Business Analysis Teamleader - retail projects
Boden

Marcus D

00:00:03 My name’s Marcus D and I work at JP Boden, and I run a team of business analysts and project managers. Every day I tend to go to a lot of meetings and I support my team in their kind of job, which is mainly running retail-related projects. For example, we launched a new warehouse in the US last year and that was about finding a warehouse, finding the staff, installing the IT systems etc. So someone in my team would be running a project like that.

00:00:33 My dream as a child was to be an architect. My A levels I did Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Art and Art History, and then when it came to choosing what to do later, I decided I wanted to go into further education, or my parents decided I should go into further education. And at the time, the best architecture courses were at polytechnics and my parents were quite clear that they wanted me to go to university. So I did civil engineering rather than architecture, which is kind of quite closely related to architecture.

00:01:02 My dad was an engineer and so he didn’t hold much stock in books and art and that sort of thing. So he was just, you know, you want a job, go into sciences or go into engineering. My engineering degree was kind of full time so I had thirty hours a week of kind of lectures and lab work. Looking back, I think it helped me settle into my career quite easily because I was used to getting up at nine and finishing at six.

00:01:32 At university you had this thing called ‘the milk round’. I don’t know if they still do it. And I applied for the first two jobs that came round early on in the milk round season that were based in London, and miraculously I got the first one, and it was working in London and I was earning more than my friends were earning, and I thought, ‘why wouldn’t I do that? And that was working for the John Lewis Partnership as a graduate management trainee.

00:01:54 So that was my step into retail. I was at John Lewis for, I think, twelve years, which is quite a long time. But I moved from the kind of shop floor sort of things to management services, which is their IT kind of internal management consultancy department. And my manager at the time was quite inspirational to me in management services at John Lewis, and she kind of taught me all about business analysis and systems analysis and kind of recognised I had certain skills and I was good at stuff that analysts had to be good at, and just kind of coached me in to that role.

00:02:29 What’s my career mean to me? It means I can live the life that I live, which I enjoy. I’ve got a good set of friends. I live in a great place in London. I enjoy my job so I don’t spend a lot of my time outside of my job worrying about the next day or the previous day, and it allows me to live my life I suppose.

00:02:46 Being with my friends is kind of the most important thing, ‘cos I’m quite lucky I’ve got a bunch of friends from different walks of life who all do different jobs and it’s just a lot of fun.

I felt like this urge to do something a bit more creative than I do, but it’s not to replace what I do, it’s kind of on top of. So I’m doing a four-day drama workshop next week. So I’m taking four days holiday and just going to have a go at this, see if I enjoy it, see if I’m good at it. If I hate it, it’s a kind of experience. If I love it, see what happens.

00:03:23 A couple of years ago I was talking to a friend of mine who worked in the city and we were kind of talking about dreams and I said about mine, and then a year later, he told me that he could afford not to work for ten years, which was an irritating sentence for anyone to throw at someone who has to work, and he went to drama school. And he’s having a whale of a time. And I got a bit jealous. So I thought, well rather throwing away my career, let’s see if there’s anything that I can do, just to kind of taste what it’s like and see if it is something I’d want to take further.

00:03:54 If I could do anything, I don’t really know. I don’t know the answer to that question. I don’t know if many people know the answer to that question. Just feel that that I’ve fulfilled my potential, I suppose.