Fractional Leaders feat. Richard Clark

In this blog, we chat with  Richard Clark, an experienced Fractional Leader whose impressive career ranges from corporate powerhouses like Reuters and IBM to high-growth brands such as boohoo and Sephora.

Here he shares his journey of driving transformative growth and building global brands.

Can you please introduce yourself and your journey to becoming a Fractional Leader?
My career has been deliberately varied as I have been really certain that I didn’t want to get pigeon holed in to a type of business, role or sector. Ranging from corporate experience at the likes of Reuters, IBM, Nationwide and Argos building effective marketing and digital approaches. To answering challenges such as start-up, launch, brand repositioning, international and rapid growth at the likes of boohoo, bulk and Sephora.

I have also helped brands realise investment goals, positioned them for acquisition and set the foundations for MBO.

My passion for hitting challenges head on and helping to solve complex business and marketing challenges has really helped me achieve through fractional roles.

Let’s talk impact, what achievements are you proud of the most?
It would be remiss of me not to say boohoo here. When I joined their turnover was around £70-75m so not tiny, but definitely not huge. We transformed the business the brand and made it a genuine global player, growing the core brand to c. £300m revenue in less than three years. We also brought prettylittlething and boohooMAN to market. It was an incredible time with us creating so many firsts and in my opinion, along with my team we created the blueprint for future growth and to an extent for the sector.

Based on your work with start-ups and scale-ups, do you have any pieces of wisdom you could share with businesses in scale-up mode?
Never be afraid of what you don’t know. For me, that is what hamstrings and slows a lot of businesses down as they always strive for data. Some times gut instinct has to count. A great example was when we did our first collaboration at boohoo. It hadn’t really been done to scale previously and Mahmud, the then joint CEO said I could do it, but if it goes wrong he would fire me. I kind of think he said it in jest, but it did show his confidence in me and my decisions with no data to support. This idea with somebody called Zoe, was the first of many and was a huge success.

So sometimes, take the risk, if it feels right, it just might be right. If it ends up being wrong, don’t dwell on it, learn from it and move on

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