Stuart Flavell - Connells

Having stepped into the role of Connells Residential chief executive in all but name, Stuart Flavell faces the challenge of keeping profitability high despite the downturn.

Anyone starting a new job is relatively apprehensive about the challenges involved but none more so than Stuart Flavell.

As the new head of Connells Residential, Flavell is tasked with retaining the profitable levels the business has enjoyed over the past few years, despite the economic downturn.

Connells Residential generated pre-tax profit of £6m in 2004, £12m in 2005, £15m in 2006 and £17m in 2007. Flavell says: “It is an interesting time to pick up the baton. We had record profits last year, now the market is declining.” On his goals for the future of the business, he explains: “My stock answer would be to see profits grow but our goals are constantly being adjusted according to the way the market is being shifted this year.”

Consequently, Flavell plans to focus more on staff training. Like his predecessor Ken Waller, he wants to ensure that Connells Residential offers staff a working environment in which they can thrive.

Financial control

He says: “The business is all about developing people. By the end of the year we want to be in a situation where we have provided an environment our team of people has developed and learnt more in, but there is no financial handle on that.” Flavell assumed Waller’s remit on May 1, following Waller’s surprise decision to retire from the business. But while Flavell will acquire Having stepped into the role of Connells Residential chief executive in all but name, Stuart Flavell faces the challenge of keeping profitability high despite the downturn.

Waller’s remit, he will not assume his title (The Negotiator, May 2) – he will instead retain the title of operating director he gained when promoted in January. Combined responsibility Flavell says: “The chief executive role will not be filled – in a sense, the two roles have been merged into one.”

He adds: “There is a lot of change happening in a very short space of time, which I am just getting to grips with.” Waller was instrumental in the changes – namely to staff – before his departure.

Last month he appointed Roger Barratt and Graham Freeman to the Connells Residential and Sequence boards, respectively Connells Residential’s regional managing directors – Paul Edgington, South West; Liz Brown, Midlands; Jon Norton, Southern; and Kevin Peel, South East – were also appointed to the Connells Residential board in May. Flavell refers to the appointments as a “cleaning-up exercise” where the directors had previously been invited to sit on the board but had not done so until recently. Reaching targets Unlike Waller, Flavell says he has never had a set career path. His tack was “always to do the best that you can and move as far up the tree as you possibly could.” He says: “One tends to look at things in bite-size pieces and look at the next achievable goal.”

In this spirit, Flavell joined Shakespeare, McTurk & Graham as an assistant to the senior partner in 1977, while training to be a chartered surveyor – he qualified in 1978. He was invited to join the partnership four years later. When Connells bought the firm, in 1987, Flavell was appointed area partner, with responsibility for the seven residential branches that Shakespeare’s owned. Flavell dismisses the suggestion of any overlap between his chartered surveying career and estate agency, regarding the latter as being more about “management skills and making money.” He says that he had originally opted for chartered surveying as an accessroute into property and had no hankering to return to surveying when Connells acquired Shakespeare’s. He says: “I was genuinely interested in the property market and when I was a growing lad, chartered surveying was a passport to a partnership. It was a different world.” Flavell says Shakespeare’s satisfied his desire for a diverse professional business, due to its agricultural and service-based disciplines.

Regional growth Flavell’s remit at Connells expanded as the agency established a presence in new territories such as Birmingham and the wider West Midlands, which resulted in him managing around 180 staff across 22 branches. He was promoted to regional director in 2003 and then operations director in 2008. Flavell is reluctant to be drawn on how his approach to the business will differ from Waller’s, irrespective of the fact that he has a new board and new market conditions in which to operate. He says: “It’s interesting because we have worked together for such a long time that our beliefs are pretty similar. I am not anticipating making any changes because this structure has proved to be successful, so we will continue in that way.” Instead, he says he will place a different emphasis on different parts of the business, in response to the challenging marketplace he now faces. Headcount He adds: “Clearly, with the contraction of sales volumes, we are having to serious look at our cost-base and headcount.”

So, Flavell and his team will now focus on creating initiatives to retain healthy profit levels and encourage buyer activity during the market downturn, which he says will include a review of staffing at Connells Residential. He will also consider reviving tried and tested sales strategies, used throughout the group, such as the six-week challenge. This involved Connells committing to sell a vendor’s house within six weeks of accepting the instruction.

Flavell says Connells Residential currently has 16,000 instructions on it books, claiming that volumes this time last year were “significantly higher”. He says that mortgage funding constraints have replaced the affordability and interest rate issues of the 1990s. But he adds: “There is no doubt about it, one is still turning stock over, we are certainly not into the depths of the market of the early 1990s.”

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