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Profile - Mark Lovell: Chairman’s mission to give the unemployed hope in jobs market
Mark Lovell
A4E is tackling unemployment under a new government programme. Lizzie Murphy met executive chairman Mark Lovell.
According to Mark Lovell, anyone can do anything if they put their mind to it and he has the evidence to prove it.
His father left school at the age of 11 but later went on to qualify as a solicitor and it’s this determination that Lovell, executive chairman of A4E, says he hopes to see in the people who are referred to the firm’s range of frontline public services.
“My father brought up his four brothers because their father had disappeared, so I’m very focused on people grasping their own destiny,” he says. “You need a bit of luck along the way but with the right support mechanisms you can do it.”
A4E is one of seven organisations, mostly private companies, chosen to deliver the Government’s Work Programme, which ministers promise will give 2.4 million unemployed people help to find jobs over the next five years.
Under the scheme, approved providers try to find work for claimants, who are referred from job centres, and keep them in work for at least two years. Providers are rewarded on a payment-by-results basis.
It replaces previous employment support schemes – the New Deal, Employment Zones and Pathways to Work.
“One of the things we really like about the Work Programme is the fact that it’s up to us to design the service so we have lots of freedom but lots of pressure to deliver the job outcomes and the sustainment,” says Lovell.
The company, which has 200 offices around the UK and a £250m turnover, is already seeing thousands of people coming through its doors each week.
“There are plenty of jobs at the moment,” he adds. “But one of the most important things we need to instil into people sometimes is a work ethic. I’ve done lots of rubbish jobs and if you don’t take that pot washing job you’ve not got a chance to get the next opportunity on the ladder to do something else.”
One of the things A4E encourages is enterprise. However, Lovell, 41, believes Yorkshire lags behind other regions when it comes to the willingness of people to start their own business. “I think it’s a confidence issue,” he says. “People don’t know how to do it and support is varied.”
Because Work Programme providers are only paid by their results, A4E is raising the £20m -£30m working capital it needs to fund the scheme through banks and investors.
In addition it is seeking equity investment to help it to expand and reach its ambitious £1bn turnover target.
Although it came close to signing a deal with investment firm Carlyle Group, Lovell says it still hasn’t found the right partner. “We didn’t feel the cultural fit was quite right so we shook hands and walked away.”
The Work Programme currently accounts for half of A4E’s business. The other half is divided between, international work, education and skills, debt advice, legal aid and health services to reduce childhood mortality, obesity and diabetes.
“The prevention agenda is really important for us,” says Lovell. “But that means you’ve got to join up public services in a way that is really difficult for Whitehall to do the way it’s currently structured. However, we’re working with the Government to find different ways of doing things.”
In addition, it plans to expand into new geographical markets. It already works in countries like Australia, India and central Europe but Lovell wants to expand in these countries and also move into the US.
A4E, which employs 3,500 staff, also plans to join up the Work Programme with other areas such as justice, health, legal and local government initiatives.
The Work Programme contracts came at an important time for the company. “We were previously delivering the Flexible New Deal,” says Lovell. “Those contracts had only been going nine months and they were all terminated when the new government came in and we had to start all over again. It created a lot of turbulence and put a lot of pressure on the business but that comes with the turf when you work in the public sector.”
However, although the last few years have been challenging for A4E, the toughest time for the business, Lovell says, was in the mid-nineties’ recession when the company, which was much smaller at the time, lost two thirds of its business overnight. “One of the reasons why we do the wider range of services now is that we were probably too dependent on helping people back into employment,” says Lovell.
Lovell and his business partner, Emma Harrison, founded A4E in 1991.
The pair met in Lovell’s home town of Manchester three months after he graduated with a management degree from Warwick University. He had already been offered a job with an international consultancy and a bank but he turned them down because he wanted to grow his own business.
Harrison had already set up A4E in Sheffield with the aim of providing redundant steel workers with the training to find work in other industries. Lovell moved to Sheffield to become her first employee and together they grew the business.
Lovell still lives near Sheffield with his second wife, Becky. He also has two children, Zak, 13, and Hannah, 11, from his first marriage.
He says: “When you start a business you might have a very big vision but you don’t necessarily have a sense of your culture and values so during those first few years we had to cement the fact that we really care about the people who use our services.”
However, over the last two years, the company has had to deal with a number of other issues.
In 2009, it emerged that A4E was at the centre of a fraud probe by the Department for Work and Pensions after staff made false claims of getting people into work. However, Lovell insists that more robust mechanisms are in place to stop such behaviour in the future.
“Fraud can’t be tolerated in our organisation and it can’t be tolerated in our industry so they are really challenging issues when you find out about them,” he says.
He adds: “I’m as confident as you can ever be that we are putting in place all the systems to prevent it. Unfortunately, some people are minded to find a way around things but that is always a risk in business.”
Last year, the company was fined £60,000 after an unencrypted laptop containing personal information of more than 24,000 people in Hull and Leicester was stolen.
Lovell says: “That laptop was in the last five per cent of laptops in the company to be encrypted and it shouldn’t have been at home.
“It’s galling when these things happen. We invest such a lot of money in having strong systems in place that if we find there has been a mistake by a member of staff we have to hold our hands up and be accountable for that.”
Mark Lovell Factfile
Date of birth: May 12, 1970
Education: William Hume’s School in Manchester; management degree at Warwick University; MBA in management at Sheffield University
First job: Pot washer
Favourite song: Everybody’s Free (to wear sunscreen), by Baz Luhrmann
Car driven: Range Rover
Favourite film: Let Him Have It
Favourite holiday destination: France
Last book read: Too Big to Fail: Inside the Battle to Save Wall Street, by Andrew Ross Sorkin
What I am most proud of: Taking risks on talented people
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Comments
There are 3 comments to this article
Page 1 of 1
Paul-Michael
Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 04:28 PMIt’s sad that the previous commentator had such a poor experience with A4e. Whilst no organisation is perfect, A4e has been very successful in helping many people back to work. I have personal experience of this – having been a highly successful entrepreneur, I lost everything in the Foot and Mouth epidemic and was referred as a JSA customer to A4e. I found wonderful, highly motivated staff who identified my strengths and offered me a job as the self-employment advisor in that branch. Working alongside them was both an honour and inspiration, and was one of the happiest times of my life. In the last nine years, I have moved on in the company to Business Manager, Operations Manager and now Area Leader. Obviously, this journey of success has to colour my views of the company that I work for, but I can honestly say I have replicated all the extraordinary inspiration I received as a customer into every part of the business for which I have been responsible – the true culture of A4e is one of challenge, support and achievement on behalf of those customers. Only through their success do we achieve as a business. Some of the things the previous poster identifies as problems were in fact largely to do with the New Deal structure – a very rigid, hours based contract. The new Work Programme is so much more flexible, and offers real opportunities for the extraordinary strengths of our staff. I won’t deny that we have occasionally got things wrong and no organisation is immune from bad practice. But there’s a lot of highly dedicated, capable and tenacious people working for A4e and it’s a truism that the thousands of highly satisfied customers that have shared their journey to work with us tend not to post comments on internet sites.
Customer Services
Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 10:11 AMMatt - thank you for your comments about A4e. I am very sorry to hear about your negative experience, which we take very seriously; it's important for us to take on board feedback when it's both good and bad. Please feel free to contact my team on 0800 345666 or email at customerservices@a4e.co.uk and hopefully we can learn a little more about how to help others in your situation.
iMatt
Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 12:01 PMIntersting article. However, having been a former 'customer' of A4e, I feel a few things need to be added. A4e is quite possible THE worst company I have ever had the pleasure or rather displeasure of dealing with. The 'training' is non-existent (was told I was on a 'Media and Design course that never materialised), the staff poorly trained, the facilities poor (far too few computers which are usually too slow) and so on. This all leads to an atmosphere of dispare, hopelessness and low morale within individual A4e branches. If Mr Lovell disputes this, then he really needs to have a full and frank discussion with the end users of his business! Of course he's probably heard many of the criticisms before. However, when your business relies government contracts, i.e. the taxpayer for the vast bulk of its turnover and profits, then pleasing those who are A4e's end users comes a distant second place! A4e has an infamous history in the welfare to work sector. This is made much worse by the denial of BOTH A4e and the government (incl the last lot) of past poor performances from A4e and it has to be said others in the W2W arena. Until past poor performances are dealt with once and for all, then governments will continuew to use A4e and offer them contracts when instead they should be using organisations far better suited for the job. As for the fraud. Well as with News International, one perhaps has to wonder if this says something about the culture within A4e.
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