Mr ambitious

‘Amicus Horizon will be the best large landlord in the country by 2016 and we will do this by being great at customer service.’

This is the message from Paul Hackett, the 46-year-old who has just succeeded the larger-than-life Steve Walker to the top job at the Croydon-based landlord and is certainly not backward in pushing himself forward.

It was this attitude and vision for the development of the once ‘basket case’ landlord (according to Mr Walker), that convinced board chair and former Labour housing minister Lord Charles Falconer, and his vice-chair, former Housing Corporation boss Steve Douglas, to offer the ex-Moat and London & Quadrant development expert the step up from the number two role of chief operating officer at 28,000-home Amicus Horizon.

‘In a strong field, he was the outstanding candidate,’ says Mr Douglas, dismissing concerns expressed by some contractors and landlords that the quietly spoken Mr Hackett, who has been at Amicus Horizon for four years, may be seen as a ‘safe choice’, rather than someone who will continue the impressive momentum begun under Mr Walker’s gregarious leadership.

During Mr Walker’s tenure, the south London to south coast landlord emerged from regulatory supervision and quickly moved through the gears to top seven performance tables in 2011/12 ahead of peers in the group of 15 large London landlords. He is a tough act to follow.

Mr Hackett begins with a fair wind, however. Mr Walker sings his praises saying he is ‘the most amazingly bright and hard-working person I have ever met’ adding ‘frankly, Amicus Horizon wouldn’t have been the roaring success it is now is without him’.

Changing priorities

But a glance at Mr Hackett’s CV shows some crucial areas of potential weakness, given the aim of sector-beating customer service excellence.

As the Streatham resident freely admits, his skills have been forged in the furnace of striking ‘exciting’ development deals. Although Amicus Horizon is building 800 homes by April 2015 with £22 million from the Homes and Communities Agency, this is no longer his number one priority. So just how good is Mr Hackett at customer service?

First impressions on arriving in his tenth floor, corner office are good. He leaps from his desk, arm thrust out in greeting as the photographer and I arrive at the door. Teas are swiftly ordered and he hangs up our coats. How long do you have for the interview? ‘As long as you need,’ says the man who must not mean it, given his self-imposed requirement to spend ‘at least two to three days a week out in our regional offices and on the front line with housing officers’.

As we settle down, he jumps up once more: his secretary is stuck at the door trying to make it back in with the tea. So far, so impressive. But how will he step out from the long shadow cast by his predecessor?

Besides making that conscious effort to be ‘far more visible to front line housing officers’ and doing ‘10 to 15 hand-written letters to staff every Friday who’ve been doing unusually brilliant things, like rehousing people at 2am after a fire’, Mr Hackett gives short shrift to any suggestion that he’s simply delivering a plan developed by his old boss ‘It’s not a Steve Walker plan, it’s a Paul Hackett and current senior executive team plan. We’re not just here to deliver Steve Walker-vision,’ he says curtly.

Prepped for the job

Amicus Horizon has also acted to ensure Mr Hackett has the best possible start. A month after being appointed the chief exec-in-waiting, Mr Hackett was flown in September to New England in the US to spend two months at Harvard Business School, completing a two-month executive education course. The spoils from this trip are proudly displayed on top of a large filing cabinet in Mr Hackett’s office.

Books published by Harvard Business School with titles such as The First 90 Days, are presented in a gleaming row. But the pièce de résistance lies beneath: eight or nine blue binders, bulging with 200 world-renowned Harvard Business School case studies. Mr Hackett uses these to put his executive team and fast-tracked staff on the organisation’s talent programme through their paces.

‘It gives colleagues a little taste of what the Harvard experience is all about and is a great opportunity at the end of each case to say, “OK, how does that relate to our own business? What can we learn?”,’ he says.

What Mr Hackett learned in Boston is writ large throughout our conversation and underpins his top-of-the-class plan for Amicus Horizon and its 850 staff across London, Kent and Sussex. He quotes Frances Frei, a Harvard professor and author of the customer service bible Uncommon Service, saying ‘focus on the things you can genuinely be good at’ as part of his epiphany.

‘We are really keen that we focus on the things that are truly core competencies and build on and sell those where we can, but not look to overstretch and do things where we’re not expert,’ he says.

Potential for growth

Areas of Amicus Horizon which Mr Hackett feels could grow income for the business include its award-winning call centre in Sittingbourne and its similarly decorated private rented sector management arm Avenue Lettings, which manages 1,200 homes on behalf of private landlords, mainly in south London.

‘We want to be the best possible service provider and driving greater value for money so that when people are looking to hire someone to do their housing management, there is no one better to work with than us,’ he explains, adding that he is already in discussions with several organisations over managing private rented schemes.

So the drive to be the best large social landlord in the country by 2016 is not simply a vanity project, but will it succeed?

‘We all want to make Amicus Horizon the best large landlord out there,’ says Mr Hackett. ‘What we mean by that is: best customer satisfaction, best key performance indicators and best employer.’ Mr Hackett has wasted no time setting out exactly how he will deliver on his lofty aim and secure the required 3 percentage point improvement in the current 93 per cent customer satisfaction scores.

He has already begun cutting procurement costs ‘and using our own take on the lean-thinking management approach to work very closely with residents to address problems head on and come up with a process that staff can really buy into’ in addition to implementing the Frei-inspired philosophy of ‘de-cluttering’ the business.

The former has, for instance, resulted in customer satisfaction with the complaints procedure rocketing from ‘upper thirties per cent to the nineties’ in just four years, while the latter has seen the sale of a loss-making telecare arm.

‘We will achieve great service delivery and become number one in the country, at the same time as reducing cost and driving greater efficiency,’ is Mr Hackett’s mantra.

Development

A chief executive of a nearby housing association admits this ambition is impressive, but questions whether this single-minded drive to customer service comes at the expense of building more, much-needed affordable homes in the south east.

‘Amicus Horizon is stunningly good at getting people back into work and delivering a great service is fine, but housing associations shouldn’t compromise developing as many homes as possible. This, to me, is the key way of how we can really have an impact in communities and change people’s lives,’ he says.

Mr Hackett’s response is unequivocal: ‘Our first duty is to be a fantastic housing manager for the 28,000 homes we’ve got. And then to build homes with the resources we’ve got available after we carry out that primary purpose.’

But what if the plan to sell call centre and private rental management services fails - might this self-confessed development junkie build nothing at all after the current HCA programme finishes in 2015? Not quite.

‘I don’t think we’ll ever build nothing,’ he says, coming the closest all interview to allowing himself a twinkle in his eye. He outlines a possible plan to sell off some of the ‘large number of older street properties with excellent value’ which Amicus Horizon owns around south London.

‘For every house we sell we could provide one-and-half new homes in the area where they are sold,’ he says.

Mr Hackett is also finalising a deal to build homes with debt provided by a Sussex local authority using its prudential borrowing powers. Clearly old habits die hard.

Upward trajectory

But, despite his 24 years working for housing associations, Mr Hackett is not an old dog yet and he is adamant his customer service credentials are now as strong as those honed running multi-million development programmes.

‘Having a passion and empathy for customer service is a really big part of me,’ he says, pointing to experience of leading a resident consultation exercise which resulted in the successful transfer of 2,600 homes in east London to L&Q arm Forest Homes in 2001.

He also has in his locker a solid four years of achievement at Amicus Horizon, where it now tops seven out of the 19 key performance indicators across the G15, including on tackling anti-social behaviour and, yes, overall customer satisfaction.

So can Mr Hackett complete his work taking Amicus Horizon from zero to hero in just eight years? You might not find him standing Steve Jobs-like in front of an adoring staff and customer audience at a tub-thumping conference, but you might well find him delivering on his promise. Ultimately, isn’t that what good customer service is all about?