What Simon says

February's restructure of Ottakar's senior management team marked a watershed for the rapidly expanding retailer. Central to the new structure is range director Simon Blacklock, who now oversees all book buying as well as its new commercial team.

Blacklock remains modest about his achievements despite his role in the development of Ottakar's over the past 10 years. He talks highly of colleagues, claiming to be motivated by them as well as "the challenges that spring from working for a growing and dynamic company".

He is accurately described by one colleague as "professional, with quite an analytical mind". But there are "things he is passionate about", such as music, entertaining friends, reading and walking.

Blacklock admits: "If money was no object, I'd be walking in Exmoor with a black Labrador." Yet he claims to find it difficult to imagine "anything else that would have such an appeal" as working with books.

Blacklock started out in the trade in 1991 as a bookseller at Heffers on Trinity Street, Cambridge. The throng of recent graduates on staff made it more akin to life as a "glorified student". Plans for a career in publishing were dismissed after a Masters in Publishing did not meet his expectations, and he returned to academic bookselling at Sceptre Books.

Blacklock applied to work for Ottakar's after seeing a Bookseller article profiling Ottakar's founder James Heneage. "Ottakar's was described as a market town version of Waterstone's with 13 stores--it struck me as a company I would like to work for."

His first interview with Heneage was above the company's Salisbury shop. "At one point the interview was not going particularly well. James looked out of the window, cried 'Good God!' and ran off. He came back a few minutes later: he had spotted one of his neighbours who had dropped her purse on the street and he had gone to retrieve it."

Despite the shaky start, he was fast-tracked as a "manager in waiting". His first hands-on role was running a new Ottakar's in Enfield in 1995, when the NBA was on its way out. "The first Christmas we had Delia's Winter Collection and the X-Files books and price had become a mechanic which we could use. Discounting has become much more sophisticated since then--it has given the trade a way of marketing books more effectively."

The "competitive horizons" faced by Ottakar's are changing at a faster pace than ever, he observes. "There are new challenges: the growth of the internet and the supermarkets, and books having to compete with other media formats. There has been a speeding up of that process."

He contrasts this with the process of collaborative action in the book industry: "The trade can be a bit of a talking shop, and things such as the returns initiative can take a long time to come to fruition."

Blacklock insists that while Ottakar's needs to "respond to market changes", it will keep its historical strengths. For instance, the strengthened head office range and commercial teams will adapt to branch-level needs: "We are becoming much more [local] market-focused with our promotional activity, despite growing on a national scale."

He believes Ottakar's has a solid core: "We always look to set out our stall and back things we believe in. People that work here have come up with the company--I would like to stay here as long as it works both ways."

Fiona Fraser