The chief executive of Lovefilm invites Director into the movie rental firm's headquarters in west London
When I joined Lovefilm in 2005 it was still called Video Island and was a very early-stage business. We hadn't yet merged with Lovefilm and staff numbers were low. The last few years have seen more than 50 per cent year-on-year growth and today we have 500 staff across Europe, with 150 in the UK office.
We first launched the DVD rental scheme; then we introduced Blue Ray and games to the service, and now you can stream films to your TV or PC, which people love. We have 1.4 million customers in the UK and every month we send out about four million discs.
We're based in commercial units in west London. We could have had swanky offices in Soho but that would have been too expensive. We can still get to central London in 25 minutes and we have more space here, so we feel that we have the best of both worlds.
It's important to have a fun environment. People build an impression of the company on what it looks like when they walk through the door, how they are greeted, how friendly the people are as well as what they see. Getting potential investors to see and feel the business was a key part of the perception they built and now people love coming to visit because they get a great sense of the company. There is an energy and vibrancy that means we all muck in – and I love that.
Our office is open plan, which improves communication flow and speeds up decision-making. Being open plan means I'm at the heart of the business. I have key people sitting near me and if we need to make a decision we can all just pull up a chair to a table and discuss it.
We beg, borrow and plead with studios for film memorabilia, such as the Kung Fu panda in our reception, and rooms reflect our film credentials – they're named after film genres, such as action, drama and comedy. There's also a tree on the wall that a member of staff has painted. Every time we get 10,000 new subscribers in the business we put a leaf on the tree. It began downstairs, as small as a shrub. Now it is a full tree that has grown up through the ceiling into the floor above.
