Why has 175-year-old retail titan Co-op started franchising its stores?

For the past 14 years, Martin Rogers has been a stalwart employee of northern business titan Co-op. But did he expect to be there for so long? The answer is a simple one. “No, absolutely not,” Rogers laughs. “I don’t suppose anyone does [expect to stay with an employer for so long] but I suppose it’s like a footballer who plays for his hometown club -“it would have to be a mega transfer to make me move because it’s something I genuinely feel passionate about and I literally wake up every morning trying to think about how to make the Co-op stronger.” And as the firm’s head of new channels, Rogers is able to do just that by spearheading the organisation’s new push into franchising.

Before finding his calling with the food retail group, Rogers begun his career as an investment banker, having studied economics at the University of Birmingham and joined a graduate recruitment scheme with Swiss multinational bank UBS in 1999. “It was very meritocratic,” he says of the market, claiming his comprehensive school education wasn’t an inhibitor in the eyes of his employer. Indeed, as long as you were bright and could do the job well, you were only judged on your capability rather than your background. “I was able to join a global graduate scheme with a bunch of other graduates from across the world – Switzerland, Singapore, France, Germany and the UK,” recalls Rogers. “And being a guy from a comprehensive in South Manchester, it was quite liberating and flattering and I learnt a huge amount.”

Working out of Frankfurt, Rogers became the head of trade support, a role which saw him overseeing stock for the likes of Volkswagen and Bosch. “It was helping people access the value in those stocks whilst concentrating on what would help make their portfolio stronger or contribute to their value for a pension fund,” he explains. Not entirely unlike his role at the Co-op today, Rogers adds his banking post was “very enjoyable and fast-paced” while there’s a link between the two in terms of the commerciality aspect.

Before returning to the UK though, having found himself in a financially stable position where he was able to pay off his student loan, Rogers wanted to give back. “I decided to do something more aligned to my ethical conscience,” he says. This saw him head to China in 2004 where he started voluntary work teaching English and HIV education. “That was [supporting] people excluded from the mainstream, [who’d experienced] lots of intravenous drug use and human trafficking, sex workers etcetera,” Rogers says. While it may not seem it on the surface, his banking background proved useful for his stint in Asia. “The pressure of preparing an English language course for 60 native Chinese speakers seven or eight times a day, six days a week was intense and I think I was prepared for that pressure by working on the stock market in a high-paced commercial environment.”

With 18 months’ experience as a volunteer under his belt, Rogers realised he wanted his next career move to have a foundation in giving back and doing good, describing the time in China as “hugely enriching”. “That really confirmed to me that I wanted to do something meaningful which then became a pivotal turning point because I wanted to combine that passion for doing something with an ethical conscience with working in the commercial world,” he says. “I felt very passionately about doing something that was making a positive difference and a necessary contribution. So that’s when I seriously started thinking about the Co-op.”

Upon his return to England and with Co-op in his sights, Rogers joined the Manchester-headquartered firm’s graduate scheme in 2005 at the age of 29 as a mature graduate, which he refers to as a “horrible phrase.” “I’m still not very mature,” he laughs.