A ‘liking’ of people forged a path to HR

Meet Ben Simonds-Gooding. He is one of those very immediately personable CPOs who makes you feel at ease instantly and as if you may have known him in a past life. It’s no wonder that he acknowledges that his career has always been driven by an innate ‘liking’ of people. He confesses that the journey to CPO at Fever-Tree has been delivered by somewhat of a ‘squiggly line’ – but nothing ever came good of a straight path.

“I started off life in advertising agencies,” says Simonds-Gooding who explains that an early part of his career was a six-year stint at Wieden + Kennedy, based in Amsterdam. “They did all the Nike global advertising, and it was great but then in my late 30s I began to question it all.” He had become the Managing Director of a top 20 London agency, but the light-bulb moment came when he realised that he ‘wasn’t enjoying it.’ He explains that it was energy sapping and a wake up call to what he wanted for the next part of his life.

“I started looking around and one of the things that I’d always enjoyed was running and building departments, I liked working with people to get the best out of them.” His next move was by his own admission ‘left of field’ when, as with all the best spontaneous decisions, he did just that and dived right in by buying a heading hunting business.

“I woke up one day having gone from an advertising guy to the owner of a little, boutique recruitment company,” says Simonds-Gooding. It was 2007, the year Netflix began streaming content, NASA landed a spacecraft on Mars and Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone. Amongst that sea of impressive firsts was Simonds-Gooding who was undertaking his own nascent foray into business ownership. He stayed there for just shy of 11 years, but the ‘dirtier’ side of recruitment didn’t sit well with him, and it was time once more for a change of direction.

Joining Fever-Tree at its peak

“I was working on sourcing talent for Tim Warrillow, the founder of Fever-Tree and it went rather well. It’s a very addictive sort of culture because it’s fast and makes decisions. It’s fun too in terms of it not being stodgy, it’s certainly not just another FMCG company. It does the right thing for the problem of the moment,” explains Simonds-Gooding.

Eight years ago, the business was going ‘hell for leather’ and was listed on the London Stock Exchange. “They realised they needed a Chief People Officer; at the time I was investing a lot of time with Fever-Tree working on their recruitment briefs as well as some organisational design and strategic projects. I suddenly realised then that I was busily consulting for Fever-Tree whilst forgetting to run my own ‘little’ business.”

While Simonds-Gooding was ruminating over his next move, he was invited to throw his hat into the ring for the Fever-Tree CPO role. Not being a textbook grown HR leader, Simonds-Gooding knew he would need to graft to fill the holes but what he brought was corporate experience and that all important slice of entrepreneurial know-how having run his own head hunting business.

He joined the business in 2018, 18 months before the Covid-19 pandemic hit. The first thing he set about doing was embedding the multitude of new employees into their new roles within a different culture.

“We must be kind to each other and the planet, caring and thoughtful. That may sound rather soft, and I don’t mean that because you have tough kindness but being fair,” he says.