How Blue Light Card went from start-up to six million members

Alidad Moghaddam knew Blue Light Card had properly arrived when he spotted a handwritten sign taped inside a coffee shop window. It read "Blue Light Card welcome". They had no formal partnership with the shop. Its owner had simply decided, off his own back, that frontline workers deserved the discount.

That small gesture says a lot about the company Moghaddam now leads. Blue Light Card began as a savings scheme dreamed up by a serving police officer from a spare room in Leicester. It has grown into a private equity-backed platform used by more than six million NHS staff, emergency services workers, teachers and armed forces personnel, who between them saved £540m in the past year alone.

Moghaddam joined as chief executive three years ago, straight from Trainline, where he helped grow the business by 400 per cent over six years and steered it through a successful stock market listing. On this episode of the Business Leader podcast, he tells Sir Richard Harpin how he has doubled Blue Light Card's membership since taking over, the mistakes that came with scaling fast, and why he thinks a graceful handover from a business's founders is one of the hardest things to get right.

In our interview, you will learn about:

• Why Moghaddam believes a founder who won't let go is the biggest risk in a handover
• How radical candour and mission-driven hiring drove Blue Light Card's culture
• Why Blue Light Card is building a self-serve platform for 10,000 retailers
• What working in private equity taught him about being a better chief executive

What private equity teaches you about leadership

Moghaddam's route to the top was, in his own words, "quite nonlinear". He turned down investment banking and consultancy offers out of university to join American Express's strategic planning group, then did an MBA before two years at Bain and Company.

From there, he moved into consumer tech, joining Trainline as its new private equity owner, KKR, rebuilt the management team around chief executive Clare Gilmartin.

"One of the most important things which I carry with me to this day is the importance of a CEO being able to really clearly articulate the vision and mission behind the business," he says. "If you have a brilliant strategy but you're not able to communicate the why in an effective way, I think you're missing a trick."

That discipline was tested during Trainline's 2019 IPO. "We were a relatively complex business and just the skill that is required to turn that into a digestible story that hits on the things that matter for the investment community was a huge learning," Moghaddam says.

He also credits keeping a small, focused team on the listing while shielding the rest of the business from distraction.

Then, the pandemic hit. Trainline's revenue fell by 95 per cent within 24 hours. "How a team responds to these crises says a lot about the culture of the business," he says. Leadership focused on protecting the workforce, using furlough schemes to avoid redundancies, while continuing to invest in product and technology through the downturn, a bet that paid off once travel demand returned.

He left Trainline around 18 months after the float to advise venture capital and private equity funds, including a stint with Hellman & Friedman on its European consumer tech portfolio.

"It's been invaluable," he says of seeing a business from the investor's side of the table. "It helps me try to be more effective in the way I synthesise what's happening in the business and communicate information and tie it back to the outcomes that the investors are trying to drive."

How Blue Light Card doubled its membership

Since joining Blue Light Card three years ago, Moghaddam has taken membership from three million to more than six million. The strategy, he says, comes down to first principles: "What are the things that have allowed us to get to that three million mark that we can continue to double down on and leverage?"

That meant deepening member trust and word of mouth, expanding the range and depth of savings on offer, and investing heavily in replatforming the technology behind the service.

The next phase of growth is about widening what Blue Light Card actually saves people money on. "Today a significant portion of the savings we deliver are on things like travel, fashion, apparel," he says. "But what we want to do more of is all the non-discretionary things that actually make up a significant portion of the cost of living."

That means more supermarket partnerships, following a recent promotion with Morrisons, and eventually household bills and utilities.

Personalisation is the other lever. Rather than presenting every member with the same catalogue of offers, Moghaddam wants the platform to know a member's favourite brands and location, so it can surface savings relevant to them.

Perhaps the most striking growth channel, though, is one Blue Light Card never built. Around 10,000 independent shops, from local coffee shops to bakeries, now accept the card without any commercial agreement in place, drawn in by customer demand.

"My local coffee shop has a sign handwritten on a piece of cardboard that says 'Blue Light Card welcome'," Moghaddam says. "And I show my card on my app and I get 10 per cent off." The plan is to formalise this with a self-serve platform that lets small retailers register and offer discounts directly, alongside an official window sticker.

When Blue Light Card changed hands

Blue Light Card's founders stayed on as board members through Moghaddam's first two years, giving him weekly calls to draw on their institutional knowledge. "They were my sounding board to make sure we didn't lose all the institutional knowledge and the really strong intuition they had for what made Blue Light Card special," he says.

For Moghaddam, that arrangement worked precisely because the founders had genuinely stepped back. "There's a tendency for a new CEO to come in and try to fix everything," he says. "And actually, that's a very fast way to overextend yourself and get burnt out."

He is equally clear about what breaks a handover from the other side. "When someone comes into the chief exec role, a founder is not really ready to hand over the keys and is trying to co-manage the business; it blurs the lines for the team around ownership and accountability and creates a really tough dynamic for everyone involved."

His advice for founders bringing in an outside chief executive is to resist hiring a like-for-like replacement. "It's actually understanding what the things that made you successful as a founder were, but what were the things that perhaps were gaps in helping take the business to the next chapter, and deliberately looking for someone who complements you."

Alidad Moghaddam's four lessons for leaders

Resist the urge to fix everything at once. A new chief executive who tries to overhaul the whole business in one go is the fastest route to burnout, Moghaddam says. Focus first on the handful of decisions only you can make, and delegate the rest.

Revisit your operating model every six to twelve months. The systems that got a business to its last milestone rarely fit the next one. Building in a regular check-in, rather than waiting for something to break, kept Trainline and now Blue Light Card agile through hyper-growth.

Hire to complement yourself, not to replace yourself. Whether recruiting a successor or a new hire, look for the skills and experience you lack rather than a copy of what already exists in the room.

Get a coach, and keep your informal mentors close. Both a formal coaching relationship and an ad hoc network of trusted former colleagues have shaped Moghaddam's decisions as chief executive. Neither has to be expensive or elaborate to be valuable.

Listen to the full conversation with Alidad Moghaddam on Business Leader's YouTube channel.