BT Group CEO Allison Kirkby: Upgrading “the world’s oldest telco”

The BT Group can trace its origins back to the Electric Telegraph Company in 1846, meaning this year British Telecom celebrates its 180th anniversary. It does so with Allison Kirkby at the helm, its first female CEO and one of only a few women leading FTSE 100 companies.

Kirkby’s ascent to the top has been far from typical. However, it’s given her plenty of experience in leading large teams, developing brands and scaling telecommunications (Telco) companies, while also cultivating personal grit.

Kirkby grew up in a working-class family in Glasgow. Both her parents were factory workers and encouraged her to be financially independent from a young age.

She started selling door-to-door aged 12 and was an Avon Lady at 14. She delayed going to university when her father fell terminally ill, instead taking up a position as an apprentice trainee accountant with the Scottish Whisky Industry in 1984.

It gave her an education of a different sort, she says. “I learned through doing,” she recalls to Sir Richard Harpin on the Business Leader podcast, “understanding how the company worked from the very bottom to the very top.”

But her big break came when she joined Procter & Gamble in 1990, where she would take on more than a dozen different, increasingly senior roles, both in the UK and abroad.

Her time at P&G was “fundamental” to her development as a leader, she says. “It was almost like a university for creating brilliant leaders.” Other alumni include Christopher De Lapuente (LVMH and Sephora), Paul Polman (Unilever), Jeremy Darroch (Sky) and Austin Lally (Verisure) – not to mention Richard Harpin too (HomeServe).

When you were put in charge of a brand, it resembled taking on a CEO role, she points out. “It was like running a business, with a functional leadership team around you.”

She remained at P&G for two decades, “flexing her leadership muscle”. She also learned about M&A, with the acquisitions of Gillette and Wella. Though it was “a massive wrench to leave” P&G, she says she was inspired by what her colleagues there had gone on to achieve as CEOs, from this quasi-management school.

She went on to take up a series of roles in the Telco sector, which would set her in good standing for the top job at BT Group in 2024. She was CFO at Virgin Media and then led Scandinavian companies Telia and Tele2, which also gave her experience of restructuring and turnarounds.

She also prepared for the BT CEO role by spending five years as a non-exec on its board first, from 2019. This wasn’t a deliberate policy to prepare her, she says, but it “made it an easy transition” for her, bringing deep knowledge of how the company works and the trajectory it was on.

It meant she was on the board when a crucial decision was made, which will likely define her tenure as CEO. The company decided to make a £40bn investment in full fibre broadband, delivered by its infrastructure arm, Openreach.

“We made a once-in-a-generation decision,” she says, describing it as the single biggest capital investment in the UK. Her challenge since then has been to explain the logic of that long-term investment and demonstrate its financial return to investors, her 100,000 employees and the public.

“Telcos have a history of investing but never delivering a return for their investors,” points out Kirkby, “and so any telco that goes into a major investment cycle, the markets usually start very sceptically, are we ever going to see a return here?”

BT Group’s challenge is even greater because it is a household name, regulated by Ofcom, with challenger brands also competing in the broadband space, demanding a level playing field. And of course, as a public company, BT Group has shareholders eager for a return.

Kirby says her plan is to focus back on the UK and “core connectivity”, “pivoting to free cash flow growth sooner rather than later”. The seasoned strategist has mapped out a path to growth and return to growing dividends by the end of the decade.

She also plans to bring the central BT brand “back into the consumer space”, with a relaunch imminent. Its main public-facing brands at the moment are EE and Plusnet.

“BT being the oldest telco in the world,” says Kirkby, “[we were] slow to invest in modern-day technologies, which meant we were one of the most inefficient telcos in the world.”

She is now drawing on all her hard-won experience to execute her modern vision for this 180-year-old institution.

The scale of the responsibility is not lost on her. “We're such a big employer. We have 600,000 retail investors and 250,000 pensioners out there. So I have to treat people in a fair way to ensure that the brand remains a trusted brand that the country believes in and wants to engage with.”

She has a piece of advice for aspiring leaders who want to emulate her: “Never say no to an opportunity that will push you out of your comfort zone and stretch you as a leader, [because] you can only learn from failure and being stretched beyond what you think is possible.”