Cleaning pair of heels

We head upstairs to his office, which he notes, his son has left untouched. "I think I'm going to be pretty well spared," he deadpans.

Timpson is that rare business: a beneficiary of the recession. Shoe and watch repairs might be regarded as in long-term decline amid an increasingly throwaway culture, but as times have got harder, they appear to have come back into more widespread use.The head office of Timpson, the shoe repair and key-cutting firm, is on a drab industrial estate in a Manchester suburb. But inside defies expectations.

In the reception, a pool of water is projected on the floor, with fish that dart away to a babbling soundtrack when you step on it. On the wall, the locations of the hundreds of Timpson shops up and down the country are listed in neat lines. The sofa looks as though it has come direct from the Conran Shop. The loo even has a fancy Dyson hand dryer.

John Timpson arrives, looks around and raises a conspiratorial eyebrow. "James's indulgences," he says, referring to his 37-year-old son, the managing director of the business and the fifth generation in the family firm. "He wants to make it the wackiest office in the north of England."

"Shoe repair did fantastically well, particularly in November when the recession started to hit people, this sort of make-do-and-mend idea, and it has kept up," Timpson says. The company says shoe repairs last week were 4% higher than the same time last year, and watch repairs were 21% better. The most recent figures available showed his holding company made a profit of £10.6m in the year ending September 2007, on sales of £92m.

"What is happening is we are starting to see people we hadn't seen before. The population is divided into all sorts of different groups, and perhaps one division is those who use shoe repairers and those that don't. You see a whole generation of girls in the Spice Girls era that wore Minnie Mouse sort of shoes never came to us at all. So this is actually good long-term for us because we are converting people to a service. "

The business, which has little in the way of borrowings, has also found itself in a position to bulk up by buying some of its less well-heeled rivals. The company has bought two businesses out of administration - a chain of dry-cleaning concessions inside Sainsbury's and a digital photo chain, operating under the Max Spielmann and Klick brands - taking the estate to 830 shops.

Timpson, 65, is an immensely likeable character who stumbles over his words and hums to himself, "bombombom", as he searches for the right papers or thoughts, and generally gives the impression that he is making it all up as he goes along. He likes to steer clear of meetings, doesn't really use email and keeps his appointments in a monogrammed, well-thumbed red leather organiser. His "spreadsheet" of shops due a visit is a scrawled list on a sheet of paper. He doesn't have a marketing department and says he has never spent a penny on advertising. "I reckon I do strategy and communications," he says.

Timpson, valued at £53m in the Sunday Times, has gained a reputation as a paternalistic employer. He runs a "Dream Come True" programme for staff, which has paid for eye operations and reunited families; he has holiday homes for workers, and the company, with links to 21 prisons, has recently set up a training school for young offenders in Liverpool. Staff get their birthdays off, bonuses for exceeding targets and he is determined to keep the final-salary pension scheme. It is, he says, "blindingly obvious" that if you treat people well, they will do a good job.

He toyed with flotation in the late 1980s when other specialist retailers such as Sock Shop and Tie Rack were joining the market, but decided against it. "If I was asked what was the best decision I have ever made, that almost certainly would be up there. I don't think we'd have survived. In the early 90s we suffered, the whole of our trade suffered, from £1.6m profit, we went back to half a million. Well, they would have had me." He says the business was saved by starting to cut keys. Timpson also now offers engraving and intends to develop a chain of locksmiths.

The toughest time came when he bought back the business and realised that the shoe shops were not working. "The next four years were the worst time of my life, because it didn't work. So I had done this magic thing, bought back the business that my great-grandfather had founded, and it didn't perform. So then in the end I had to make the decision, well it was almost made for me, of selling the shoe shops. That was ghastly. I was selling the people. Luckily, I said 'well, I've got to have something to do' and worked out how to keep the shoe repair business.

"But I had no long-term plans, I don't believe in long-term plans; one of my jobs for this afternoon for the board meeting will be to do my five-year sort of view, but I don't have it all written down too much - it is all little pictures and scribbles."

Timpson spends about three days a week visiting individual shops - his specialist subject, if he were to appear on Mastermind, he says, would be Britain's car parks. He retells his favourite "eureka" moment from talking to staff. "I met a guy called Glen Edwards, who was operating our shop in West Brom. Glen said, 'I hope you don't mind but I'm doing a few watch repairs, because I used to do watch repairs', and I said, 'how much are you taking?' He said '£120 this week'. Glen now runs the watch repair division. Our watch repair turnover last week was about £270,000, so that was pretty good."

Timpson's great-grandfather founded the company in 1865. It began as a shoe retailer, with the repair business added in 1903. It is often said that family firms go wrong in the third generation and so it was with Timpson, when John's father was ousted by his uncle and the firm taken over. Timpson says he was "shattered" by the event but stayed with the new owners in a different division.

Two years later he was invited back to run the old family business, like the returning prodigal son. The new owner, UDS, was then acquired by Hanson and Timpson took the opportunity to lead a management buyout of the family firm in 1983, more of an emotional than a commercial decision. Over the subsequent few years, he bought out the other shareholders and today owns 100% of the company again.

"By the time you get to the third generation, there are lots of cousins and so on who are only interested in the dividend and spend their time complaining about the people who could be doing better. So I was just lucky that there was a whole sequence of events that meant that although I am the fourth generation, it is like I am the first generation. I have the advantage of having the experience handed down without the disadvantage of anyone else owning any shares."

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License