Q&A: Andy Simpson, Team Wheel
Many retailers invest heavily in new HR, payroll and workforce management systems, only to discover that technology alone doesn’t solve operational challenges. Success depends on how well those systems align with the realities of running a busy, multi-site workforce and whether colleagues across the business actually use them.
Founded in 2019, Team Wheel was created to help retailers close that gap. Led by CEO Andy Simpson, the consultancy works with HR, payroll, finance and operations teams to select, implement, optimise and rescue people systems, ensuring they deliver tangible business value. In this interview, Simpson shares the thinking behind Team Wheel, the lessons learned from supporting retailers through complex transformation programmes, and why successful change starts with people and processes, not just technology.
What was the moment that made you decide to launch Team Wheel, and what gap wasn’t being filled?
There wasn’t one moment, more a pattern I kept seeing from the inside. A retailer would buy a good HR or payroll system, the implementation partner would leave at go-live, and the people left running it had a system that wasn’t set up around how the business worked. Hourly paid, multi-site workforces just had the worst experience imaginable.
The big consultancies priced and designed for head office and what the juniors knew about the industry, and the smaller ones didn’t know the systems well enough to fix what was wrong. Nobody was designing for the store manager with 40 part-timers, a Saturday rota to fill and no HR person for 100 miles. I started Team Wheel in 2019 to sit in the middle: people who know the systems and understand what a Friday payroll run means to a store on a Saturday.
What are the key lessons that have shaped the way you now advise and support retailers?
The system is rarely the problem on its own. It’s the decisions made before it was chosen, or the ones nobody made and just fell into. So I’d always spend time on the plan before the product.
The biggest mistake I see, and I’ve seen it a lot, is taking a bad process and rebuilding it in a new system. The rota is still copied from last week rather than built to footfall and trading hours, the approvals still go through the same three people, the payroll team still re-keys the same corrections, it’s just happening on a nicer screen. That solves nothing and costs a lot. You’ve paid a six figure sum to automate the problem, and because it’s now in a system it’s harder to change than it was on paper.
Which is why we always start with what we call phase zero. It’s a short piece of upfront work before anyone does anything technical. We sit with the people who actually do the work, store managers, area managers, the payroll team, HR, and map how things run today, not how the policy says they should run.
How does a store actually cover a sickness on a Sunday? What happens to a Christmas temp’s contract in January? Where does labour cost get decided, and does anyone see it against sales before the week’s over (having that sort of information at least daily is quite helpful, isn’t it!)? Then we agree what should change, what’s worth keeping, and what the business wants the system to do for it.
Only then do we design the system around that. It’s usually a few weeks, it’s the cheapest part of the whole programme, and it’s the part most implementations skip.
Second, with hourly paid teams the basics have to work on day one: rotas, time and pay. If they don’t, the business feels it that week and all the trust goes, and it’s hard to get back.
Third, go-live is the start, not the end. Most of the value comes from what happens in the months after. And listen more than you talk. The store manager usually knows where the process breaks, nobody has asked them.
What makes Team Wheel different, and why do retailers choose to work with you?
We’re 24 people, all employed, no contractors, so the team that scopes the work is the team that delivers it. We know the systems properly, Dayforce, Workday, HiBob and Factorial, and we know hourly paid, multi-site operations, which is a rarer combination than it should be. We don’t start with the product.
We work out what the business problem is first and then pick the tool(s), and sometimes the answer is to fix what’s already there. A lot of our work is the phase before a system is chosen, and the rescue of systems chosen without that phase. Clients tend to stay with us after go-live, which I take as the best measure. We’ve also been finalists in the British HR Awards three years running.
What tangible outcomes can retailers expect, and how do you create lasting change rather than short-term fixes?
Payroll needs to be right first time, every week, through peak. Managers building rotas and approving time in the system rather than on WhatsApp and spreadsheets. Labour cost visible against sales while there’s still time to do something about it, not in a report a fortnight later. One record for each employee that HR, payroll and operations all trust, so right to work, under-18 hours and minimum wage are checked by the system rather than by someone remembering. Fewer queries landing on store managers and the payroll team on a Monday morning. And a plan the business can run itself.
The lasting part comes down to one word: adoption. No adoption, no return on the investment, and no point having done it. In retail this matters more than almost anywhere, because the people doing most of the HR work are store managers with no HR training, hundreds of them, supported by a small central team. If they work around the system you’re paying for it and still doing the job by hand, and the central team spends its time chasing. So change, comms and training aren’t a nice to have bolted on at the end, they’re the job. The work with managers and processes runs alongside the configuration, not after it. People hear what’s changing and why, from their own leadership, well before go-live. Training happens before people need it, on their own examples, and in a form a store manager can actually use between customers. And we stay on as support afterwards so nothing drifts back to the old way.
It also changes how we look at a retailer that already has a system in place. If it’s set up fine but isn’t getting the results, the first question isn’t which new system to buy. It’s why people aren’t using the one they’ve got, and what would make them. Nine times out of ten that’s a cheaper and faster fix than a replacement, and the business ends up with the return it should have had the first time. With the Employment Rights Act changes coming, a lot of retailers are going to find out quite quickly whether their systems are being used properly or not.
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To find out more, visit the Team Wheel website here.
