Steve Oliver has quoted Ian Brown and Pep Guardiola as he prepares to step down from MusicMagpie, the company he founded 20 years ago.
“As Ian Brown said at the end of the last ever Stone Roses gig, I have reminded myself a lot recently of his phrase ‘don’t be sad it’s over, be happy it happened’ and perhaps even more poignantly, as Pep said at the end of his farewell speech “it’s been f*cking fun!” he wrote this afternoon.
Oliver co-founded musicMagpie in 2007, originally buying and selling CDs, DVDs and games from his garage in Stockport. Fast-forward to 2024 and it was acquired by AO World for £10m.
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“It is two years ago almost to the day that I first met with John Roberts and Mark Higgins at AO to first discuss the possibility of musicMagpie becoming part of the AO Family after we’d had a pretty torrid time on the public market,” he explained.
“Well, I can now say with absolute conviction that AO acquiring musicMagpie has proved to be the best long-term home I could have ever dreamt of for musicMagpie. JR, Mark, and the AO team have been fantastic and have absolutely delivered on their commitment to me and us on day one. They said they were committed to letting me and the senior team have the autonomy to run the business, which they absolutely have, and they said they were absolutely committed to our brand, our office and our operations and they have delivered on all those promises 100%. That is a massive testament to the people and the business that they are, and I’d like to thank them personally for that trust and respect. I have many, many reasons to admire and respect JR for what he has built over 25 years at AO, but perhaps the biggest single one is his infinite passion, energy, stamina, and vision for what he wants to achieve at AO. Magpie is in the safest of hands.”
Oliver explained that he’d spend more time with his family, “travel a bit” and work on his other “‘part-time’ business interests” including Doorly (formerly Appacut), Bioloon and EGG Engage Grow Go, the homelessness charity he founded 3 years ago.
“My greatest single pride at Magpie has always been the people …. more so than our cumulative £2bn of gross income in our history so far, more so than the little business that started in my garage in Hazel Grove becoming the biggest seller in the world in the history of eBay and Amazon and more so than paying out well over £1/2 billion pounds in tax-free cash to our customers, it is absolutely our people that I am most proud of,” he added.
Oliver will step down as MD on 30th September, with Jonathan Miller taking over from 1st October as MD and a member of the AO Senior Leadership team.
