The largest pavilion to date!

Speciality Bites with

Paul Hargreaves

Chief executive of Cotswold Fayre

• Becoming a B Corp
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• Self-sacrifice: The importance of building a leadership legacy centred on others
• Undercover Boss
• Can/should bosses really be close friends with their staff?

What a fabulous Speciality and Fine Food Fair last week. In terms of visitor numbers (which haven’t been verified yet) it looked to me as the busiest ever

Have you ever been up on the gallery of Olympia and looked out over the arena?  It is fascinating to see where the different areas of the show are busiest at different times of day.  Next year the show is moving to the smaller hall at Olympia as they have been bumped by the Jewellery Show, which in turn has been bumped out of Earls Court as that is being knocked down L, so there will be an upstairs to the show again, which will add a different dynamic.

I was proud to note from the balcony that the Cotswold Fayre pavilion was larger than the Scotland, Wales & Irish pavilions, so we are officially now the largest exhibitor at the show.  In 15 years we have come a long way from our initial 3 metres x 1 metre stand.  Working together with 35 of our closest suppliers at the show this year worked very well, and having our own stand in the middle of the area was far better than last time.  It is good for customers to link up with both the producers and the wholesaler at the same time, and makes the follow-up from the show a lot easier and more effective.

As some of you will know our IT implementation this summer could have gone much more smoothly than it did, resulting in customers being shorted of a lot of their orders during the worst couple of weeks. I won’t bore you here with the details, but a whole number of things came together to create a “perfect storm” and it was the worst few weeks in 15 years of running this business.  Everything is sorted now just in time for Christmas orders which started going out of the door last week. However there is some confidence building still to be done with some customers, especially those who have had contact with an ex-employee, currently on gardening leave. Apparently there is a rumour around that Cotswold Fayre is going out of business!  This is nothing new – it happens at least once a year and is generally started by scurrilous competitors after a cheap shot. Generally people ignore it, but I have had suppliers on the phone in the past ring me to ask the question, which has always amazed me that they have had the courage to pick up the phone when we have generally been growing at 20%.  At the show a few customers who said they had been told this by our ex-employee came to us and asked us if this was true.  My response was to look up at the large Cotswold Fayre Pavilion, and ask them, “What do you think?”  Point made!

I have always held a high ethical position in business, and certainly within the speciality food world, it is in everyone’s interest to get on.  It is a very small world, and too small to make enemies.  There are many competitive companies who see that too, and we get on very well. I had a late night drink one night at the show with of them and had a very entertaining conversation.  There are some who are still operating in the dark ages though! A prophet once said, “you reap what you sow”. It’s true!