What Do Your Customers Think?

Speciality Bites with

Paul Hargreaves

Chief executive of Cotswold Fayre

• Becoming a B Corp
• Top trend predictions for Christmas 2021
• Self-sacrifice: The importance of building a leadership legacy centred on others
• Undercover Boss
• Can/should bosses really be close friends with their staff?

First of all, apologies to those of you who wait for my blog – I have missed two

I haven’t been away, just ridiculously busy, and my normal hands-off approach to management became hands-on as we’ve been dealing with a massive uplift in orders going out of the door. Yes we expect an increase in the run-up to Christmas, but this is ridiculous! My team have been fantastic and many have put in loads of extra hours to get the orders out.

It’s all very well us being busy loading up retailers with stock to sell over Christmas, but will the retailers be busy over the festive period? My guess is yes. Despite the continued doom and gloom in the news, the feeling on the street is one of optimism. As I’ve said many times before, the stores that are run well, have products people come in for and merchandise them effectively are doing tremendously well – and long may it continue.

Confidence in what we are doing permeates the rest of the culture we live in, so keep it up.
It all boils down to what your customers think of you. If they love what you’re doing they will tell their friends and their friends will tell their friends and so on. Whether or not you believe in the value of social networking to your business, it doesn’t’ really matter – Facebook and Twitter are the 21st century equivalent of gossiping outside the school gate or over the garden fence. People will talk about the companies that are giving them great service.

On that note it’s judgement day for Cotswold Fayre as we are about to get the results back from a huge customer survey we commissioned a few months ago. Around 1,500 people were polled by e-mail and 100 by phone to tell an independent company what they really think about us. I am sure there will be criticism from some quarters, but I’m looking forward to getting the results because it represents an opportunity to improve! I will let you know the score next week. Also on Thursday we will find out whether we are the SME of the Year at the Thames Valley Business Awards. Winner or not, it’s sure to be a good night out!

Finally, I have always kept my family out of these blogs. One reason being is that I never want them to join the company – I have seen far too many family businesses go bad to do that to them! Anyway I found out last week that my 9-year-old and 12-year-old have started a small enterprise. One of them buys bags of lollies from the new Poundland in Cirencester (at a cost of £1 for 20) and the other sells them for 20p each on the playground. They were sharing the profits – a margin of 300%! If only we scaled up like that!

Have a good week.