Sussex Business Times Issue 360 2012

SBT

ISSUE 360: FREE

SUSSEX BUSINESS TIMES

YOU CAN MAKE IT WORK...

AND WE CAN TELL YOU HOW! ALAN SUGAR REVEALS HIS SECRETS FOR SUCCESS THE IMPORTANCE OF E-LEARNING EXPLAINED THE GREEN & BLACKS CHOCOLATE ENTREPRENEUR SPEAKS OUT HOME OR AWAY? MANUFACTURING DEBATED THE NEW WORLD OF B&B PUBS EXPLORED PLUS: HOW TO SHOW YOUR CAR BRAND WITH STYLE

SBT THE MAGAzINE THAT MATTERS WWW.SUSSEXBUSINESSTIMES.CO.UK

Visit www.identity-online.co.uk or call today on +44 (0) 1323 469111 2 www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk

SBT Welcome Photograph © Grant Scott

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“At SBT we make it our business to investigate ways that you can add to your revenue streams” - SBT

It’s business as usual here at SBT. For us, that means delivering more of the features that you’ve given us such positive feedback on from the first of our refreshed issues. Refreshing, has in fact continued to be a theme for us ever since - not least because we anticipate that it will be for you...

We understand that with business as it is, it’s important for you to keep moving with the times, be open to new ideas and try out new ways of adding to your success. So with the arrival of spring - a time of transformation and survivial of the fittest - we thought it the perfect time to inspire you to achieve your personal ambitions and business goals.

We’ve got the lowdown from Alan Sugar, who tells us what it takes to be an entrepreneur in his trademark, straight talking style (on page 32) whilst Jo Fairley, the Hastings based business woman behind Green & Blacks, tells the story of how she built the chocolate company worth £100 million today (page 24). Don’t miss her tips for improving your own brand.

At SBT we make it our business to investigate ways that you can add to your revenue streams. As the great British pub is widely reported to be be suffering in the economic downturn, we show how to buck the trend with an informative insight into how a West Sussex businessman has created a portfoilo of six public houses that are all thriving businesses, (page 36) and reveal the secret of the continued success behind local brewers Harveys of Lewes (page 50).

For those companies looking towards training staff to generate returns and improve service, we lift the lid on E-Learning to reveal exactly what it is, how it works and also discover that Brighton is, infact its UK home. Can you afford not to be in the loop?

Finally, as we all need incentives and rewards for our hard earned graft, we bring you the latest luxury car accessories to reinvigorate your wardrobe, office and travel experiences, in the second of our Spending It! series.

In short, our spring issue of SBT aims to engage you with informative content that entertains, to push you forward in all you do in business, this season.

Editor Samantha Scott-Jeffries

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Contents SBT Issue 5

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SBT

ISSUE 5: FREE

SUSSEX BUSINESS TIMES

YOU CAN MAKE IT WORK...

AND WE CAN TELL YOU HOW! ALAN SUGAR REVEALS HIS SECRETS FOR SUCCESS THE IMPORTANCE OF E-LEARNING EXPLAINED THE GREEN & BLACKS CHOCOLATE ENTREPRENEUR SPEAKS OUT HOME OR AWAY? MANUFACTURING DEBATED THE NEW WORLD OF B&B PUBS EXPLORED PLUS: HOW TO SHOW YOUR CAR BRAND WITH STYLE

SBT THE MAGAzINE THAT MATTERS WWW.SUSSEXBUSINESSTIMES.CO.UK

PP 01 Front SBT.indd 1

08/02/2012 14:27

Cover Image: © Dreamstime.com

Sussex Business Times Editor: Samantha Scott-Jeffries s.scott-jeffries@parkview-publishing.co.uk Editorial Director: Grant Scott g.scott@parkview-publishing.co.uk Design: Park View Studio: Harriet Weston h.weston@parkview-publishing.co.uk Commercial Business Manager: Thomas Hopkins t.hopkins@parkview-publishing.co.uk Managing Director/Publisher: Lee Mansfield l.mansfield@parkview-publishing.co.uk Sales Director: Simon Skinner s.skinner@parkview-publishing.co.uk Media Director Linda Grace l.grace@parkview-publishing.co.uk Accounts: Clare Fermor/ Amelia Wellings c.fermor@parkview-publishing.co.uk a.wellings@parkview-publishing.co.uk Published by Life Media Group LTD Park View House 19 The Avenue, Eastbourne, East Sussex BN21 3YD 01323 411 601 Printed by Gemini Press, Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex, BN43 6NZ All material in this publication is strictly copyright and all rights reserved. Reproduction without permission is prohibited. The views expressed in Sussex Business Times Magazine do not necessarily represent the view of Park View Publishing LTD. Every care is taken in compiling the contents but the publishers of Sussex Business Times Magazine assume no responsibility for any damage, loss or injury arising from the participation in any offers, competitions or advertisement contained within Sussex Business Times Magazine. All prices featured in Sussex Business Times Magazine are correct at the time of going to press.

Copyright Life Media Group LTD 2012 ©

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3 7 15 19 24 32 36 45 50

Welcome

Get fired up for spring, with details of how this issue of SBT will inspire and entertain you.

Spending It! Breathe new life into your wardrobe and office this season, with our round-up of the most desirable new lifestyle products from luxury car brands.

Working Lunch Need to know where you can enjoy the best business lunches in Sussex? SBT visits Brighton to review The Kings Restaurant at The Grand Hotel and bring you three further recommendations.

Training Focus We explain the what, why and how behind E-Learning and discover how Brighton based company Kineo made it a global business.

An Entrepreneur’s Story Meet Jo Fairley. The East Sussex based businesswoman reveals how she created the £100 million brand Green & Blacks chocolate and offers her advice on creating your own business success.

A Word From Lord Sugar...

The renowned businessman explains what makes an entrepreneur in his straight talking style. Have you got what it takes?

How To Create Profit We all know that our great British pubs are facing hard times, but are there ways to add to their revenue streams? We reveal the model that proves that there are.

The Big Debate It may be a great selling point, but is manufacturing in Sussex financially viable? SBT opens up the debate to two local furniture companies who operate by the opposing arguments, to find out.

Made in Sussex We discover how Harveys of Lewes has adhered to its strong traditional values for some 200 years to achieve enduring success.

I

I AM CHANGING EVERYTHING

I AM THE NEW NIKON 1 V1.

I am an intelligent camera built from scratch.

With my pre and post capture technology, I take pictures before and after you’ve fully pressed the button, meaning you will never miss a moment again. I am a small system with interchangeable lenses and innovative features, an electronic view-finder, and a super high-speed autofocus system. I am a new era of imaging. www.nikon.co.uk

I am your colour of choice: For 2 year warranty on any camera and lens kit simply register your new Nikon within 30 days of purchase. Call 0800 408 5060 or visit www.nikon.co.uk/register.

www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk 5

6 www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk

Spending it!

Get in Gear

At SBT car brands are the driving force behind our wish list of accessories this season. Our essential round-up will add a sense of luxury and fun to your wardrobe, desk and out of office adventures

LAMBORGHINI Lamborghini are the first in fashion to produce a collection of unisex carbon fibre bags.The result?

Lightweight, strong and highly desirable.

Messenger bag, £905 www.lamborghinistore.com

MASERATI Made-to-measure to fit the rider whose name and limited edition number are printed on the frame, no wonder there is a waiting list for the Montante for Maserati 8CTF, £3,012.90 www.maseratistore.com

www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk 7

Spending it!

ASTON MARTIN Handmade in luxurious cable knit cashmere, this scarf from Aston Martin’s Cygnet Collection exemplifies understated style, £195.83 https://store.astonmartin.com

RANGE ROVER Aerodynamically designed to withstand the most rigorous weather conditions, perfect for when you need to leave your Range Rover roadside in a storm, Blunt Umbrella £59 www.landrover.com

S

0 LAND ROVER Understated and stylish with the Land Rover logo appearing on the inside, this supple leather wallet has two hidden multi-purpose pockets for business cards and a very reasonable price tag.

The York Wallet £29 www.landrover.com

8 www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk

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Spending it!

VOLKSWAGEN GTI Volkswagen are celebrating 35 years of the Golf GTI with a special accessories collection. With its great graphics and unmistakable stripes, we’re coveting this Baseball Cap, £15 www.volkswagen merchandise.co.uk

AUDI Big on style and reasonable on cost, this classic timepiece with its leather strap, luminous hands and striking date display has a Swiss quartz movement and is water resistant to 50 metres - a great all-rounder.

Chronograph Big Date, £185 www.audi.co.uk/merchandise

JAGUAR A true classic in racing green, this 100% cotton jersey polo shirt is a perfectly formed, not unlike the E-Type.

Classic Polo, £25 www.jaguarcollection.com

BMW Designed in collaboration with OGIO and featuring eleven special pockets including an insulated drinks compartment and a fleece lined pocket for valuables, the BMW Golf Cart Bag, £161 www.bmw-shop.com

10 www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk

Full

1976

Trek makes its first bike, the 520. A high-tensile, double-butted steel frame built in a barn in Waterloo, Wisconsin. It’s still under warranty.

520

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Now a top performer in the Tour de France, the Madone combines aerospace technology with ultimate comfort. Now designed by bona-fide rocket scientists at Trek HQ in Waterloo, Wisconsin, just minutes from the same barn where it all began.

Technology has changed a lot in 35 years. Our goal has remained the same: Build The World’s Best Bikes.

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SBT SUSSEX BUSINESS TIMES

DAILY UPDATED NEWS LOCAL EVENTS FEATURES BUSINESSES FOR SALE BUSINESS DIRECTORY

WWW.SUSSEXBUSINESSTIMES.CO.UK

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER @SUSSEXBUSINESS 12 www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk

Spending it!

LEXUS This journal from the CT 200h Collection is a handy companion for meetings.

It features an integrated sleeve for storing the complimentary pen and an expandable inner pocket, Cross Signature Journal £15.32 www.lexus.co.uk

RENAULT

HONDA

Sized to hold a Renault key card, this business card holder is sleek and practical, with a pleasing magnetic closure mechanism, Card Case £15 www.renault.co.uk

Perfect for travelling, this Honda branded box contains a set of white headphones with three differently sized silicon tips to suit most ears.

Earphones £7.50, www.honda.co.uk

MINI A Mini Rally Monte Carlo print gives vintage personality and style to this canvas handbag. Perfect for mini adventures. Small Doctor Bag, £84 www.mini.com/shop

www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk 13

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We are proud to announce that Stanmer House has recently been reopened by Whiting and Hammond as a wonderful restaurant and bar and now opens its doors to everyone...

There’s no need to book, just pop in.

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Our daily changing menu cooked to order by our award winning chefs using locally sourced produce. View our website for todays menu.

FOR ALL THE DETAILS JUST VISIT www.stanmerhouse.co.uk

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14 www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk STANMER HOUSE, IS PART OF THE WHITING AND HAMMOND GROUP, DISCOVER MORE AT: WWW.WHITINGANDHAMMOND.CO.UK

Tried & Tested

WorkingLunch

Need to impress a client, discuss important plans with a colleague or just enjoy a great lunch away from the office? SBT brings you our guide to the best business lunches across the county.

This issue, we visit The King’s Restaurant at The Grand Hotel in Brighton and wonder why more people aren’t shouting about it...

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Photography by Harriet Weston ©

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It’s a crisp, sunny January lunchtime when SBT venture Review to The King’s Restaurant at The Grand Hotel. Bathed in pale sunlight, the hotel’s handsome Victorian facade has an iconic air, one that was first made famous by the film Quadrophenia, and our knowledge as visitors that Thatcher and JFK have been amongst its better known guests.

Inside, The Grand lives up to its name.

Beyond the hatted footman, marble columns, classic English decor and opulent chandeliers greet us at the entrance of the restaurant, its name etched in glass above vast double doors. If you’re wanting to close a deal, prove your credentials or really treat a client, this is the timeless venue in which to do it, muses SBT. We’re greeted by a friendly face and led out to a light filled conservatory beyond the vast and cavernous dining room.

Here, we have a choice of tables with seafront views, dressed in simple white linen. It’s a bright but intimate space, with an informal, peaceful atmosphere that’s conducive to conversation. Our waitress, Helen, instantly offers us water, followed by a choice of warm sourdough or pecan and sultana bread rolls, whilst we study the menu.

Today’s selection doesn’t disappoint.

Alan White, the Executive Chef offers just enough seasonal choice for it to be reassuringly local. From crispy Sussex Ham Hock to South Downs Roast pigeon breast, there are rich flavours for

ABOVE: Roast pink breast of Gressingham duck, ABOVE LEFT: Gurnard, the catch of the day and ABOVE RIGHT: Carpaccio of Casterbridge beef served on a granite slab, at The Kings Restaurant.

“The hotel’s handsome Victorian facade has an iconic air, one that was made famous by the film Quadrophenia” meat lovers, whilst line caught South coast seabass and Brighton scallops promise to satisfy fish lovers with a conscience. All of the dishes have a British feel, yet many have an original or contemporary edge. And Helen, our waitress has impressive knowledge

from the kitchen, to help us make up our minds.

To kick off proceedings, SBT plums for the blue lobster spring rolls with fennel, radish and a bisque sauce, which lives up to expectations. The soft, sumptuous lobster is a perfect contrast to the crispy pastry, with fennel and radish adding a refreshing tartness to the plate. The other dish is a carpaccio of 28 day matured Casterbridge beef fillet with a trio of beetroot, horseradish and cream. This arrives presented on a granite slab, against which the colours of the beetroot and creamy horseradish sing. The delicately sliced carpaccio is topped with a sprinkling of crunchy sea salt, and neither the horseradish or beetroot overpower the star of the dish.

Choosing a main course from White’s tempting selection is no mean feat.

The roast breast of Gressingham duck with confit leg, honey roasted parsnips, carrot puree and goosberry sauce catches SBT’s hungry eye. Chef, we’re told, only serves it pink. The confit leg turns out to be deliciously crumbly meat inside a crunchy duck ball, the gooseberry sauce is sweet and it is agreed that chef was spot on about the cooking time of his succulent meat.

SBT is also intrigued to order the catch of the day. The Gurnard, a meaty white fleshed fish, is cooked with a crispy skin and served with pleasingly doughy gnocci. A tomato pesto and pine nuts pulls the plate together. Portions are generous, but vegetarian options on the menu are limited to just two, yet SBT is told that the kitchen is always happy to accommodate those with special diets,

www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk 15

LONG ROOM THE

The perfect place to meet people, drink and dine in the centre of Eastbourne with a secluded garden.

Private room available for hire.

8 Bolton Road, Eastbourne, East Sussex BN21 3JX Tel: 01323 723023

16 www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk

Tried & Tested

often inviting guests through its’ doors to ensure they can conjure something appropriate. Here, there is no need to call ahead in advance, preventing that embarrassing moment when booking a business lunch, of having to investigate and relay the ‘special dietary requirements’ of a client.

SBT barely has room, but feels it would be rude to shun dessert. We move from the conservatory to the comfort of the Victoria lounge, where Sussex cream tea is being served to guests whilst a pianist entertains. Helen exuberantly recommends the Valrhona bitter chocolate fondant with black cherry ice cream, which she is right to do. It is the perfect mix of the richest dark chocolate with a warm gooey centre and just sharp enough cold ice cream.

Yet not all of the desserts on the menu are heavy classics. SBT discovers Jake’s pure apple juice sorbet to be the perfect pallate cleanser after two rich courses, and that it is made far more exciting than a usual bowl of two

scoops with the addition of a mini toffee apple and dried apple crisps.

It was quiet in the restaurant, we note, on clearing our final plates, but it is January, we debate, and there is news that The King’s will soon be offering a choice of two set menus in addition to today’s a la carte, which will change weekly. The first, The Taste Of The Grand will run from Sunday night to Friday lunchtime and offer two courses with a glass of wine and coffee for £20.

The second set lunch menu will give guests the option of choosing either two courses for £15 or three for £20. As the current a la carte menu offers starters from £5.95 to £8.85 and main courses from £13.25 to £24.75, both look set to be excellent value. Such a move should entice more diners to enjoy the experience at The King’s. It’s a treat.

One that clients and colleagues will thank you for. www.devere.co.uk

Why it works Local seafood from Brighton’s harbours features on the seasonal British menu The elegant Victorian facade and interior of The Grand Hotel, are perfect for when you need to impress or treat a client The service hits the perfect note of efficient but relaxed, friendly rather than stuffy and nothing appears to be too much trouble A selection of conference rooms and spaces are available for businesses to hire with facilities for 6-800 guests.

SBT

Recommendations Three more top restaurants to visit in Brighton

Jamie’s Italian

Terre à Terre

Côte Brasserie

You know that you’ll be in good hands at Jamie’s. If you’re hosting a lunch that requires Oliver’s informal style combined with the kudos of great food, this is the venue. Fresh seafood, perfect pasta dishes and daily specials are all cooked in the wood burning oven and served by friendly, efficient staff. Arrive early as tables can only be booked for larger groups and parties. www.jamieoliver.com/italian/brighton

Need to impress a vegetarian client?

Where better to wine and dine them than an imaginative but professional restaurant whose meat free menu is based on quality ingredients.

Established in 1993, this award winning veggie venue has the ability to surprise the most ardent meat eating guests with its’ exciting dishes packed with flavour and its’ extensive wine list. www.terreaterre.co.uk

Known for its great value and Parisien style, Côte Brasserie is the upmarket chain that delivers simple French food that’s reassuringly consistent. Visit for classics such as a great steak frites, moules marinères or their selection of ‘light mains’ which often appeal at lunchtime. The décor is smart and the gently bustling ambience is just the right backdrop for an informal business chat. www.cote-restaurants.co.uk

www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk 17

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28:42

Training Focus: E-Learning

Everything Starts with an ‘E’

With half of the UK’s top E-Learning companies based in Brighton, did you know that the East Sussex city has become a centre for E-Learning? And that many global business brands use E-Learning to train staff? SBT talks to Mark Harrison, a Founder and Director of the Brighton based E-learning company Kineo, whose clients range from Nike to Nikon, to discover out how they went global, bring you up to speed with the latest in training and find out how small companies can also utilise E-Learning.

What is E-Learning?

Essentially E-Learning is any learning experience that has been delivered using technology and IT technology. That actually means you have to think about the things that arent E-Learning these days to understand what it E-Learning is - ie face to face workshops, classroom sessions, a manager coaching, reading a book (although that’s now debatable with The Kindle) - in short, not much.

In the past, it used to be distinct. There were distinct ways in which technology got into peoples lives and the rest of their learning experiences were in the classroom. Now this is not the case.

Insight

So how does E-Learning respond to how we learn today?

What has changed of course, is that now people expect things to be delivered by technology and they question why they should go into a classroom. It means they then have to take time off, it takes them away from their job and companies have to put them into expensive hotels. If they do choose to do that, it seems to be for something that requires face to face

reflection and roleplay. In effect all the things that used to be done by (often dull) face to face delivery can now be delivered by computer. E-Learning could arguably be looking at a video, computer, YouTube, it could be someone having an exchange email a learning experience happening within technology, it could be a webinar - a virtual classroom, and you could have a whole range of people all around the world, posing questions online, via their I-Pads, tablets or smart phones, for example.

What do E-Learning production companies do to ensure learning?

E-Learning production companies tend to get involved in the above areas, but if people want stand-alone content, more than a piece of video - involving questions and checking things - then it becomes stand-alone E-Learning content or interactive E-Learning. The essence is that it is interactive. The distinction is that you can watch a video but you can’t guarantee someone learns from it, but if there are questions and activities whereby you can track what people are doing, you can guarantnee that learners know x,y,z. Furthermore if I put questions into E-Learning then

“E-Learning could arguably be looking at a video, computer, on YouTube, it could be someone having an exchange email” - Mark Harrison

www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk 19

I can send the data back to a learning management system, which can take all of the data, store it up and send reports that show that every one of your people has done the programme and how they did it. So Health and Saftey is a staple in E-Learning - you can prove that all of your workforce have been trained, track that they passed a score on a test or quiz after they’ve done some E-Learning via a programme.

Is it economically effcient?

In this respect it is a very cost effective way of reaching thousands and thousands of people - probably no more than a £1 or £2 a head in some organisations - so no more than someone having a coffee on their way to a workshop. It can be incredibly cost effective if you choose the right subject with the right people.

So is interactive E-Learning aimed at large businesses?

I think there is an entry point. I would say do your maths to find what the cost is of producing something upfront, and you might find that the cost of creating a stand alone interactive programme might indicate that it would be worth doing something differently, such as going into a classroom, which might be cheaper. From experience, if you have a company with less than 300 or 400 people, you probably wouldn’t find a business case for paying people to create E-Learning content for you.

So how can small businesses use E-Learning?

There are lots of opportunities for people to put videos on their intranet, or coach via email.

There are companies who offer content you can buy off the shelf on lots of topics It makes some sense for some topics to be generic, there is no reason to create from scratch a programme telling employees what fire extinguishers they should use in case of an emergency in the

workplace, for example. Companies such as Learn Direct cater for indivuals.

Some organisations have big libraries of generic content and create some custom content from that. There is also a lot of free information online. Some generic content on almost every topic on the world is somewhere on the web, often given away by organisations partly for PR purposes.

How would you suggest that smaller companies use this free information?

Find out what’s free, work out what you really need to do, and if you do want to create something custom for yourself, try and create a renewable source that people can contribute to, such as a small learning management system where you can add content and share things, rather than invest in a certain topic. It’s much better to create an area where people can go to with nuggets of information that’s learning focused, rather than somewhere on the intranet where there is reems of information.

Get a video camera, get your experts put a camera to them and put it up on YouTube. Not enough people do that.

Will custom E-Learning ever be viable for small businesses?

Human beings cost money. If you could get everything scripted somewhere where there was cheap labour you could see it following the same process as manufacturing, but the reality is that you wouldn’t go to Vietnam or Malaysia to find a interactive designer to help you to design a programme for the UK. There will always be interactive designers based in the west who have a certain cost, so custom content won’t go beyond a certain level however automated it is. What will happen is that people internally will do more, subject matter experts will share more, but although these tools and materials make it easier, there is no guarantee that it will become cheaper.

Can you offer an example of a typical

custom E-Learning programme or project that you have worked on?

One example, for which we won an award for last year, was the M&S café.

The M&S cafés were not performing very well and weren’t at the level that M&S said they wanted. So we came in and worked very closlely with their team to discover the things were that weren’t happening. We then created a relatively short E-Learning programme to take staff through what the issues were. They were able to practice and try things out with mini simulations. They learnt to offer what customers needed and wanted instead of just offering them food and drink, which furthered their understanding of their customer. With no other input, purely with people going through the E-Learning, like for like sales increased by 6% in the six months post roll out, more than 12 times the industry average in the same period.

The staff learnt how to be helpful and improve the M&S café environment.

This was a way that E-Learning saved money, it would have cost way more to deliver a programme face to face, and it improved business dramatically.

So it can be hugely cost effective for large corporations?

We’ve saved hundreds of thousands or million of pounds for organisations such as BP or Compass, because it’s cheaper to deliver. But you need everyone to do it, and tackle what is a clear problem, rather than think that it is something that is “nice to have.”

Are there other examples of the kind of companies for whom E-Learning is particulary effective?

For people who need to do things on the job, for companies geographically spread, and for those who require constant or fast moving product knowledge or information, are particular examples. We work with Nikon, Canon and Cable and Wireless, the latter of whom have products come in every week. E-Learning can respond to that.

“With no other input, purely with people going through the E-Learning, like for like sales [for the M&S café] increased by 6% in the six months post roll out, more than 12 times the industry average in the same period. M&S claimed to have saved £400,000 by not having to pay for travel and accommodation [for training].”

20 www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk

Training Focus: E-Learning

Taken from an E-Learning programme for managers on leadership, here learners find out what would happen if they applied very different leadership styles within a meeting with a team member.

There are many forms of interactivity in E-Learning, on this screen, taken from a module on leadership, learners can click on options to get exactly the information they want.

This screen is taken from an E-Learning programme on the risks of misusing inside information on the financial situation in a company. In this case, the learner looks at a story and decides if inside information has been shared illegally.

E-Learning programmes often allow learners to see what programmes they have completed and what they still need to do, as illustrated by this menu

Here, an interactive tutorial on numeracy skills in a programme for young learners is based around scenarios of preparing for the 2012 Olympics

And when does it not work?

It doesn’t work for big businesses just throwing infomation at a screen. It has to deliver genuine information which the learner will be interested in. We always remind our designers that there has to be something in it for the learner. The danger is when you force someone to

go through an hour’s worth of dull stuff.

If the experience is poor for the learner, they will not relate to it and it will not lead to retaining knowledge at all.

So is there any data to prove the effectivness of E-Learning?

There are a huge amount of studies, a

lot of complex data and literature on this, as a huge amount of people have puzzled over this question for twenty years. The fundamental problem of evaluating training is isolating it from everything else that’s going on around the person at the time. You have what’s often called ‘The Hawthorn Effect’

www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk 21

UNWINDING?

BEING SOCIAL?

CALL PRIORY

When an occasional habit gets out of control it can quickly become an addiction. It can wreck your life and the lives of those around you.

Fortunately addictions can be treated and the sooner you act, the sooner you can regain control of your life. The Priory Hospital Brighton & Hove offers a free, confidential assessment.

Call Priory on 0845 2 PRIORY (that’s 0845 2 774679) to talk to an experienced addictions therapist for help and advice.

You’ve come this far, don’t back out now.

Contact the Priory Hospital Brighton & Hove for a free initial addictions assessment:

Tel: 0845 2 PRIORY (0845 2 774679) Email: info@priorygroup.com

22 www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk www.priorygroup.com/addictions 40 Sussex Business Times

Training Focus: E-Learning

which is the theory that when anyone is paying attention to what they are doing, they do it better, because they are then more aware of what they are doing.

The data on whether E-Learning is any better than face-to-face delivery is not clear. Certain practical implications suggest that this would be the case people can try out things safely, each individual has a go rather than one person putting a hand up in a group, and they can try it in short bursts or at their own pace. The problem with being scientific is you would need to run parallel programmes (of different types of learning or not training) to prove it.

Conversely [for various reasons] any academic studies on E-Learning are very hard to find. But there are studies that show it has led to significant changes in performance and that you can definitely can say it’s cheaper at a certain volume.

So as a cost effective option in tough times, what kind of growth is the E-Learning marketplace experiencing in the recession?

We grew 20-25% last year and we’re looking to grow at least another 10% in the UK this year. We are also growing faster in other countries. Our business in the US is bound to double. Is the market place growing? Yes. People are predicting that it is at a rate of 10-20%.

The risk, of course, is that people won’t have money because of the recession, that projects might have lower budgets or none at all, but that means they are doing no training at all - and E-Learning is getting an increasing market share of all training. The challenge is to be in the right place - ie China, and we have plans to grow our global network wider those places to whom anyone studying world economics would understand we need to go.

And on the flip side of the recession, are companies using it to train a learner workforce?

You can get people up to speed quicker through E-Learning and it perhaps helps organisations who have staff with more tasks on their plate than they’re used to. However, I wouldn’t correlate leaner organisations with more E-Learning. Big organisations deliver it for reasons beyond costs, it’s not straight forward to think it is perfectly designed for an organisation looking

to move people forward and make numbers redundant, but conversely it can also help people train quicker for the next job. It has, however, impacted on face-to-face trainers, who will have seen less demand for what they do because of E-Learning. Some parts of what they would have traditionally done, can be done more effectively or in a more stimulating or engaging way via E-Learning.

So how did Kineo become an expanding global company?

Kineo came on the scene relatively recently [launching in Brighton in 2005 when four experts got together to introduce a different way of working to the market].

We were able to establish a very strong brand early on. We spent a great deal of time, and we still do, sharing knowledge - we’re something like the 9th highest ranked E-Leearning website in the world, so essentially we’ve been well known globally and often in countries with whom we have no direct links to.

We were proactive with going into America and we now have offices in Pheonix and Chicago. We made a conscious decision that we wanted to be bigger than the UK, but during that time of expansion, we’ve also been approached by people saying they want to ‘be’ Kineo too - so we have been setting up a global franchise network.

You can grow franchises quicker than setting up globally yourself and if we were employing people globally ourselves we would have needed to borrow money by now. We have never borrowed money and don’t even have an overdraft. The trade off is that we haven’t been able to set up Kineo employees all over the world, but we’ve now got entrepreneurial types in Sweden, Israel, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and China who might be doing better things better than people we could have employed. They speak English so it’s easy communicate, it’s easy for us to manage the franchise network and for everyone to share information. China has a very good English speaking Chief Executive and it is such an important growth area.

Global contracts are now going through China and coming back through the rest of the group. Essentially we have broadly been responded to by people who have a dream or vision themselves

who see they have more chance of success in their own country within Kineo, rather than trading as they were. Two were exisiting E-Learning companies who decided to change their name and become part of the Kineo family, and they foresaw that it would make a difference. Facts suggest that they have increased their turnover by 50-60% by being in the Kineo family. www.kineo.com

The Process of Creating a Custom E-Learning Product • First we confirm what type of learning the company needs. This is usually ‘blended learning’ a blend of different elements, which are agreed and documented.

• We define the objectives, what the learner should know at the end of the programme, and how that knowledge will be tested and evaluated.

• We work out what content will be covered and how. Ensuring it’s a 30 minute experience for example. This protects all parties, including us producing more than we are paid to do, or than is anticipated.

• We then write a script to include elements such as animation, video and so on, which are approved. Then we produce this, and share early versions. The first version is called an ‘alpha’ and used to check with the client that we are on the right grounds.

• Then we produce a ‘beta’ where we might add a video, which may have been indicated only at the ‘alpha’ stage.

• Once everyone is happy, we produce the ‘master’ or as it is sometimes known; the ‘gold’.

There are lots of sign off points and prototypes along the way and the more involved the client is, the better, so that they understand and can visualise the content. This is vital, not least if E-Learning is new; there is a big risk that it is not what they might have imagined.

www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk 23

An Entrepreneur’s Story

The Sweet Taste of Success

Josephine Fairley, co-founder of Green & Blacks chocolate, reputedly sold the company to Cadbury Schweppes for £20 million in 2005. Today she and her husband Craig Sams - with whom she ran the company live in East Sussex, where their business interests include Judges Bakery and the Wellington Centre in Hastings. SBT’s Editor Samantha Scott-Jeffries talks to Fairley about how she created a global brand.

Jo Fairley makes the creation of the £100 million brand Profile Green & Blacks sound remarkably simple. The year was 1991 and Fairley was already enjoying a career as a successful journalist. At the age of 23, she was the youngest magazine Editor that the UK had seen (editing New Look and Honey) and was busy writing for titles such as The Times. Living on the Portobello Road in West London with her husband Craig Sams - founder of the natural food business Whole Earth - Fairley discovered two squares of a prototype of chocolate on Sams’s desk, which he had made in tandem with a supplier in West Africa who managed a peanut, chocolate and cocoa project.

Whole Earth was renowned for its’ peanut butter and “Craig had originally been interested in the peanuts,” Fairley elaborates “but they had failed an alpha toxin test which he had strict standards about so Craig said ‘the peanuts are no good.’” In response, the supplier asked

24 www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk

Sams if he was interested in cocoa beans instead, and despite being in the ‘no sugar’ business, he wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity. “At that time, the natural food industry in Europe was tiny, the business was very small and a lot of people had started on the back of Whole Earth, so we knew everybody and Craig was pretty sure that he could find somebody who was interested in distributing organic chocolate” Fairley recalls. “So they had a sample made up in a factory in France, which was the sample I found on Craig’s desk and I put a square of the chocolate in my mouth and it was like…’oh my god, that’s amazing! That’s the best chocolate I’ve ever eaten, what is it?’

Craig said ‘it’s just a prototype, it’s not for us, but our friend in Denmark might be interested in distributing it and I went “no! no!’” Adamant that they were on to something good to give away she “nagged and nagged” Sams until “eventually he said ‘well if you’re so interested in it, why don’t you do it?’”

Fairley took the plunge. She knew that the sales and distribution could be

managed by Whole Earth but that she had to look after the marketing, PR and not least, finance the project. “I had some money from selling my house before we got married and moved in with Craig,” she says simply. She invested it in the venture on recalling a teenage memory. “I bought a postcard when I was 16 with a man on a diving board that said ‘if you don’t do it, you never know what would have happened if you had done it’ so basically I thought I had to find out what could happen.”

First off, Fairley had to fund an initial consignment of chocolate. “It cost £20,000. I had to ring my bank manager and say “I’d like to transfer £20,000 please he said “what for?” and I had to say ‘chocolate!’ I could hear the stunned silence on the other end of the phone,” she laughs. “Then one Saturday night on the Portobello Road we dreamt up the name,” she continues, “it literally took 10 minutes.

We had ideas like organi-choc, biochoc and eco-choc and we also had green-choc (because it was organic) and we had black-choc (because it

Photograph © Adrian Peacock

An Entrepreneur’s Story

www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk 25

ABOVE: From white to 85% dark chocolate, all of Green & Blacks products are made with organic, ethically sourced ingredients including Trinitario cocoa beans.

The brand - from conception to its new ownership - has always prized the values of taste and principles.

“Lady Sainsbury had been given Green & Blacks at a dinner party and had later told her husband ‘you have to have this in Sainsbury’s” - Jo Fairley was the darkest chocolate on the market at the time (being the first 70% dark chocolate) 50% had been the highest concentrate before then.”

However, Fairley with her instinctive touch for branding, knew that whilst the chocolate had to have eco credentials, it had to feel luxurious rather than earthy and “couldn’t look organic.” It was a strong brand vision from the outset.

“Let’s do something that sounds like an old English chocolate company,” she eventually decided. “Green because it was organic and black, because it was the darkest chocolate on the market, but by putting the & in the middle, all of a sudden it was like, ‘oh my god, we sounds like we’ve been around since

26 www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk

1876!’” she enthuses.

As part of her brand vision, Fairley was careful to ensure that the chocolate was on sale in exactly the right outlets. “So even though it was high maintenance, I would personally drive two cases to the Conran Shop, Harrods or the Villandry on Marylebone High Street, who couldn’t at that time get the product from a wholesaler, because I knew how important it was for that shop to stock the product,” she claims. In this same way, she also “got into New York very early on” sending one consignment to a green store called Terra Verde in Soho, then later, on meeting Georgio Deluca at a chance meeting in his store, adding chocolate for him to pick up to

stock at Dean & Deluca personally. “So it’s always been strategic” she confirms.

Fairley, of course, also put her skills as a journalist to optimum use. “I blitzed all of my media contacts; all the foodie people that I knew, the restauranteurs and chefs with the chocolate and a press release to get it on their radar.

And because it was the first organic chocolate in the world, it wasn’t difficult to get news coverage.” Whilst this all sounds very much in Fairley’s stride, she was in fact juggling the launch of the company with her day job. “I literally ran the whole thing off of my desk,” she explains. “I would be on the phone to the Editor of You magazine and say ‘hold on Dee’…’hello Green & Blacks!’”

PAGE 26: Photograph Courtesy of Green & Black’s PAGE 27: Photograph © Annie Hanson

An Entrepreneur’s Story

Then one day, the ultimate call came.

“A Sainsbury’s buyer rang and said ‘we’d like you to submit your chocolate for our next product review’ I instantly went rushing home and told Craig. He said ‘no, it doesn’t happen like that, you go knocking on their door for months and months and months or years and years and years and eventually you might get a foot in.’ But it did happen.”

Fairley discovered that Lady Sainsbury had been given Green & Blacks at a dinner party and had later told her husband ‘you have to have this in Sainsbury’s.’ And that, she recognises “was our great big break.”

Whilst having known that via Sams’s reputation as an innovator in the natural food industry the couple would invariably succeed in launching the chocolate into the natural food trade, they could not have anticipated the uptake from major supermarkets.

“Everyone at that time wanted to be Sainsbury’s, they were the number one supermarket in the UK,” Fairley recalls “and because it was the most successful supermarket, we found that it was relatively easy to get into the other chains. We even got it into two major supermarkets without even seeing a buyer, which was extraordinary,” she reveals.

Following the initial success of the company, a second push catapulted it further into the public consciousness in 1994. “We launched the world’s first Fair Trade marked chocolate product with Maya Gold (dark chocolate with orange and spices). That was another first, and another media boost for us.

We had eight minutes of news coverage on the day of the launch, the packaging flashed up behind Michael Burke’s head as he read the news!” Fairley laughs.

Rather than seeing business as a departure from her career as a journalist, she embraced the usefulness of her trade in helping to create the brand and spread the message. “As a journalist you have your finger on the pulse of what’s happening, you know what’s coming down the line and what people are talking about, so I’ve always found it very useful to be just that little bit ahead of the market and I keep my contacts. That was a great advantage,” she reveals. However, she admits candidly that she had no idea that Green & Blacks would eventually be quite the success it has become.

“I don’t think that anyone can ever

“All of our cash was tied up in stock.

Everything was in stockholding and that’s not a good place to be if you’re trying to grow your brand.”

- Jo Fairley conceive that this would become a £100 million brand. If I had ever thought it would have been that big, I don’t think I would have been able to jump off the diving board,” Fairley confesses. “If you’d have said ‘one day you will sell your business to Cadbury’ it wouldn’t have been that helpful for me, because every decision that I made, instead of being done because it felt right, would have been by rationalising things [for that purpose] instead of going by gut feel” she maintains.

In fact, Fairley talks of how harmful she feels it is when a fledgling company visits the bank to start a business and they ask ‘what’s your exit strategy, what’s the game plan, who are you going to sell to?’ “That changes everything and I don’t think

it’s necessarily constructive, and I don’t think it is just about the destination it’s about the journey.” Yet, one, in the case of Green & Blacks, that inevitably required an exit strategy of its own.

After running Green & Blacks with Sams for nine years on the Portobello Road, by the year 2000 “the company was growing so fast that all of our cash was tied up in stock. We didn’t have the budget for packaging redesigns and product development. Everything was in stockholding and that’s not a good place to be if you’re trying to grow your brand. The problem was that we were selling more and more chocolate, but you will never be paid as quickly as you need to pay your suppliers. We had quite a few cash flow crises at that stage, and that was at about £2 million a year and that’s when most companies have to do something and get some extra investment,” she details candidly.

A private equity firm who had previously invested in the New Covent Garden Soup Company, taken it to its next level and subsequently sold the business on, stepped forward. “It is not an entirely dissimilar brand to Green & Blacks” Fairley was pleased to note at the time. “It was widely available, people still felt that it was their secret discovery, they were loyal to it and we thought ‘yes, they understand our kind of business.’ They were prepared to come in and fund a new marketing director and a new product development person which we couldn’t afford to do. It was important for us to

Fairley with husband and business partner Craig Sams, the founder of the highly successful Whole Earth Foods

www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk 27

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An Entrepreneur’s Story

let go at that stage, so that Green & Blacks could progress.”

Yet letting go wasn’t easy. As Fairley notes “when you are selling your business, you have to choose its’ new parents carefully, it is like your baby really because you feel so tremendously attached to it. If they start doing things you really don’t like, it’s very hard [because you will have little control].”

For a product with strong ethical credentials at its’ core, it was vital that the new owners of Green & Blacks understood and maintained the brand’s ethos, not least for its continued success as a credible product. “We’ve just been incredibly fortunate that the new parents and then subsequently Cadbury and Kraft [the latter acquired Cadbury in February 2010] understand it. They haven’t tried to change it or mess it up. The product is exactly the same, using the same beans, using the same farmers, using the same factory – nothing has changed. The only thing that’s changed is the scale and distribution because they can now reach markets we weren’t in.”

Fairley and Sams also moved on.

In 2001, they moved permanently to their weekend home in Hastings, East Sussex. Sams remains the President of Green & Blacks and Fairley is still an ambassador for the company, yet in Hastings, they have also seized two new business opportunities.

Sams, it transpires, is a master baker who founded the first organic bakery on the Portobello Road in 1972 and still remains so passionate about baking today that Fairley describes him fondly as a “bread head.” Still writing and working as a journalist, Fairley had worked on a feature about Daylesford Organic in Oxfordshire and subsequently took Sams there on a visit. There, he met a baker with whom he struck up a relationship and “started exchanging bread stuff, a bit like train spotting!” she jokes. “And he told the baker that he “always dreamed of having a slow food bakery in Hastings Old Town.” For the man who had launched a natural food company, it was a reaction to the “industrial bread with lots of yeasts, enzymes and terrible stuff for people’s digestion systems,” Fairley claims. When the baker left Daylesford, he contacted Sams to see if he had got further with his idea, which he hadn’t. “Then, just three days later, someone came up to Craig on the

allotment and said ‘do you know that Judges is for sale?’ We felt that there was no where to get good, fresh organic food in the old town and we certainly didn’t want this hub of the community to become yet another art gallery, which could easily have happened, so it just seemed very serendipitous,” says Fairley of their acquisition.

This is not to say that creating the new incarnation of Judges in 2005 was a breeze. The bakery had been a part of the community since 1826 and unlike their chocolate brand which had to be constructed from scratch, had its’ own heritage as reputedly the oldest working bakery with production in the same premises, in Britain. “We wanted to change the interior from a café and bakery to a food shop and bakery.

We had to put in refrigeration into the listed building, stay open and not get dust on the bread!” Fairley winces. “We managed it, but it was challenging.”

As for the bread itself, the Daylesford baker joined Judges and trained their staff. 200 recipes for the existing cakes, pasties and breads were converted to organic “without the existing customers being frightened away, so any change in quality had to be a perceived improvement,” she explains.

It is no surprise to learn that Fairley was hands on from the start, although set backs with staff led her to being in the shop “from 7am to 9pm for 363 out of 365 days in the first year. I had to roll my sleeves up, but it was a great way to get to know the business and now, if anyone comes to me with something,

I know how it works, I know what the obstacles are, what’s possible and what’s not, and that’s really helpful.”

Yet when Fairley found herself “falling asleep during my own dinner party, that’s when I knew something had to give,” she smiles.

Six years into owning the bakery, Judges is firmly established as part of the local Hastings community and

One of the treatment rooms at The Wellington Centre, which Fairley designed

The yoga studio at The Wellington Centre, Hastings

www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk 29

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An Entrepreneur’s Story

is already moving on to expansion.

“We’ve now opened a licenced Judges Bakery in Robertsbridge” [in East Sussex] she elaborates. “A couple, who had a shop with a tenant who was leaving, came to us and said ‘we want to open a shop, we like bread but we don’t have a bakery, and we like what you do. You’ve obviously seen what works, which lines go and which don’t, and you’ve also done the research’” and proposed they open a second Judges. “It’s brilliant for us,” she notes “because the one thing we can’t do, is load a van before seven am because

“If anyone comes to me with something, I know how it works, I know what the obstacles are, what’s possible and what’s not, and that’s really helpful.”

- Jo Fairley we’re in a residential area, so we can’t get bread to London, where we know they’d love it, but we can get it within a 25 mile radius of Hastings. So, if we can find the right people to do it with, we’ve got a formula that works, products that work and we can roll it out now,” she says of the future of the business.

Along with her continued career as a brand consultant, speaker, author and journalist, Fairley also oversees the couple’s other business The Wellington Centre, which opened in Hastings in 2007. “We moved down from London, and being busy people to de-stress we’d go to yoga, pilates, or for a massage, to maintain our equilibrium and our wellbeing,” she explains. On their arrival in Hastings, they discovered that all of the local yoga classes were held in drafty church halls and the tiny health centre next to the bakery which

subsequently closed. Sams and Fairley thus started to talk about opening their own complementary health and wellbeing centre, knowing that there must be a “real market need” within the local community, not least those who may have moved from Brighton and London. Fairley’s health and beauty writing gave her a background in knowing what to look for in therapists and practitioners and she soon discovered “a lot of really good people here who have worked in London.”

When a council building offering an abundance of space and light “came up, we walked in and thought it would make the most fantastic health centre.”

Following extensive renovations, Fairley has created a “one stop shop” for wellbeing, with treatments, therapies and classes on offer in an environment that feels like an intimate and luxurious escape. The decor has the comfort of a chic, understated boutique hotel, the facilities are practical and the range of treatments; extensive, yet vitally, the prices are reflective of the fact that the centre is indeed in Hastings, and not in central London.

As such, the Wellington Centre is another example of what Fairley herself describes as her innate feel for what the consumer wants and needs, and simply implementing it. On talking about her role as a brand consultant, she laughs of her ‘extensive training and experience’ as a “shopper” claiming “I just have an ability to look at a brand and see how they can do things better, I just can.” Whilst her client list includes Boots the chemist and Chanel amongst many other international brands, she speaks as candidly about her success as a brand consultant, as she did of launching Green & Blacks. “I know what I need from a shop,” she gives by way of example “I tend to be fairly typical in what I want. I’m not trying to imagine what someone wants, I just know. It’s completely instinctive.” And that, it would appear, could well be the secret of Fairley’s enduring success.

www.josephinefairley.com www.judgesbakery.com www.thewellingtoncentre.com

What Makes A Successful Brand?

Jo Fairley reveals a key checklist of 5 tips and pointers that you simply can’t afford to ignore if you have, or are contemplating starting your own business.

• Think about the customer.

I always come from the standpoint of the customer. I am consumer first and foremost. I don’t come at things imagining what the customer would want, I am the customer.

• Check that everything you offer is appropriate to your market.

• Be clear with communication.

It’s amazing to me how even very big brands can, miss things, not communicate their messages or be descriptive about them.

Some expect their product to sell themselves off the shelves without telling the customer why they should buy them.

It is often because they are so entrenched in what they do, they forget to explain it to others.

• Be obsessed about attention to detail and remember to also stand back to see the bigger picture.

Martha Stewart said that in business you need a microscope and a telescope and you need to use them every day. The telescope is to allow you to stand outside of your business so you can see how the customer sees things all of the time. The microscope is for the detail. The former isn’t really hard to achieve - you almost have to mystery shop your own business but lots of people just don’t do it.

• How things look and how everything is presented, is tremendously important.

• Invest in your equilibrium.

As a business person, I need to be fighting fit, there are challenges every day. There’s a great yoga saying that one of my teachers uses: “flexible spine, flexible mind.”

www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk 31

The Secrets of My Success

Sugar Coated Advice

Lord Sugar says he’s “fed up” with being asked what makes an entrepreneur. Yet here, for one last time, he offers straight talking advice and his own personal stories to those considering setting up business on their own…. Just don’t ask him again.

If you’re going into business, you need Essential to examine your Advice motivation.

Now, in my case, it was very simple. I watched my father struggle as a factory worker and saw that it was the ethos of the family that, once a person came of school-leaving age, they would simply move on and become a factory worker in the same way. I wasn’t prepared to live the life my family lived, and I recognised at a very early stage that I would have to do it myself and not expect any hand-outs.

At the time, it was about making sure I was self-sufficient and had plenty of money so that I didn’t have to rely on anyone else. And that is what drove me to be in business on my own.

You have to have experience and, more importantly, a passion for the business you wish to enter.

Here’s the biggest point: simply jumping out of bed one Monday morning thinking, ‘I’ve got an idea – I think I’ll go into business is a complete joke.

I didn’t start my business until I had accumulated some experience at the expense of others by way of the previous jobs I’d had. I also had a passion for electronics and technology, which had interested me from a

32 www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk

“Let’s be honest about this.

The world is not waiting for you!

What’s your speciality?”

- Alan Sugar

young age. I was to go on and find out that it was this love for the electronics industry that drove me and my colleagues to try to keep thinking up new ideas. I didn’t enter this business simply because it was fashionable or ‘a good idea at the time’.

When you’re analysing your new venture, the most sobering question you can ask yourself is ‘Why me?

What’s so special about me?

Let’s be honest about this. The world is not waiting for you! There are plenty of other suppliers or individuals already out there doing what you have in mind to do, so you have to ask yourself what your speciality is. What is your hook? What is the reason your potential client is going to buy from you? In the case of an actual hard product you have in mind to produce, is it unique? Has it been around before? Are you going to sell it simply because you are much cheaper than your competitors?

Are you going to sell it because it has greater specification or a unique feature? What’s your speciality?

Unless you face up to the fact that you’ve got to have something special, you are going to fail and be bitterly disappointed in the marketplace.

Now, you may throw that back at me

www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk 33

The Secrets of My Success

and say, ‘What was so special about you? I guess my unique point was my determination and my salesmanship, as well as my ability to spot bargains and have in mind who to sell the stuff to.

On top of that, you’ll need to be prepared to put in a lot of hard work, and show a dogged determination not to give up if things aren’t going well.

Lord Sugar: A Brief Biography Alan Sugar was born in 1947 and brought up on a council estate in Clapton, in Hackney. As a child he watched his dad struggle to support the family, never knowing from one week to the next if he’d have a job.

It had a huge impact on him, fuelling a drive to succeed that was to earn him a sizeable personal fortune.

He started spotting money-making opportunities as a child, engaging in activities as diverse as selling surplus 35mm film to schoolmates (undercutting the photographic shops by 50%) and making and selling his own ginger beer. From schoolboy enterprises to setting up his own company at nineteen; from Amstrad’s groundbreaking ventures in hi-fi and computers, which made him the darling of the stock exchange, to the dark days when he nearly lost it all; from his pioneering deal with Rupert Murdoch to his boardroom battles at Tottenham Hotspur FC, he has since embarked on an amazing journey.

Today Lord Sugar is Chairman of Amstar Media. In 2009 he was appointed as Enterprise Champion to advise the government on small business and enterprise, and was also awarded a life peerage, becoming Alan, Baron Sugar of Clapton in the London Borough of Hackney. He continues to appear in The Apprentice, recently listed in The Sunday Times and The Telegraph as one of the defining TV shows of the decade.

This is an extract from The Way I See It, by Alan Sugar, £20.00.

Published by Macmillan

34 www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk

Drive, they said

Lord Sugar is no amateur when it comes to inspiring others or understanding the importance of a successful company identity, but he’s not the only expert. We decided to seek out some pearls of wisdom from other leading entrepreneurs to find out how they created their own success stories.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.

Don’t be trapped by dogma which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

Steve Jobs CEO Apple We’ve never done a piece of software unless we thought it would sell. That’s why everything we do in software ... is really amazing: we do it because we think that’s what customers want.

That’s why we do what we do.

Bill Gates CEO Microsoft A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts.

Richard Branson Chairman of the Virgin Group I was 19 and my friends were away in Ibiza partying, or students. I was stuck at home, in this wee flat, with no TV, skint. Couldn’t even buy food. My husband was a trainee at the time. He was on £13,000 a year and that was our income between the two of us. We could have got by. I mean I didn’t have to get a job. But I was really hungry. I wanted to make something of my life. I always say you’ve got to go out there and call people.

Michelle Mone The Inventor, Founder and CEO of Ultimo Bras I have a home personality and a work personality and make sure I keep them quite separate.

At work I’m a good leader and communicator but at home I’m a pushover!

Karen Brady Vice Charman of West Ham United Football Club

The government grant I got when I started Cult was probably one of the most important moments in my life. I lived off the grant and invested all my money back into the business. I just love seeing a business grow. I’m not a big spender, I’m not really driven by money.

Julian Dunkerton Founder of the Superdry Group and Cult Clothing ‘I read Sam Walton’s Made in America three or four years ago.

I’d barely heard of Wal-Mart before, but gathered that it was the biggest retailer in the world.

It was such an interesting book in terms of what it said about management and expansion: fine-tuning one particular type of outlet and rolling it out across the country, but not in a cloned fashion. It was adapted from town to town, and built a management culture which meant a programme of improvement could be enshrined in the company, to avoid atrophy.

Once I’d read it, I bought 500 copies and gave one to each of my pub managers. At Wetherspoon we’ve also copied WalMart’s practices of meeting once a week, keeping bureaucracy to a minimum and spreading information across the country quickly by phone. We critique the business - not a very British phrase.

I like Sam Walton’s idea: ‘You don’t have to have a small ego to work at Wal-Mart, but you’d better pretend you have.’ He means: don’t get removed from the sharp end, and maintain a particular type of self-criticism.’

Tim Martin Chairman of JD Wetherspoon

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Your Business: How to Create Profit

More Rooms at the Inn 80% of pubs in Britain are said to be small businesses run by tenants, lessees and owners, and it is no secret that many are struggling in tough times. In our quest to find an effective way of adding to your revenue streams, SBT speaks to the entrepreneur who has turned six pubs into profitable businesses

Nick Sutherland lives and breathes the pub business. His father was “an old fashioned publican” he says, and during his early career (that has since spanned 25 years) Sutherland worked for a PLC restaurant company, City Centre Restaurants. He was approached in the late 1980s to head up a restaurant for a private investor (called Louise Barton).

The venue was a traditional tenancy run by a regional brewer, “a ‘scampi in a basket’ type pub on the A27, next to the Hilton Hotel called the King’s Head” Sutherland recalls. He transformed the pub into a destination restaurant with four letting rooms called Oaks. He was there for two years until 1994.

Barton who had paid £215,000 for the site later sold it for £695,000 to a leisure company.

The First Success Sutherland’s next The First step, in 1998 was to buy another pub Success himself. The Royal Oak was a 200 year old Inn, in East Lavant close to Goodwood Park in West Sussex, which he bought from Gowers Brewers, the biggest brewery in West Sussex. The site was part of a ‘brewery disposal’ which Gowers deemed as having no real future, as a pub as it was so small. “We took it over and instantly stopped selling ploughmans and rolls and converted into an early version of a gastro pub,” says Sutherland, again

36 www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk

seeming to be ahead of the game.

They built an extension to the restaurant in which “our principle was that you could have a great ham, eggs and chips or you could have monkfish Thai green curry. Instead of cooks we employed chefs.”

Sutherland then added a further revenue stream to The Royal Oak, based on local research. “Speaking to people we found that the area was “under bedded” there was demand for accommodation during peak times of the year because of the Goodwood Festival and they said that the tourism market in Chichester and West Sussex was getting stronger.

There were no travel lodges around in those days, just the old fashioned Trust House Forte hotels, so we set about converting the outbuilding and the upstairs, not because the business was failing, but because the business was successful and we had this surplus accommodation, which we saw could be a good addition to the business.”

The space he referred to upstairs would have once been occupied by the landlord of the pub but had since dormant. Whilst ‘rooms at the Inn’ have existed as long as public houses themselves, Sutherland knew that to create accommodation that was appropriate to run alongside the standard of the gastro pub and guarantee return business, he would need to offer more than the traditional notion of a simple place for a night.

“We wanted to exceed people’s expectations on quality so instead of pubs with rooms (in which furniture had traditionally been a mish mash), we designed and themed the rooms, we had power showers, flat screen TVs, DVD players. Customers were getting four star luxury in a pub for a budget price point.”

The model worked. “The turning point came when we started to get lady travellers and business people staying with us instead of staying in a conventional hotel like Goodwood Park as they preferred the personal touch.”

This was when Sutherland knew there was “a big future in developing rooms in pubs.”

Sutherland responded by leasing two cottages at the back of the Inn’s car park that belonged to the Goodwood Estate to convert into holiday cottages for longer stays. People could come with their dogs, plan longer breaks, stay for the Festival of Speed. Sutherland claims that this wasn’t a big outlay, simply a “refurbishment of the existing layout. We put up extra walls, and re-configured the existing space. Of course there was a financial outlay but the ongoing running costs were minimal, most of the turnover of driving the rooms went down the bottom line.”

The connection with Goodwood was attractive to potential customers and the business also benefited from exposure via the original Mr & Mrs Smith Guide. “The founder James

A fireside corner at The Royal Oak, an asset which Mr & Mrs Smith recognised would be popular with visiting Londoners.

www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk 37

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Your Business: How to Create Profit

The spacious cottage at The Crab & Lobster demonstrates Sutherland’s model for exceeding clients’ expectations of pub rooms.

Logan came to me when he was setting up the guide because he had family in the area” recalls Sutherland. He was initially compiling a collection of “30 interesting or alternative places to stay in the UK and asked if we would go in.

I didn’t think we had enough to offer, being amongst Le Manoir Aux Quats Saisons [Raymond Blanc’s hotel],” confesses Sutherland “but he thought people coming down from London wanted to stay in a cosy pub. He wanted £500 to go in the guide, in the end he convinced me to go in and he sent a photographer down. Mr & Mrs Smith launched Christmas 2002 - with an initial print run of 10,000 and sold out very quickly - today they’ve sold 50,000 copies of the original guide and we’ve had a phenomenal amount of business

through that. We became a destination, accommodation and food venue, as well as having the origins of a country pub where you could still get a pint and a bag of nuts and sit by an open fire on in the garden.”

As a result the turnover of The Royal Oak increased five fold over the ten years from when Sutherland took on the property in 1998 until he leased it out in 2008.

The Business Model Sutherland has gone Holding on to increase his on to portfolio of West Success Sussex pubs in and around the Chichester area,to six. He has achieved this, he claims “by growing organically with the

“That took a pub that was just ticking over, to guaranteeing people eating and drinking in the restaurant when they stay over on a cold February night” - Nick Sutherland

support of Barclays Bank. They see our previous history and track record, they can see the cash flow through the accommodation and the pay back period,” he elaborates.

The collection includes The Halfway Bridge Inn, a roadside pub with a barn adjacent to it, which Sutherland leased from the Cowdray Estate and from which he created an additional eight ensuite rooms. “That took a pub that was just ticking over, to guaranteeing people eating and drinking in the restaurant when they stay over on a cold February night,” he confirms. The Crab & Lobster followed in 2005, the others include Trents in Chichester.

This is not to suggest that the process has always been seamless.

Sutherland is ready to admit that he has made mistakes. “One of the pubs we converted had eight rooms. We decide to reduce them to six by making them bigger,” Sutherland reveals. He felt that by giving two of the rooms the USP of being extra large and luxurious, that he could sell them at a premium. “These were Deluxe rooms with the option of having for example, a bath in the middle of a bedroom.” Yet the model, he says

www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk 39

“The turning point came when we started to get business people staying with us instead of a conventional hotel like Goodwood Park as they preferred the personal touch.” - Nick Sutherland

The refurbished bar area at The Halfway Bridge Inn on the Cowdray Estate.

40 www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk

candidly, simply did not work. “We found that there was a ceiling on how much someone would pay to stay in a pub, so we converted the six rooms back into eight to sell more nights at a lesser price.”

Of course the wasted work cost money, but it was put through the cash flow of the business and long term, it was of benefit to have the rooms maximise their profit (rather than provide a lesser return).

“You can get carried away with trying to make it too special. If you try to be too clever and push the price up too much then you find you are competing with the spa hotels - and at that level, people choose the spa hotels,” he notes simply, claiming that when your charges are over a certain price point, staying in a pub is not as appealing as a boutique hotel or spa to the customer, for the same outlay.

Having put in the initial work to transform the six pubs into profit making businesses, he now leases some of them out. “Because they are rural destination pubs, we feel that the owner-operators have an added value as hosts. There are so many facets to a pub that you need someone on site there 24 hours, it’s a seven day a week business, and that’s also a lifestyle choice that’s not for us.” It’s here that Sutherland and his wife have carved out a long term business plan that suits them well. “We find the pubs, refurbish, relaunch them, putting them on a strong footing, and then we look to issue a new lease and draw the rental income from that or we trade it ourselves, so there are two prongs - we have a long term funding from Barclays Bank for the freehold property investment and we have a small trading company. The idea of the trading company is that we can support any of the lessees that have leased our pubs, or if there are any problems we are in a position where we can take over, and Barclays like that idea, that we can step in and reestablish that business as required not that this has been tested yet.”

Focusing on just one geographical location, has been key, he claims. “It was easy for us to grow our business, as it’s about staff and reputation. If you’re opening down the road people will talk about it, it raises the profile.

Having your businesses close to each other allows you to move staff around,

Your Business: How to Create Profit

whereas if you have a chef off sick and you have no cover you become slightly exposed. I also live in that area so I can control it, and we market under the West Sussex area, so if people look for accommodation in Sussex, we come up as a collective group under Google searches.”

Whilst he has enjoyed success with his business “there is no exit plan, no exit strategy,” claims Sutherland, “We will just continue to cherry pick some new sites within the West Sussex area and gradually build slowly on the model that’s still working.” That, in the current climate, has to be a cautious exercise, and coupled with Sutherland’s experience, one that SBT readers can benefit from. “Where we sit now, we only look at pubs with 100 covers in the restaurant area or 50 covers, plus rooms,” he reveals.

“The rooms and the food go hand in hand - I don’t think a pub will survive without a strong food trade now, whether it has rooms or not. And you won’t be able have rooms that work without food. Liquor only pubs are few and far between - they’re either in idyllic locations if they are successful, riverside, or city centres - and they are definitely going to continue to decline.

There were 60,000 licensed pubs in the UK and that number has fallen by 8,000 in the last few years and we’re likely to lose 10% of that stock in the next few years,” Sutherland estimates. “I think we need to sell different services to people and different products, to take us through to the next century.”

The exterior of the Crab & Lobster pub, acquired by Sutherland in 2005

The facade of The Royal Oak pub, the first in Sutherland’s portfolio.

The 17th century exterior of the Halways Bridge

Nick Sutherland offers the knowledge Expert he’s accrued, to those looking Advice to emulate his model of adding value to their businesses with rooms.

First find out if there is demand Call up your local accommodation providers and see if they have any rooms free. Speak to local business people, to see if they have any requirements for rooms.

Consult the experts Get an architect to look at the building to see if its feasible to provide accommodation that won’t make the rooms too small. Consult your

A slick exterior for city centre pub, Trents

www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk 41

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PP 44-49 The Debate SBT.indd 44

20/02/2012 14:59

2 14:59

Your Business: How to Create Profit

local planning office. Speak to your rating office, who value commercial properties. Most pubs are classed as public houses, so if you are adding and letting accommodation you will need to be mindful of what the new value and any rise in rates will be.

One of the modern rustic rooms at The Crab & Lobster

Be prepared to invest, then potentially wait...

The initial investment of conversion costs is approximately £25,000 to £40,000 per room (to complete the building work and fit out). It’s a slow start up on the rooms, but if the product is right don’t lose faith in the waiting game. For us, initially, the payback was within a year, but the occupancy levels went up to bring rewards in years two and three, especially during the winter months.

You mustn’t skimp on the finish People might not have high expectations when they come to a pub with rooms, but you must exceed them. The more we seem to invest in the room, the higher quality of customer we attract, the higher the spend goes up and we then also attract repeat business.

cheaper to do that with a lease, but for major structural work, then you do need to have a very long lease and the support of the landlord.

Bear in mind what facilities people require, including business people With The Royal Oak, we looked at Goodwood Park and offered more, such as dressing gowns, slippers and premium toiletries.

Consider your economies of scale You need at least four or five rooms to make them pay dividends and fund running things professionally. You need a chef to cook breakfast to offer the quality of service your customers will require for example, so you have to have enough income from the rooms to allow you to do things to a high enough standard. If you try to do things yourself, or ad hoc, it doesn’t work.

Contact other accommodation providers in your area So that when they’re full and they’ve seen that your offer is good, they’ll recommend you to clients that they can’t take. Don’t shy away from other local businesses, you will have an individuality about your products and different price points. Also contact the bigger hotels and get to know the reservations manager. Some work to the same model as airlines, booking at 105% occupancy, to anticipate cancellations. They occasionally get caught out and you want them to call you when they do.

Don’t always think in terms of accommodation, look wider Close to one of my sites, the village shop had closed. Talking to the locals and holding nights for them resulted in a decision to convert the outbuildings adjacent to the pub to provide a village shop. The space would only have supplied two rooms for accommodation; for which the economies of scale wouldn’t have worked. The benefit is that the rents and rates will stay the same, we’ll add value, but people will also now use the facilities of the pub who may not have used them before.

Freehold or Leasehold?

It only makes sense to own the freehold where you build accommodation. If you are carrying out the refurbishment of an existing area to create rooms, it’s

The guides are very beneficial for marketing in our experience They raise your profile. When journalists are writing a review of the area, they often use a guide such as Sawday’s

to find out what’s there, so the more guides you’re in, the better it is. For most, you need to pay for entry. They have different criteria, but if you apply, then someone like the AA will send someone down for an unannounced inspection. All of the good ones like Egon Ronay, go through their own vetting process. Also consider the local council and tourism guides and websites, there is often more room to negotiate fees.

Marketing is vital Never before in my 25 years in the business have I spent more time doing marketing than in the recession. You need to be focused on a clear strategy.

Use the local paper. Put on locals’ nights - offering a free drink will turn it into a community event and in return they will support the pub more. Finally, cross market if you have a restaurant and rooms, promoting the rooms via the restaurant for example. You have to do much more than just serve beer.

www.thesussexpub.co.uk

www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk 43

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Zest delivers what it promised. The very latest technology is now being used for digital print. Sarah Iredale checks up on Zest, the new on-demand print company (that was Prontaprint for 30 years).

Zest opening with Stephen Lloyd MP, Julie Banks (owner) & her staff.

Zest, in Grove Road in Eastbourne, is an amazing transformation from Prontaprint that had been operating successfully at the site since 1981. Entrepreneur and MD, Julie Banks, bought the Prontaprint franchise in 1996. In December 2011, she took the bold and exciting move to create Zest and leave the franchise.

As Zest, Julie is offering you even better services, all delivered by the same expert team, from the same premises with the same phone number. When the business launched, Julie promised immediate hefty investments in new technology. Has she delivered? The answer is yes.

TOP NOTCH TECHNOLOGY Zest is providing real noticeable differences in print quality and fantastic value for money. This has been achieved by installing the very latest high tech colour digital press and two mono digital presses in December and January. This significant investment is part of Julie’s continual upgrade programme that has run for many years.

As well as the exceptional print quality, the presses are faster, more reliable, quieter and use less energy. Great for their customers, the environment and their neighbours!

Canon engineers installing brand new Imagepress 1110 presses.

Julie said “With our investment in new technology, the fantastic skills of my staff and our wealth of experience, I am confident that we can give local businesses a level of service and quality that is beyond their expectations.”

This seems to be true. Zest already has some great testimonials from clients that mention their meticulous and polite service, expert advice, on time delivery and their calmness under pressure in the face of late changes!

MORE THAN A PRINT SERVICE You can now have pretty much anything printed in small or very large quantities, with personalisation, if required, on the high street in Eastbourne! Zest is much more than a printer.

It also offers design, finishing and fulfilment. It even offers a Print Facilities Management service where you can outsource all your printing and distribution requirements.

Julie added “We’re on a mission to impress our existing and new customers. We welcome anyone to give us their printing challenge. We would love to have the opportunity to let you know what we could do for you.”

www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk 45

DEBATE THE BIG

There seems to be a trend for all things locally, if not British made, but are customers willing to pay enough for them to be made in Sussex? SBT opens up the debate to two local furniture companies to find out: is manufacturing in Sussex economically viable? .

Provenance is a hot topic. Market trends since the beginning of the economic downturn have suggested that consumers are buying with caution, but it has also been widely reported that they are often buying less, but better products that will last. Just as we want to know where and how the food we put on our plates is produced, many of us want the comfort of knowing the story behind the lifestyle products we buy. We seek assurance that our high street fashion has not been produced in unethical sweatshops, and we regret seeing the disappearance or international buy-out of many British brands, from Twinings to Rover. Yet whilst we might, as a nation regret the demise of the Stoke potteries, or Sheffield steel that we say with nostalgia made English manufacturing great, are consumers really willing to pay more for quality British made products today? Or is that the privilege of the few that can afford the top end of the market?

Habitat has almost disappeared from our high streets, IKEA’s profits show a downturn and the idea of a handmade, solid piece of furniture for life is appealing. But is it economically viable to manufacture furniture locally? Should businesses feel a commitment to do so? Can they simply not afford to? Or is there a more appealing alternative? SBT consulted two Sussex based furniture businesses who claim to produce high quality furniture, to see how and why one manufactures within the county,

46 www.sussexbusinesstimes.co.uk

and the other imports all of its products from a factory overseas.

AGAINST

The Case Against Manufacturing in Sussex Richard Wilson (ABOVE) is the Owner of Quality Furnishings of Sussex.

The company launched five years ago when with entrepreneurial spirit, Richard started to sell a wide range of office chairs that he had sourced at a competitive price. He then looked into having reproduction style desks manufactured to sell with the chairs, but “knew there was no way I could get furniture made in this country for anything like the prices overseas.” In fact he claims “we would need to pay more than we can charge to have our furniture made here.” When he found a suitable manufacturer in Indonesia who could also supply other pieces of solid wood furniture, he diversified into beds, followed by other pieces and his business grew. Today, he claims that the company can sell some 800 pieces of furniture a year. A core 90% of business is done through the company’s website, whilst the company also has a warehouse in Herstmonceux where potential clients can see finished pieces before they buy.

How did you come to manufacture in Indonesia?

I started looking around the world, which led me to two main countries which were far cheaper than anywhere else - China and Indonesia. China deals with the mass side of the market, everything is machine made in MDF, so that wiped out China. The problem with Indonesia was finding a company which is reliable. You can get one delivery of furniture that’s fantastic, then the next can be terrible, then the third fantastic, its difficult to get consistency of quality.

How did you find a factory that could deliver consistent quality?

Trial and error. It took us two and a half years and a fair bit of money to find the right factory, buy the furniture in and sell it off at a price that reflected the quality we need to keep our reputation. We had samples sent over and had trial orders from different factories, each of which took about three months.

How does the manufacturing process work in Indonesia?

They generally have a factory, but they subcontract out to tiny businesses or specialist, skilled craftsmen. So for example, a father and his son who will make a fantastic desk, because that’s what they are experts in, then the next person down the road makes beds, so you needed a factory based over there, who are responsible for the finish of all of the products, do the stock control and oversee quality between the different craftsmen.

SBT Discusses...

How do you know that the craftsmen are treated ethically and paid fairly by the factory?

The company is run by British people, we know the system they use and they run checks in the workshops to oversee the people making the furniture.

Furniture making is a highly skilled job, it’s considered to be high up in the hierarchical chain. The guy who can make a desk is seen as special.

The area is overseen by a group of elders, who, like a union, ensure that their people get a certain price for their labour and craft. The factory negotiate set prices for certain pieces made regularly. For anything over and above, or bespoke, which we are proud to

mahogany or oak, we don’t specify if it’s from renewable sources, as mahogany isn’t indigenous to Indonesia, but there are plantations there.

Who are your competitors?

There are companies who pick up all of the furniture rejected by the Indonesian factories in markets there for half the price, which enables them to buy in bulk and sell them on very cheaply. The problem we have is that their picture which appears in The Daily Mail to advertise their product is better than the picture we have [of similar products] but the quality of their product isn’t better because that’s the bed we rejected.

We get people call up and say ‘why is

“We would have to pay more than we charge to have our furniture made here” - Richard Wilson, Quality Furnishings of Sussex. offer our clients, the factory go back to the people who make the furniture to negotiate what they can do.

their bed cheaper than yours?’ We say ‘we can only talk for our quality and the price you get for the quality.’

Are shipping costs a problem?

We’re continually trying to get the freight down to get it over here, we look at bringing it into different ports, but as far as sea freight is concerned you’re dealing with Russian conglomerates, who charge what they want to. The main way we keep the prices down is that don’t have the shop front.

You offer a 14 day, quality guarantee or money back promise. Have many people demanded the latter?

We offer it because it’s difficult to demonstrate the quality of the product on the internet. So we’re saying ‘if the quality isn’t what we’re saying it is, send it back. We’ve had one, possibly two people at the most, do this in our five years of trading.

Who is your market?

We’re appealing to the people who go to MFI but don’t want to buy something that looks as though it’s made in a regular factory. Sleigh beds, for example, are made by every furniture company in the world. Most are MDF, they’re cheaply put together, rattle and move, ours are solid and handmade [they cost in the region of £600]. We compete with the people who make the cheaper ones and ours are better quality, but we’re not trying to compete with people who are making handmade furniture in this country.

Do your clients ask about the provenance of the furniture?

Yes. We tell them that the furniture is handmade in Indonesia in solid

What is the future for your business?

Going forwards we’re happy with the factory we manufacture through in Indonesia. We already make a lot of bespoke furniture. We can sell a bed a £600 bed, if the customer wants the headboard and footboard smaller, to fit under a ledge somewhere, it might cost an extra £50 (rather than hundreds) and we can make almost anything, which is a great selling point. So we will aim to develop that side of the business, and a couple of ranges that are unique to us.

It would be a mixture of us putting ideas to the factory and their drawings and thoughts on what they think is practical; a collaboration between the factory knowing what’s going to work, and us knowing what sells.

FOR The Case For Manufacturing in Sussex Marcus Ballam, (ABOVE) the cabinet maker behind Brighton Woodwork, set up his company just 18 months ago.

A former Bar Manager whose position had been made redundant, he returned to college for a year to study furniture making. On successfully completing his course he rented a workshop in Henfield, a West Sussex village, having saved £6,000 to fund the initial start up costs such as tools, electricity and business rates, to ensure that he would not go into business with debts.

From the workshop he makes bespoke handmade furniture for mostly local customers. Each piece is original, designed with the client to meet their specific requirements. Ballam invites his customers to the workshop to see the progression of their pieces throughout the making process, he uses local craftsmen such as stone masons and painters to finish the pieces when necessary, and English timber wherever possible. Ballam estimates that he made 25 pieces for clients last year.

What is your business concept?

When we were at college we were making high end furniture, but I knew that not everyone could afford it. I simply wanted to make furniture that people could afford.

You claim on your website that ‘beautiful furniture doesn’t have to be unaffordable, if you have something in mind we can build it for you at a reasonable price.’ How do you fulfil this for clients?

It’s down to materials. It’s working with the client to get the finished result that they want, but instead of using solid timber, we use veneered timber or soft wood instead of hard wood, to meet their budget. That’s the key to it. From the first very first stages of the commission, we try to find out the budget and cut our cloth accordingly.

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SBT Discusses...

Do any of your clients commission you specifically because your pieces are made locally?

There are a lot of people who are green minded, from keeping what they buy local to wanting to use material from sustainable sources, and it’s not just the younger generation. I’ve found that pensioners like the business because it’s within the village, I get a lot of work from the older generation.

So being local and environmentally friendly is intrinsic to what you do?

I cycle to work, I have my timber delivered which makes it a green business, and it means that I’m not wasting fuel. I’m only using a van two to three times a month for deliveries and by hiring a man and a van, I’m putting money back into the local economy. I have a wood burning stove in the workshop and I burn my waste for fuel. I advertise in the local magazine and use the hardware shop.

Other people who live in the village are also keen to keep work here.

How do you capitalise on this?

When I set up the business I spoke to carpenters and furniture makers who all said that word of mouth is worth everything - that’s starting to happen with repeat customers. The aim is to get a small, relatively local client base and build from there.

How much local timber are you able to feasibly use?

I use as much as possible. The timber company tells me the country of origin.

If I use oak, it’s always English oak, the MDF is made by an English company, and I use English pine where possible, dependent on its availability.

Do you feel a commitment to manufacturing in England as well as your local business community?

It’s always been my view that the problem with the country is that we don’t make anything anymore and that’s part of the trouble we’re in. I do also think that small businesses should support each other.

Are there any downsides to making locally, in the way that you do?

Yes, I could make more money if I was farming things out, and working alone takes considerable time. If I buy a piece

of timber for a job I buy it rough sawn, which I then work on myself, rather than buying it ready prepared. It saves me money and because I do this myself, I know its going to be exact, but at the same time, some things take longer because there is just me doing them.

I’ve just made a circular table for a lady that took two days, but some things can take five to six weeks. It depends on how things go. Every bit of timber is different, it’s all part of being a small business, you can’t rush things.

How do you structure your prices?

My prices are based on the cost of materials, my time and delivery, but if I take longer than I have quoted for to finish the piece, the price doesn’t change. I can make a veneered desk out of mahogany substitute (Sepele and Utile) with a couple of drawers for £800900. Sepele and Utle are slow growing woods, like Teak, which is much more expensive from my supplier. Sometimes people are happy to commission a more expensive piece. I recently used a six metre long plank of Teak that cost £900 for the timber alone for a local client.

“We don’t make anything anymore and that’s part of the trouble we’re in. I also think small businesses should support each other”

How does the overall process work, when you are commissioned?

When I get a phone call or email from a client, I do a consultation over the phone. Then I see the space where the piece will be made for and have a more detailed chat about budget, styles and every detail of the construction.

Once we’ve come to an agreement, I start making. People come down to the workshop and see their piece being made. They like that, it keeps them involved and it means that sometimes we take decisions to change things as they evolve organically. Finally, once the piece is finished, I deliver it.

Brighton Woodwork

Is your business model working?

It’s working for me and it can only get better. I have a friend who’s been a joiner for 15 years working with me to meet demand. He couldn’t believe how busy we were before Christmas. In December there were approximately 15 enquiries, six of which came off.

- Marcus Ballam,

What is the difference between a handmade piece made in veneer, rather than factory made veneer?

People go to IKEA for something to plonk on the corner, if you want something for a specific space, or that lasts, that’s when it works to have it made. There is no reason why a locally made table can’t be around in five years time. Veneered MDF is going to last - if it’s factory made it’s just edged along the board, but I edge in solid timber, it’s oiled, waxed, done properly so there aren’t any exposed edges, which is the problem behind flatpacked pieces not lasting, and the fact that they are held together by dowels or biscuit points. I use incredibly high grid veneer specifically because it lasts. Customers really appreciate the whole piece, including a proper solid joint that’s been shaped by hand.

Is it sustainable going forwards?

I’m very aware that I have to keep an eye on finance and that this is a business not just a passion. My costs are low and because people pay for their own timber, my overheads and outlay is not high. I’d like to build on my relationships with local suppliers, giving them business so that my prices, in turn, come down. I will also be renting out some of the workshop next year.

www.brightonwoodwork.com www.qualityfurnishingsofsussex.co.uk

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Home Grown Hero

Made In Sussex:

Harveys of Lewes

Founded in 1790, Harveys of Lewes, East Sussex, is a family run business steeped in history and strong traditions that still inform the way it successfully conducts business today, some seven generations and 200 years later. has local benefits, which we extend to keep going (without the religious side).”

The earliest record a commercial scale. We employ local Harveys has always operated “on of a business Brand tradesmen, architects, workers and a work hard principle of austerity,” he transaction held at Focus firms and support them, who in turn elaborates and throughout its history of Harveys is dated support our products in their spare struggle and boom there has been an 1794, when John ethos of “work hard and earn your profit time”, claims Elder.

Harvey is noted to Despite offers from supermarkets to before you spend it.” have supplied wine stock its’ products nationally, Harveys In what might sound like an outdated to a local parson in Plumpton. Many has resisted being anything but a local view of commerce when we desire dockets follow detailing the supply of brand, supplying their products within quick returns for our efforts, the wine and port to customers in Lewes a 60 mile radius of their headquarters. deliberately modest growth of Harveys and later, by 1811 John Harvey’s “We won’t conform to the wine and brandy shipping supermarkets’ price buying business was established “at structure,” Elder claims. the foot of Cliffe Bridge” in Meeting the margins, he the town. believes, would compromise John Harvey developed the another crucial principle of Bridge Wharf site in Lewes in the company - a devotion 1838 from where a year later to quality. “My colleague Henry Harvey was brewing in charge of brewing [Joint Stouts, Porters and Strong MD Miles Jenner] is almost Mild Ales for distribution obsessive about getting the amongst 17 family owned best raw materials available, public houses mostly located as maintaining the quality in Eastbourne and Hailsham, of the product is crucial.”

East Sussex.

Cheaper hops may lead to Today, Harveys produces bigger profits Elder explains 47,000 brewers barrels per but at the expense of quality. annum, and owns 49 public Whilst beer is crucial to the houses that spill over business, and Elder from rural Sussex anticipates “more into Kent and of the same” for the London. Yet future of Harveys, he whilst boasting is not complacent. many awards for “We need to look at its’ beer and an diversification,” he annual turnover of reveals, in response £19 million, some Hamish Elder, Chairman and Joint Managing Director, Harveys of Lewes to the decline of the things at Harveys British pub. “It may have resolutely involve wine becoming a larger part of has ensured its longevity. So too, has endured to this day. the business.” maintaining its scale and identity as a “John Harvey was a Calvinist I Yet whatever steps towards growth Sussex based business. “First of all, the believe,” says the current Chairman and that the current generation take, it’s a product lends itself to environmentally Joint Managing Director Hamish Elder. given that they will follow the traditional sustainable credentials; we can make it “The whole company is based on a values on which the success of Harveys with local products and distribute it on non-conformist work ethic going back has been built. a local basis. And that whole process to the industrial revolution which we

“Victorian business values - such as being as good as your word - we take pride in those.”

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2

The 2011-12 official home kit

A new shirt for a new era The superb Brighton & Hove Albion FC Official home kit is now available from the Seagulls Store at the Amex Stadium or the City centre store at 128 Queens Road, Brighton.

Alternatively, order online at

www.seagullsdirect.co.uk

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