15th Picture

From L to R. James, Claire, Phil, Elaine and Sharan.

Spending time with friends is always great but spending time with those that have inspired you and made you look at life in a completely different way? Well, that to me is priceless.

Phil, Elaine, Claire (Elaine’s daughter from her first marriage) and her husband James are fellow Spar retailers. They and a few other retailers are what I would describe as my retailing hero’s.

I first visited Phil’s store back around 2001, while I was still working for BT and our shop was being managed by my brother. He persuaded me to go with him on a Store study tour. This is where you go and look at the best practice of different stores with the aim improving your own store. So off I went with my brother with absolute no interest at the time of shops or retailing of any kind. We’d visited a few stores before we got to Phil’s but what I saw and heard about his story that day blew me away! I had never known anyone to do what he did, and it changed my life forever. It’s for that reason we extended our store! (So if you don’t like our extension, then blame Phil)

So what did he do? I hear you saying!

Phil worked in his family store, which was about the same size as ours used to be, and in 1997 his father passed away. He (Phil) was left with a couple of choices; either sell up and seek a new career elsewhere or to carry on. However, at the time he wasn’t really enjoying retailing so the first option was very tempting.

Someone from (I think it was Tesco’s not too sure) visited his store and asked him if he wanted to sell his Alcohol licence as they were looking to develop the site approx 100 yards down the same road from his store which at the time was a disused petrol station. Phil then sought the advice of Spar who advised him to take that site over himself and develop it into a modern Spar store. This is exactly what he did! He purchased the site, gutted it out, refitted it, and that total cost was approx £250k.

On hearing this story I was totally gob smacked at how someone who only a few months previous wanted to walk away from retailing had then invested so my time and money into a project that he wasn’t even sure was going to repay his investment. In short what he did took a lot of guts! There aren’t many folk that would take that much of a risk on a whim!

I was in awe of this guy, so much so that the following day I went back to work at BT I just couldn’t stop talking about him! I must have repeated his story a thousand times to anyone that would listen!

So when we took over our store in 2002, one of the first things I did was take Sharan to see Phil’s store. After we drove away from that store I remember telling Sharan that one day we’ll have a store as good as that one. At the time we had; no stock, the shelves were empty and were on the verge of bankruptcy! But I knew that if we could just get past this initial setback then we would be able to dream about doing exactly what Phil had done.

It’s taken us a little longer than we had anticipated but I’m proud to say that we can now finally say that our store is of equally high standards as Phil and Elaine’s. And what is even more important to us is that we can now call these guys our good friends!

Ammo