Business growth through targeted education

Toby and Amanda Dicker, owners of The Chapel group of salons in Kent and London, recently attended a Business Growth and Development Programme at the Cranfield School of Management and claims it was a business-changing experience. Tell me about the course The course is designed specifically for the development of owner-managers. The aim is that by the end of the programme you will have developed a comprehensive and robust strategy and plan for the future. Why did you attend the programme? We wanted to really understand what it takes to build a winning management team and to inspire us to take the business to the next level. We have always believed you can’t possibly know it all. Success to us is not always measured in numbers, our lifestyle and happiness both at home and in work also play a very big part, and we have always believed our concept and business has great potential but never known quite where to go next with it. We felt we need something else to help us make that next step but never quite knew what that step was going to be. I don’t think we had the real focus required to just go for it before we started the course. What was the most surprising thing you learnt from the course? The most surprising thing was being so aggressively challenged on the way we were running the business. It certainly was an emotional roller coaster in the first few weeks, especially as a husband and wife team. On the second weekend one of the coaches who I had not met before started chatting with me and asking about the business and what we do. I was mentioning about how important it was for us to retain customers and about our customer retention figures are something we are really proud of. He turned around to me and said: “I don’t think those figures are that great. I would want to know where all those customers who aren’t coming back are going.” He really challenged me. He was also asking a lot of questions about the future of our business and it proved that we did not have clear focus when I said: “We might open a few more in a few years.” He summed it all up by saying “You are the biggest barrier to growth in your company”. So that was the biggest lesson of all to learn, that it was Amanda and I who needed to change the most to take our company forward. What was the most useful thing you learnt? To be much more open minded, specifically when it comes to educating yourself and those within your team. We never believed that spending time educating ourselves would be so valuable to us. Not just in a business sense but in our personal lives too. The most useful thing was probably to realise that we have a business with a unique proposition that is scalable and to have the confidence to source the funding and just go for it. We have changed banks and sourced funding that will allow us to grow the business by a further 20 sites over the next 10 years. This positive frame of mind also really rubs off on the team and on all those we meet, opening up doors for many more opportunities as a result. Tell me about some of the changes you have incorporated into the business as a result of the course. Since finishing in December 2013 we have implemented many changes in the business. We have moved our small back office to a new purpose built office space. The 1,800 sq ft space incorporates five offices, a board room, training room and photo studio. We have started to look for our next site and we are training our next owner managers, with a dozen attending the course called The Next Generation. So in the three months we will know where we are opening and who with. We have created new systems and procedures and created our company manual, which we call The Gold Book, which really focuses the team on what is most important. Overall this has helped us to create a plan that we all believe can work and can be delivered. What affect have these changes had on the business? There is an amazing buzz in the business right now, however If we look back six months and ask ourselves whether we believed we would be planning to open 20 more businesses we would categorically have said no. In fact I remember asking our in-house accountancy team to help me put together a model for opening 20 more sites in November last year and they just laughed. But here we are now with a total belief from the team, our banks and our suppliers with a collective belief that we can make things happen.