Timeline: Carrwood Park is seven years old!
It’s seven years’ ago since Carrwood Park first opened its doors for business. It’s been an incredible seven years. Sometimes challenging and always rewarding. Being a family business in Leeds, we’ve always prided ourselves on being a tight-knit, friendly organisation, an ethos that we share with our customers.
Take a look at our fascinating seven-year timeline and what we have learned each year since we started in Leeds seven years ago.
Year One – Customer is king
An essential component of family run business - or any business, is that customer is king. We learned pretty quickly that no customers means no business.
As Volom writes, we all know that the “customer is always right” school of thought is flawed. Namely because the customer isn’t always right and something get it very wrong. However, as customers are generally the key to business success, a company is responsible of how the customer perceives their business and services. Consequently, “their perception is their reality.”
We always put our customers first and place an emphasis on creating a bespoke environment for them and concentrating on improving our services to keep our clients happy - something which we learned in our first year of running a business in Leeds.
Year two – Invest in your staff
Top staff are the nucleus of driving a business forward.
“Whether you’re a start-up or a Fortune 500 company, you want and need top talent to grow and add value to your company,” states HR.com.
Naturally, it can be difficult for start-ups to invest in both taking on more staff and developing the staff they have through training.
It was not until we were in our second year and was becoming more established that we realised the importance of investing in your staff. In short, a service is only as good as the staff that manage that service. One component that makes Carrwood stand out, is our friendly, committed, knowledgeable and skilled staff. Time and time again our customers commend the friendliness and professionalism of our staff. This is primarily due to the fact that in year two, we placed an emphasis on training, nurturing and developing staff and have never looked back.
Year three – Learn the art of delegating
For a company like Carrwood, which has started a business from scratch and ticked every required box to get the company off the ground, delegation can be difficult. It wasn’t until year three, when Carrwood realised learning how to delegate successfully makes a huge difference to how a business is run.
It was around this period we asked ourselves, what many businesses ask themselves, “Do we keep our business at a comfortable size, or do we attempt to build it to its full potential?”
In opting for the latter, we realised we required the help of others and this is when we began to learn the art of delegation.
As Sage advises, most businesses come to a point when it is impossible to do more on your own and you have to “trust others with your company’s best interest.”
We learnt that there is a fine line between the ownership of a business and dictation. Simply dictate to your staff and you won’t get the best out of them. Consequently your business is unlikely to move forward and is likely to suffer. By contrast, let your employees call some of the shots, welcome their opinions, ideas and views and subsequently these fresh ideas being poured into your business will do it a wealth of good, moving it a step, or several steps, forward.
It can be difficult for a start-up or young business to recognise and then implement the art of delegation and it wasn’t until year three that Carrwood finally recognised this essential business trait.
Year four – Keep learning
“Constant learning is the foundation of a successful business owner,” Scott Halford, expert speaker and author of ‘Be a Shortcut: The Secret Fast Track to Business Success.’
You are never too old or too young to learn and constant learning is the “grease we need to stay competitive.”
Here at Carrwood we are on a constant learning curve. We learn off our customers. Their requirements, aspirations and even gripes means we can improve our services and create an even more reliable, trusted and respected service.
However, realising the importance of constant learning within the business spectre does not come overnight and we have to admit it was until we’d been operating for four years that we finally recognised the importance of relentless learning.
Year five – Failure is good for you and improve you, your business and staff
“To achieve the greatest success, you have to embrace the prospect of failure,” Success.com.
Nobody likes to fail. Failure isn’t rewarded. What we do have to realise that failures become the stepping stone to success. Many business don’t realise this and it wasn’t to the fifth year of Carrwood being a business in Leeds that we recognised it.
One of the most poignant examples of failure leading to success can be found in Thomas Edison’s story. Edison was, of course, the inventor of the light bulb, single-handedly taking society out of the cauldrons of dimly-let candlelight and into a vibrant world of light. What is less well-known about Edison and his remarkable invention is that it took him 1,000 failures before it was perfected.
A reporter allegedly asked Edison:
“How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?”
To which Edison replied:
“I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.”
Year six – Photograph everything!
By year six Carrwoods yorkshire business centre was well-established and thriving. Accompanying a growing number of customers is an equally mounting mound of paperwork and records. Keeping records is a time-consuming and not to mention arduous job but unfortunately someone has to do it.
It was then when we realised that taking photos of certain documents, displays and information can be a darn sight quicker and more efficient than the old school method of filing!
Year seven – Minimise email, maximise communication
As we talked about in an earlier blog, minimising the amount of time spent sending, reading and responding to emails can save a business a significant amount of time, thus making it more productive.
Carrwood is currently working towards improving communication within our business by getting rid of emails. Our CRM Microsoft Dynamics enables us to send emails so why would we require an external email account?
According to the young prodigy and Facebook proprietor Mark Zuckerberg, “emails are dead.”
We have to admit, here at Carrwood, we agree.
Bring on the next seven years of learning, ups and downs and business success!
If you like this post you may also like our two blogs on starting business in Leeds, find your first one here.
