1983: set up one of the first Stefanel franchises in the UK.
1985: operated leisure concessions for Butlins.
1989: joined Bryson Group as operations director of retail and leisure division. This included a group of 12 amusement arcades within Butlins and Haven plus fast food, retail and leisure outlets at seaside resorts.
1993: appointed managing director of Weststar Holidays, which then owned and operated two leisure parks. Since then the group has expanded with three more acquisitions. Weststar now provides holidays for more than 100,000 people a year.
l Know where you are heading at the outset and somehow things fall into place.
l ‘Wear’ the right career – just as you instinctively know which clothes you feel comfortable in, you should find a job that suits you.
l Learn from every experience that you have, good or bad. It is knowledge and experience that makes you good at what you do.
l Working with good people can only reflect well on you so don’t be afraid to recognise when others are better at doing something than you are.
l Remember when you are dealing with people, you’re dealing with feelings and emotions. Ensure you treat people the way you would wish to be treated yourself.
There is a subtle difference between good service and caring service. I love to travel and have learned a lot from the way we have been treated.
For example, in India service can be superb but you always feel they are hoping for a big tip. But in Nepal it is a completely different experience as I discovered four years ago.
We went to the airport to check in for our Air India flight. As nothing appeared on the board, we went up to ask what was happening with our flight. We were told the flight had ceased operation four months ago and there would not be another out for 28 days.
We were wondering what to do next when someone came over and asked us if they could help. It turned out they worked for Royal Air Nepal and had overheard the conversation. We explained we had to get a connecting flight back to the UK so he said he would see what he could do. He sat at his computer for the next hour and finally found a way out.
The remarkably thing was he did this in his own time. We weren’t even clients of his airline but we were guests in his country and he chose to own our problem and help us out.
When we offered him a well deserved tip, he refused to take it. He said he was embarrassed we had experienced such bad service and all he wanted was for us to leave Nepal with a good impression of his country. Of course we left feeling great about Nepal.
Now if we can achieve that at Weststar, if our customers think about us with that same kind of warm feeling, we will have done a good job.
Sometimes it is not always good experiences that shape your attitudes to the way you manage people.
Years ago, in my first real management position, there was one man who was always late. The mistake I made was to give him a good dressing down in front of two colleagues. It ended up in a row. I humiliated him in front of his work mates and managed to end up looking pretty foolish myself.
It is no good expecting people to care for our customers unless we care for our own people. People love it if you can remember small personal details.
I learned the power of this from Hoseasons boss James Hoseasons who, when he comes to our offices in Exeter, walks right up to our reservations staff, knows their names, knows all about them.
Caring about people’s lives inside and outside work is what motivates them. We try to explain this as soon as people join us. We have a three-day induction programme but the first day is not about the work they will be doing, they are not learning technical skills. Instead we try to explain our values and what kind of attitude they should have when meeting the customers.
We try to make sure we don’t put words in the mouths of our staff. We don’t want them to say ‘Have a nice day’ like robots. We want them to use their own words and speak to our clients in language they are comfortable with.
It’s funny how many experiences that have shaped my attitudes to work seem to have happened when I have been away from the office. We’ve certainly had to handle some challenges and keeping a cool head in a crisis is one of the first lessons you need in management.
Our eventful travels have taken us straight into a military coup in Buenos Aires; we were in Peru when they stormed the Japanese Embassy; we were in India when the plague broke out; and we found ourselves in Egypt a week after the massacre at the temple of Hapshaptut.
It’s amazing how resourceful people can be when faced with a crisis or a challenge. Perhaps I am attracted to visiting places that represent a challenge where you expect the unexpected. And perhaps that is how I view my work.
I believe in the same way you should wear clothes that suit you, you should ‘wear’ the right career. You cannot be exceptional in something that does not suit your personality 100%. Managing holiday parks seems to satisfy my need for diversity and meeting the challenge of the unexpected. There is never a dull moment. With 10,000 people on site in peak season, we have lots of interesting challenges.