insideSUSSEX Magazine Issue 13 - March 2016 | Page 94
BUSINESS
FOLLOW THE LEADER…
WHAT MAKES A GREAT BOSS?
Some are a bit too nice. Some can be pretty nasty. Some are always peering over your
shoulder. And some you barely ever see. Be that as it may, bosses are what make a business
tick and a great boss will always get the most out of their company and their staff. But, what
is it that makes a brilliant boss? Polly Humphris had a chat with Alan Margetts and Janina
Cooper, both winners at 2015’s Sussex Business Awards in the ‘Boss of the Year’ category, to
find out the secrets of their successes.
ALAN MARGETTS
Alan Margetts started his business, The Kitchen
Store, 12 years ago, and was recognised by
the Sussex Business Awards in 2013, where he
walked away winning ‘Sussex Entrepreneur of
the Year’. What started off as one Lancing-based
store with “three-and-a-half” employees, now
employs 25 people, across a second branch in
Hove, and a third, brand new Horsham store
that opened at the end of February this year.
“When you’re running a business, you’re busy
thinking about the things you’re doing wrong
most of the time, and not the things that you’re
doing right, so awards like this remind you that
someone outside the company looks at what
you do, gives you the thumbs up and says
you’re doing something good,” says Alan. “It
was great to win the award and really nice to get
the recognition from the people that I work with.”
www.thekitchenstore.co.uk
01903 524 343
@KitchenStoreGrp
ALAN’S TOP TIPS FOR BEING A GREAT BOSS:
1
HAVE A PLAN
“When I started the company there was a clear
plan to have three stores and we knew exactly
what the business was going to be about and
what its future aims were. If you have a plan
and you communicate it, you give people a
purpose; no one comes to work just because
they want to earn a living, it’s more than that,
you have to make sure that people believe in
something and know how their work fits in to
the bigger picture.”
2
COMMUNICATE
“To be a good boss you have to be a fantastic
communicator, keeping no secrets from your
employees and making sure you communicate
everything in your business to everybody
involved. You need to communicate the good
news and the bad. At least twice a month, I
meet with the whole company, and once a year
I do a two-hour company presentation that the
whole business attends where I speak about
how the company has performed and what
the plans are for the year ahead. The more that
people are involved in that, the more they make
their own decisions confidently.”
94
3
VALUES
“Someone said to me years ago: “If people
haven’t got skills you can train them, but you
can’t change behaviours”, and that’s really
stuck with me, so when we recruit now, often
we’ll recruit people into the business that don’t
quite have the skills, but do have all the right
values and that think in a similar way. They’re
by no means clones of one another, but they
believe that people should be treated in the
right way. We interview three times to make
sure that we’re finding a great match for the
company, so we’ve always got a core team
that really believe in what we’re about.”