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.”