The Drive and Vision
What I consider one of the biggest success factor in the business is what you might call the driving force or the motor room. This is possibly a hard to describe but noticeable effective entity that is natural in me. It is my drive. It is my vision. It stems from a genuine want to succeed, to do the best and be the best in what I have chosen to be my current occupation. It is what creates the whole picture and ties up the many separate parts of the business to try and create one harmonious place of being. It is the director and mentor of many a person, keeping the train on the tracks so to speak. In this business my goal was to provide the best possible produce at the best price with the best service. Earning money was not my priority; it was one of the rewards if I could achieve my goal. It is through these eyes that you mould who and what is around you to create what is. I love what I do here and my enthusiasm must rub off onto others; my staff, my customers, total strangers. I have helped develop pride in their performance; my staff have always cared about the shop almost as much as I do and treated it as if it were their own. I have created a warm and friendly environment, I think the environment created in my shop warms people; I personally have not had one day where the actual shop has brought my mood down.
All of the concepts that are created in the shop from the shop surrounds, customer interaction, to how important the staff are, is something that comes naturally to me, the school I went to was life experience. I can say that the result of all my ideas and all of my energies are a great influence on the business and a significant key, not just because I make it up to keep myself going, but because since I started the shop, even when sales were the equivalent to a good wage in China, my customers continued to praise what I had created. This is how I new I was on the right track, how I knew I had ‘built my field’. The positive responses by people I crossed paths with gave me energy, I grew in strength and this is how I charged through those early days. This is what I try to encourage in my staff. I want them to strive to recreate the things I have achieved in my shop into their lives, achieving their dreams. I don’t actually think my staff are mine for a long period of time. I feel like my business is just one stepping-stone for their lives, I encourage them to go for their life goals. If I don’t I am being selfish. If their work goal is to put up with me and create a wonderland in my shop then that is also a goal worthy of following. Whatever I am doing, whichever way you may describe it, the runs are on the board in this business, the shop is getting busier and busier, and this I love to see.