Moorgate History part 4

Out with Naim

We were now ensconced in Sheffield and had expanded into the upper floor of Swifts Autocare next door. We had a conference area, a large AV demo room, an office and our stores up there. Dad had retired from active work but his hand was still very much guiding mine in the business. Things seemed settled and business was consistently profitable enough for us to reinvest in our stock and pay all the bills.

However nothing runs smoothly for long. Our relationship with Naim became strained due to differences of opinion between ourselves and our rep. Although it was he who actually opened our account I think he felt that we were not receptive enough or that we didn’t do precisely what the company wanted. After a couple of years he closed our account with no fanfare and little notice. Initially he wanted to close Sheffield and leave Rotherham open. This made no sense because Sheffield did all of the Naim business! Either way it seemed our faces didn’t fit and that was that. 

It saddens me to this day that fantastic products can be made into a chore by people who have their own agenda. Something wonderful can become painful and it taught us that good people make good business and that relationships are everything. It also taught us that Moorgate was bigger than any one brand and better to lose any brand than compromise the ethos and message of the company. You have to stand for something.

We managed without Naim for a few years and replaced it with other brands. We never lost our love of the products but some of the people were a different matter.

Over the years we’ve not fallen out with many suppliers but Linn, Naim and B&W spring to mind. Sometimes it’s people and sometimes it’s the direction of travel that cuts against the grain. Sometimes walking away and taking a breather ends up forging a different relationship that is better. Sometimes a break makes both parties think, reflect and then fix whatever was wrong. We have never professed to know other peoples business and we’ve never told a manufacturer what to do. But we do know our business and we won’t have manufacturers dictating how we do things to us. This is less common now but in the past it was the standard operating procedure of companies with a powerful presence in the market. And it became our operating procedure to explain they were full of….sh… bad ideas.

Dad and I have always sat and had a pint in the pub after the shops closed on Saturday, and often with the staff. We would reflect on the week and what was going on in each store. We’ve been doing this for 43 years and we still do it now although less frequently now and we don’t talk quite so much about business. These meetings would be attended by staff on occasion and often by my mum. Mum was company secretary so she had a valued position and input. These meetings were useful for letting off steam and making decisions based on what was going on in the shops.

The decline in Rotherham

Slowly it became clear that our Rotherham store was stalling. We never expected it to keep up with Sheffield. It didn’t have the population or the prosperity. There were many other reasons for this but perhaps the two main ones were parking and Meadowhal, married with a decline in the importance of owning a decent stereo system. This was partly down to the emergence of lots of other things and products that pulled at our customers' luxury budget. Gaming, computers, multiple holidays and the list goes on.

Meadowhall also had a very negative effect on Rotherham town centre. The council really stuck it to retailers by making parking harder and more expensive and by fiercely enforcing it. It is almost as if they wanted people out of town. Great for Meadowhall but less good for its retailers and not good at all for us. We have always found that our customers come by car. And if they can’t, they don’t.

By then we had moved our store across the road to an improved space with better demo facilities. This had not halted the decline in sales. We’d even seen an increase in customers migrating from Rotherham to Sheffield. It seemed that as things were moving up in Sheffield, they were dropping off in Rotherham.

We responded by moving some of the staff around. I started to spend more time in Rotherham to see if I could spot anything we were doing wrong. I couldn’t find anything except a degree of indifference from customers. A lot of tyre-kicking and gunna gunna but not a lot of buying. We did events, we looked at product profiles, we spoke to people and asked them what they wanted to see from us. But try as we might, it felt like retail was tanking in the town.

Eventually we realised that we needed to close down but this isn’t easy when you’re tied to a long lease. And we had to do something because it’s a disaster to have one store drag the other down. The answer eventually came when a brewery agreed to take the lease from us. We absorbed the staff we could into our Sheffield store and expanded our Sheffield store into the adjacent building on Fitzwilliam Street as I’ve explained.

I say this as if it is an easy thing. It’s not; it is far from easy closing something that you set up out of passion. A lot of good effort by a lot of good people had been poured into the store and Rotherham had enabled us to get established. Closing the Rotherham store hurt. And it hurt my dad a lot. He took the opportunity to retire working in the business on a day to day basis and we took the opportunity to remove a sleeping partner from the business at the same time. In later years my dad has explained how badly closing the shop had affected him. It took the closure of our Fitzwilliam Street store (due to our move to Woodseats) to make me fully understand how he felt. I’ll elaborate later.

As an aside from our storyline I wanted to explain why we never opened more stores. We’ve actually looked at opening shops in Leeds, Nottingham, Lincoln and also in a place called Red Brick Mill near Batley. The one in Leeds was formerly Image Hi-Fi in Headingley and that was the closest to happening.

The reason why none of them ever moved beyond the intensive planning phase was people. As in finding the right ones. During our history we've had some fantastic people working for us and all of them remain firm friends. But not all of them have the skills or the desire to spread their wings or to make the move from working in something to running something.

It's the people who make any business great and whilst nobody is irreplaceable, breaking up a good team is a sure way to dilute success. Dad told me later that he saw Sheffield as a way to give me a challenge and he felt without one I might have lost interest. But to take on a challenge I suppose you have to want to and want to with a passion. No passion and no success.

When you open a new store you can't put untried people into it. So you end up pinching people from your main business and this causes a dilution in the team there. Core business shouldn't suffer to add new business. We’d initially seen this in Rotherham but had found Noel Gregory, a member of staff who excelled at sales and customer relationships. He’d fixed the Rotherham team and for a good few years led the charge before the economy turned bad.

In any event our research into additional stores indicated increased workload for little gain. Some retailers who had done this said it made their lives a misery and that it provided a lot of work and turnover but often at a reduction of net profit. All said the team was vital to any success.

That was the main reason why we expanded our store in Sheffield once we’d got over the closure of Rotherham. We did this instead of looking at an additional store or stores.

Fitzwilliam Street

Staff come and go regardless of how hard you try to keep them. Both Ian and Richard left to pursue their careers in different directions. We were sad to see them go but life goes on. Paul Cooper started working in the Sheffield shop and we began the search for another member of staff. We’ve had some great people but we’ve found that nobody is irreplaceable if you show their replacement the right way to do something and harness their enthusiasm and love for music.

Sadly our good friend Nigel Charlton passed away at the young age of 41. He was and is sadly missed as his conversation was nothing if not sparkling and entertaining. He is as vivid in memory as he ever was in life but I can’t say that we don’t miss his wicked sense of humour.

Short of staff we placed an advert somewhere or other and interviewed about ten people to join us. The only person that stood out was Nigel Vawser and he joined us at his earliest opportunity. Nigel knew nothing about hi-fi but loved music and was extremely willing to learn. We started by showing him how to set up a system from scratch and did some demo’s to illustrate how much difference existed between various components. He took to it like a duck to water. We got him to Linn, to Naim and to Cyrus and we arranged a whole raft of in store training with other manufacturers.

Nigel was very smart but he was unassuming and the sort of person who you would say was “quietly confident”. He looked at things slightly differently and had ideas of his own. As I grew to know him better I realised he was extremely capable and would be of great use to us. Some of his ideas we put into practice immediately and to good effect. Customers liked him and his sales were extremely good.

I recall going for a pint with him at the Cross Scythes in Totley. This would have been around 1993/94. He’d mentioned he had something to talk to me about and asked that we do it outside work and free from distraction. Talking at work is almost impossible because our phone rings and customers and reps call in. We wouldn’t have it any other way of course.

“Paul I want to tell you about something that I think is going to be potentially massive for Moorgate. It’s called the World Wide Web”

As a result of this conversation and a lot of hours of discussion (followed by months of graft) Moorgate were one of the first British Hi-Fi companies to have a web presence. And it became clear within a few months that Nigel was correct. I remember Nigel and myself trying to explain all this to my dad. He was pretty dumbfounded by the concept but had a lot of faith in Nigel. He gave us plenty of rope with which to hang ourselves. But as it worked out we didn’t even build the gallows.

Nigel claimed that the only point in a website is to sell. It must sell Moorgate and it must sell products for us. As a result we could not use a third party to run our website for us. His belief was that we needed our hand on the rudder. If we got a product in, we needed to be able to update and place that product online within moments. Paying someone else to do it when it suited them was going to be both slow and expensive. Even I could see the sense in this. Web designers can and will tell you anything. I’ve been told a million times that such and such a company could make Moorgate number one on google. But how can they say this to all their customers? How can they make two hi-fi stores number 1?

It was painful because I had to learn how to build a website from scratch. Nigel was there to help with the structure of the website but my job was populating it within this structure. Progress was slow but I needed to do it because the business was now “my baby” so to speak.

I can’t emphasise enough how important this process and Nigel’s input was. It enabled our business to grow (without adding another store) and it enabled us to reach new customers far more effectively than any advert or brochure.

The impact was such that we went from having a rack full of used audio equipment gathering dust to stuff selling within days (sometimes hours) of it coming in. We’d take some photographs, upload them onto the website and the phone would start ringing. All of a sudden we were meeting new customers who knew our history. And our inbox was full of people wanting advice. It improved our ability to communicate with our customers and the process was immediate.

This all happened extremely quickly and it is perhaps because we were early adopters that we benefited so much. Early bird and all that.

Looking back it’s hard to think back to a time without it. The internet has proved itself to be an instrument of great wonder and immense devilry and I have a love hate relationship with it. It is something akin to Pandora's box.

If you had asked me back then how significant it would be I would have had no idea. But sometimes a leap of faith is required and sometimes standing still death in business. And Nigel had the strength of his conviction.

Interestingly writing the copy for the website allowed me to reflect on the things we’d done that worked and the things that we had done which had not worked. It crystallised a lot of ideas. At this time Linn started to offer us training in retail. We jumped at the chance because we were eager to learn. We decamped en-masse to Glasgow to be LINNED.

LINNING

The Linn training also covered management and one of the things I took from this was that the best place for a dealer principal is in the store. Linn called it “managing by wandering around”. This is what I’d seen happen with my dad in our Rotherham store and I was keen to keep immersed in the business and in close contact with our customers. Even if only to say hi or to ask how the demo was going or to add a second opinion. I can also get away with saying things my staff might struggle with. If I know someone well enough I can simply say “get it bought”.

The training and the self evaluation made us take a close look at some of the things we did and look to improve them. Small changes are what we’re talking about really. Trying to get customers listening as soon as possible. Trying to avoid confusing people with too much choice when really they want the best choice. Listening as carefully as possibly to people’s requirements.

Over the years a few of our suppliers have run sales training courses and to be honest most of them are of extremely limited use. I say this because there is no exact sales formula and people are individuals and don’t follow some kind of herd mentality or “hive-mind”. You can sell a superb system and have another customer wander in when you’re about to strip out the demo room. They have a quick demo and are not overly keen on what they hear.

Two things have stood out to me over the years and these both relate to listening. The first is trying to find out how good a sound someone needs. This is often based on what the customer already owns, what their experience of good sound is and also if they are familiar with live music. We have to make a sound good enough for them to discover sound quality that exceeds their expectations. Either that or we must raise their expectations.

The second is that equipment can be measured by fatigue factor. If you enjoy listening to it and it isn’t tiring on your ears then it is a good system. If you can listen to it for an hour or so before you feel inclined to do something else then there is every chance that it isn’t up to the standard you need.

The Linn training was very good. It was challenging and sometimes uncomfortable but it was also probably the most useful we’ve had. And it was far wider in its approach than just about selling Linn and could be applied to any product and to the business and sales team as a whole. It focused on becoming efficient and on customer satisfaction. The main cut and thrust of this is many businesses concentrate on new customers but the best businesses concentrate on the customers they have. A satisfied customer then introduces his friends and contacts to you and becomes an ambassador for you. This resonated with us because we’ve always felt that the people who are our target customers are basically people who love what we love. We talk the same language and these folk will generally find you if they’re interested in doing the job properly. General advertising is a waste of time.

Around this time I was press-ganged into becoming the vice-chairman of BADA, The British Audio Dealers Association. I accepted and eventually became Chairman too. I did a lot of work, did some speeches, did some brainstorming and then realised some salient and sobering facts about our industry. The first of these is that manufacturers and retailers see things completely differently and usually won’t see eye to eye. I’ve seen so many instances of this that I have lost count of them. It was my job to try and change this. Eventually I realised it was akin to pissing in the wind and getting wet.

BADA had many great ideas and for a while it managed to do some good. It even tried to forge closer ties with our suppliers. In this it failed. I put a lot of time and effort in. I was young and I thought I could help change things for the better and move everything forward. However I had not countered on people who didn’t want to change, wouldn’t change and were as set in their ways as a bug trapped in amber. I am referring to other retailers and to a lesser extent some of our suppliers. It was an unpaid position but eventually I decided I’d not do it for all the tea in China.

It was like trying to teach a mouse to maintain a car. And the mouse didn’t want to learn.

BADA also taught me that meetings of any kind that involve more than five people are a complete and utter waste of time. People sit and nod their heads and then go home and forget all about it and all the things they’ve agreed to. 

My time at BADA lasted for perhaps five years. I learned a lot but most of it was to do stuff and not talk about it and to not expect anyone else to add any real momentum. I learned to keep meetings brief and between small groups of people, all of whom had the ability and the power to make decisions and act on them, as opposed to nodding their heads.

Hi FI Magazines

Our experiences with Hi-Fi magazines haven’t convinced us to trust their professionalism or impartiality. I am not telling you this to bad mouth them or indeed to stop you trusting them. As enthusiasts there is nothing more natural to want to read about the equipment that you are interested in. I do not want to discourage this but merely to give you another perspective.

In our history (and perhaps up to 15 years ago) the magazines were very powerful. A good review made a big difference to the sales of a product. Sometimes it helped transform a supplier from a “kitchen table” outfit to a big commercial company. Equally it could force the company into a downward spiral as the “fantastic reviews” petered out. In fact the power of the press is one of the things that makes manufacturers change their products so often. In simple terms a revised/improved product could be resubmitted for review just as sales were starting to taper off. The press doesn't report on products that have been around for a while. Or they rarely do. They’re interested in new and improved equipment.

Retailers would buy products that had great reviews because those were the ones that customers were interested in. Sometimes these were not always the best products. I recall demonstrating a Linn Intek against an Audiolab 8000A. The Linn sounded better with his speakers but the customer bought the Audiolab.

We were invited twice to take part in a retailer review scheme. On both occasions we were asked to “buy a good review”. We didn’t and so we didn’t get reviewed. That was fine with us but it did change our view of the press.

I got to know many of our suppliers and often (over beer) I’d be told how the advertising worked and how the booking space on the back cover would generally mean better reviews. I won’t mention any specific magazine and I’m not tarring everyone with the same brush. Merely pointing out that the Hi-Fi press make their money from advertising and NOT from the sales of the magazine. They simply don’t sell enough copies to be profitable from magazine sales alone. Particularly now when magazine sales are generally in massive decline. So the people booking big adverts are more important than readers.

Finally (and excuse me if I’ve mentioned this before) I was invited to two meetings with a well known Hi-Fi magazine that is still trading and in my capacity as the chairman of BADA. The first was to help them get better sound in their listening room. This was a terrible room. It was extremely dull sounding and had a bass problem. As a result equipment which was bright/forward and recessed in the bass got good reviews. Everything else got classed as dull, boomy or both. This was simply down the room. Where they used independent reviewers they would have a far better chance of getting honest results. But in-house was a farce. We helped fix that with the use of a number of things that were relatively simple and involved removing some things and adding others. The fact that they were reviewing equipment and yet didn’t know any of this stuff was something I found truly hard to grasp. Or at least then.

The second time I had a sit down with the editorial director of What Hi-Fi? at the behest of Mission. He wanted to know why retailers like Moorgate tended to distrust the press and as a rule were not advertising with them. At this time most of their business came from the larger groups like Sevenoaks and Richer Sounds (plus manufacturers).

For over an hour I explained our experiences over a few pints of Guinness. I didn’t pull any punches. He made notes and nodded his head a lot. When I had finished I asked him what he thought and he told me that he mostly agreed with me and understood my reservations. I asked him if he thought that changes could be made to fix this. He said he doubted it as his boss had very set ideas about the direction he wanted the magazine to move in. I thanked him for wasting my time. There are worse places to be than sat in an Irish bar drinking Guiness however.

My conclusion then and now is that the magazines serve a purpose but are “outside” of our industry and feed on it like parasites. That sounds harsh, I know. The bigger you are the bigger a shout you’ll get in the magazines and this is down to advertising budget as opposed to anything else. Hence the championing of some brands and retailers. I can’t blame either brand or retailer for doing anything within the law to help grow their business. I am an idealist and hope for better but that has not been our experience. For that reason we do not advertise with any of the hi-fi press and I don’t personally read them. 

I understand why people read them avidly and particularly when they are new to Hi-Fi and want to learn more. If they encourage people to listen then they have done a great job and I salute them. But more and more it seems to be about driving customers to online retailers where they can get the best deal. Usually this is in no way in the customers best interest and we often get to pick up the pieces. This trend of delivering customers to online retailers has continued and pretty much explains the editorial policy of most enthusiast magazines. It is not based on respect for the consumer. It is based on charging retailers for sending people to them.

My dad and I often discuss how many people are genuinely interested in quality enough to seek out a decent stereo system and we reckon it is about 2% of the population. That really doesn’t seem a lot but then again if you ask yourself how many of your friends share your enthusiasm and that would give you some indication.

Home Cinema

Home Cinema cropped up before the demise of Rotherham and for a few years was a significant part of our business. It was about sound and so we thought “here’s something we know about”. I had some reservations as did we all but we were encouraged by some of the results we could get and felt that demonstration of it would be important to the customer. So we gave over a demonstration area, bought some TV’s and went on a lot of courses to learn how to get the best out of the format. 

Arcam was very useful in the training process. They had embraced home cinema fully and at the time were extremely good at breaking down the technicalities of setting up and fine tuning the system. Product calibration is complex but methodical when you have the right set up equipment. Our thanks go out to them for this.

For a few years home cinema gave us some business. Then everything changed and it was a fairly protracted and painful process to realise the what and the why. In short the magazines were telling people what to buy and sending people to online/shed type operations who were mostly discounting the brands but selling lots. It became evident that most of the businesses were tax dodging and giving away the VAT. 

Even worse was the fact that customers would give us a shortlist for us to demo and then we’d never see them again. They were getting a listen at our store and then buying cheap.

I’ll end this section of our history by saying we all went to the Devonshire Cat one Saturday and sat drinking beer with very long faces. One of my staff said “it’s as if they place no value on what we do”. I thought about this and we all thought about this and I sat up and said; “let’s pack in selling Home Cinema” and everyone else all but leapt up and cheered.

Tuesday morning it all went in the window or on eBay and the money we got back from it went into improving our stereo equipment and getting back to doing something we loved. And love it we did. Morale in the store hit an all time high. Some customers completely got it and others didn’t but we kept our heads down and ploughed on regardless.Many retailers fared less well. They threw the baby out with the bathwater and it was too late to make the plug run the other way. We saw the problem and acted extremely quickly and we can do that because we are small and agile.

Part 4 to follow.

(or what I recall of it)

Moorgate History Part 2 

As we approached the middle of the 80's, Moorgate was still growing and starting to gain a good reputation among customers and suppliers alike. Keith's ideas about customer service, the move towards better equipment and the demo room all helped us spread the message. We'd developed good relationships with our core suppliers and we'd developed the habit of listening to our customers.  We also learned from the trade body BADA and from those who were keen to grow the industry and improve the competence of their retailers. Also we learned from other retailers. What to do and what not to do.

I had joined the company around 1983 after working part time whilst doing my A levels. I am afraid at that point in my life I was far more interested in music, gigs, beer and the opposite sex (not in that order). Education was something I am ashamed to say was pretty boring to me at the time. The sixth form allowed me to indulge most of my other interests until it came to exam time. I got an A level in general studies and failed all the others much to the scorn of my teachers. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life but was enjoying (mostly) working in the Rotherham store whenever I was needed to help out. I didn't particularly wish to work for the company full time but I sort of fell into doing just that, initially for the summer and then throughout the season. 

Business used to be extremely seasonal and we'd do 70% of the yearly takings between October and March. This followed the show season, during which time we improved our stock, looked and listened to new brands and sharpened our swords for battle.  By the time I stepped back and thought about what I wanted to do in the future I was already ensconced in Moorgate.

I don’t want to give you the impression that business was easy because I can never remember a time when it was. There were times when it was easier and there were times when it was fun. But easy doesn’t come into it. We’d endured the miners' strike and the massive impact brought on by the winding down of both mining and steel; two of the largest employers in Rotherham and South Yorkshire. We also had a city council that was making it harder and harder to park in the city centre and seemed unsympathetic towards the retailers that made the centre thrive. This will reappear as a common thread running through our entire history but starting particularly at this point.

Despite this we did our level best and met with some success. We measure success by paying our staff, and making a little money to plough back into better products and the business. There were no Ferraris and lap dancers.

We had some great staff back then too and it wasn't long before Keith invited Nigel Charlton to join us, initially part time. Nigel was an outstanding human being but he was also incredibly unpredictable. I may reveal stories about his time with us that will generate much mirth. He was older than me and had worked as a rep for Sansui, Rogers, Sugden and a few other companies. He was passionate about music which marked him as a little different from some of the reps. Surprisingly at the time many of the reps were not hi-fi enthusiasts as such but simply came from a sales background. We got to know Nigel and he would often come up with ideas about how we might do things. Sometimes these were outlandish and we'd never have done them in a million years. Other times he was bang on!

Nigel joined us part time (to fill in for his work with Rogers I believe) and to help us out. I learned an immense amount from him. It's difficult to describe him really but he was the exact opposite of my dad. Dad was quiet and fairly reserved and Nigel was the polar opposite. I learned a massive amount from both of them and tried my best to mix the two together. My dad was all about listening to the customer and then making suggestions backed by demonstration. Nigel was about entertainment and making the experience fun. He wanted to talk about music and whatever crackpot ideas he had rattling around in his fascinating skull. He told me that people buy from people and from people they like. That stuck with me.

Robert was a shopkeeper. He knew where everything was and was good at buying well and finding the styli that our local customers were always asking for. We used to sell hundreds of tapes and hundreds of styli. Accessories used to be almost 20% of our business. All the other electrical shops in the area didn't bother so they'd send all these folk to us and as a result the accessory side of our business grew. Because of his encyclopaedic knowledge and memory we liked to keep him behind the counter where he was happiest.

That left sales mostly to Nigel, myself and my dad, when he wasn't bogged down with the annoying red-tape and periphery of running a business. And this is a considerable amount! I learned quickly that everyone wanted to speak to my dad. And my dad was often busy with "other stuff" so I tried as hard as I could to introduce myself and explain that Keith perhaps couldn't help but I would do my best to try. It often worked. Other times my dad was needed.

Keith’s office was upstairs and as a result he was often absent from the shop floor. And yet so many people wanted to see him, often just to say hello and chew the fat. I took note of this but the gravity of it only came to me later when I realised that my dad was the "best man" and we were allowing him to bury himself in peripheral matters that often kept him away from the customers. Running a business generates unbelievable amounts of red tape and most of it has nothing to do with what the store is actually there for. This is increasing all the time, either to draw data from you or to find new ways to charge you, or penalise you for non-compliance. Dad was getting bogged down! Realisation of all this came later and it was actually some Linn training that crystallised this for me. It explained how your best people can be taken away from the shop floor and hidden where they can’t do good.

Naim Audio

In 1986 I had a customer lend me a Naim amplifier. It was a 42/110 and he suggested I try it at home. Prior to this I had a Sugden A48 and I recall this had just been replaced by a Musical Fidelity Synthesis. There was something about the Naim that put a smile on my face although I couldn’t at the time put my fingers on what it was. I logged the knowledge away when I gave the amplifier back. Attempts to open accounts with Naim Audio (as well as Linn Products and Rega) were rebuffed however. More about that later and God loves a trier.

When not busy with customers we began to set things up to listen to and compare them in order to find out which combinations worked well and which didn’t. The demo room was the most useful tool we had. Instead of talking about products we could demonstrate them. It all sounds so obvious but we still do this today. In fact it pretty much underscores what we do.

We also learned from other retailers through BADA. Sometimes you’re too close to things to see what they really are. But it is a wonderful thing to learn from people who have done things and sometimes failed but other times succeeded. Talking to people from companies like Grahams, Brady’s and Audio T (to name but three) was a great way of seeing the whole market as opposed to just our own small corner of it. Sometimes you can’t see the wood from the trees. Great minds have a way of “stepping outside the situation” and looking in.

I met these people at BADA meetings. I found some were simply blusterers and others were eager to share ideas. Ignoring the blusterers (many in London were back then to be a success all you had to do was open your doors every morning) and focussing on those who were happy to chat and share served me well.

Mission

Mission was a brand we finally managed to get in our Rotherham store and it performed really well in the demo room. Shortly after that followed Cyrus, their electronics brand and initially part of one company. They were great products and were owned by the charismatic Farad Azima. Farad was a man who seemed able to cut to the chase of what the business was about and what the industry needed. He was a great public speaker and his presentations were gripping, refreshing and often enlightening. He also used to listen to what his retailers wanted and would hold regular meetings to discuss business and the coming season. He would talk and inspire but he would also listen and act. Very few of our suppliers do this. Even to this day. It was notable because it was quite unique.

The Mission factory was based in Huntingdon near Cambridge. This was an area critical to the hi-fi industry and the UK centre of a lot of electronics companies. Factory tours were wonderful events where we discovered the ethos, the people and the design behind products that were unique and exciting. The Mission 70, the 753, the 780 speakers and the Cyrus One and Two were also launched at the factory and we gained great products and insight into what made them tick. 

I also developed one of my life's greatest friendships with their sales manager David Marchant. Dave was great company, a great wit and a great person to prop up a bar or to eat curry with. He would also strong-arm me into buying deals that would always enable him to hit his targets. I would then have to explain the stock to my dad and then set about selling it as quickly as I could. These were great products and it was never too much of a chore.

Suffice it to say David was a gentleman and a true character. He passed away a few years ago and is still missed by myself and all who knew him. I was also extremely saddened to hear of the passing of Farad Azima during the first covid lockdown.  I frequently raise a glass to both of them. Farad taught me to ski, was a great friend and allowed me to look at things from a different perspective and seek out different ways of doing things, even if it meant working against the tide. He also told me not to waste my energy on fools. This has been an immensely useful piece of advice to me.

Paul Cooper joined Moorgate in 1987 and is still with us to this day. I knew him before he joined us and we  shared a passion for rock music. I felt he was wasted in his job at the time and eagerly suggested he sit down with my dad for an interview. He joined us not long after.

Each new member of staff quickly learned what we were about. They spent a lot of time in the demo room, listening to products and shadowing demonstrations to hear what staff and customers had to say. They appreciated that listening to the customer and listening to equipment in a home environment was vital. I think that is because we have always chosen enthusiasts and music lovers first and foremost. I have read many CV’s but mostly disregarded all qualifications and looked for hobbies. No mention of music and there would never even be an interview. I can smell passion and a love of music from a mile off.

Sheffield

In 1988 my dad asked me if I thought we should open another store. I did some research and discovered that we were drawing a lot of customers from Sheffield. In fact it was a bigger figure than we all thought.

Not long after my dad asked me if I felt up to running the store should we find the right premises. I thought long and hard about it and eventually decided I’d like to try but only if I could find the right staff to work with me. I did a lot of thinking about this and a lot of soul searching. I wanted to do it for the company and I felt it could be good for me but I wasn’t really confident in my abilities. I have always been able to project confidence (I get that from my mum) even when I don’t feel it. I was 24 and I had a lot of sleepless nights over my casual “I’ll give it a go dad”.

Ian Blay came to us from a local electronics supplier and he used to call on us in that capacity. My dad and I thought him the perfect candidate and was delighted when he said yes. We never even interviewed him. I knew he had the warmth, enthusiasm and desire to help people that we were looking for. David Coleman came via an advert placed in the Sheffield Star. He was by far the best candidate and he got the job on the spot. He was a very capable person and a good listener. Both Ian and David were customer favourites and both very passionate about their music.

We eventually found premises we thought were ideal on Fitzwilliam Street in the centre of Sheffield and just off the bottom of the Moor. It was light, spacious and suited our purposes perfectly. To help with this we used a design agency to come up with something that was a little different. Now we could probably manage that ourselves but back then we were still green and lacking in confidence.

There was on-road and off-road parking outside. We would have two demo rooms and a large showroom. Once we had the designs for how the shop would look we approached our suppliers to ensure they would be happy with us selling their products in Sheffield. Fortunately the reputation we’d fought for meant they now said yes or at least agreed to come and take a look. Things had changed since we opened our store nine miles away to get the better brands.

It didn’t take long to train our new people. We don’t and have never insisted on “an extensive knowledge of equipment” or solely employ people from within our industry. We saw it as our job to teach people about the equipment and how to look after customers. All we needed was passion and enthusiasm. You can’t teach those to people who don’t have it and often if you employ people from other shops you inherit their bad habits as well as good.

Moorgate Acoustics Sheffield opened its doors in 1989 after many aforementioned sleepless nights. I worried that people wouldn't come or that Sheffield already had enough shops. Indeed at the time it had 5. I also worried we had the wrong product profile and I worried over a thousand other things that were all irrational but ate away at my confidence. The realisation that the buck would have to stop with me and my dad was a half an hours drive away and would be busy with his own work.

I recall the opening day. Everything was bright and clean and well lit. Our store was a little different to the norm in that it was tidy and uncluttered. I got in early and as I opened the shutters a very elegant woman in evening wear looked in the window, smiled and walked off. Where she’d been until 7 in the morning I’ll never know.

Part of the store design was that my desk would remain IN the shop and I have never given in to the temptation to move it away into our office space. I still get bogged down by the increasing avalanche of red tape but I can almost always be found when customers (many of whom quickly became old friends) come in.

We’d made our 1st sale within ten minutes; a 4 tier hi-fi stand. It was the first of many that day and it put some of the butterflies to rest in my stomach. Even to this day they never go away completely, especially when we host musical events or open days. A few bad days and you start to think the market has changed, customers have gone elsewhere or the press have finally talked the market to a standstill. I am absolutely convinced that many people think running a business is easy and if you run a business you have some sort of staggering good luck. I find the harder I work the luckier I get and I wish more people could see the true reality of running a business in the retail sector. And more so today than ever before. I’ll get to that later.

I’m delighted to say that Sheffield did well. We all worked hard and it thrived. We had a staff dream-team and customers became regulars, rewarded us with their loyalty and allowed the business to continue. We also received long-awaited visits from the brands who had so far evaded our interest in stocking them. Maybe it was the second store, maybe it was the store itself or maybe it was just some synchronicity but within six months of us opening we had visits from Linn, Naim Audio and a short while later Rega Research. It did help that by then I owned an LP12 and a Naim amp myself and had great enthusiasm for their products.

LINN

It was not a painless process taking on Linn in particular and to a slightly lesser extent Naim Audio. Both companies had their own way of working and their own philosophies and these were different from our own. They expected a lot more from us. It wasn’t just about “buying some stock and selling it”. Sometimes the learning curve was steep and at the time it almost felt like a religion. We understood “source first” but Linn had a degree of enthusiasm and strong core opinions. So we all decamped to the factory so that we could fully grasp these. 

It was at Linn that I got my LP12 training. This gave me some understanding of how the turntable worked and how best it could be upgraded should the customer so wish. It also made me realise that a lot of the mystique around it was added by dealers and had nothing to do with the product itself. It was and is a relatively simple record player of great precision with a few do’s and don'ts. You didn’t need to be a guru to set it up but a little engineering understanding would do the trick.

One thing you had to hand to Linn was that they had the strength of conviction. They would bring every new product to our store and demonstrate it. They would always compare it against the products we felt were strongest in the market. They never shirked from this and they felt if the product impressed us it would impress our customers. I believe they were completely right in that regard and I wish more companies would follow their lead. Sometimes I wish they would follow their own lead and continue with this.

Linn also took us back to basics with regard to system set up. Most of this we knew but it was presented in an organised and coherent manner which gave us the tools to get better sound in the demo room and better sound at customers homes when we were installing. Better sound means better demos and happier customers.

Both Linn and Naim were also advocates of musical evenings and open days and they set a very high bar for these. They would ensure we got the products, the staff and the support to do these events and do them well. As a result they were successful and extremely well attended. I remember Neil Gayden from Linn hosting a lot of events at our Fitzwilliam Street store. And on one occasion Ivor himself came to do a presentation for our customers.

Hosting these events taught us a great deal. It wasn’t always easy and we all had to step outside our comfort zone, myself in particular. But the end result was that we learned a formula for many events to come and with many brands and products.

Naim were similarly different and immensely proud and enthusiastic about their products. Their amplifiers followed a (at the time) unique hierarchy which meant that the pre-amp initially took power from the power amp until such a time as a power supply was added. It wasn’t rocket science but it took some getting used to.

Not everybody is a fan of these two brands and I understand and respect that. But their influence on our industry (most of it positive) is notable and extensive and in some cases formed the template for high quality audio equipment and its retail for a long time to come. A lot of manufacturers took their ethos as the design for their own.

Finally both companies had remarkable factories that went some way to explaining why their products were so good.

British Audio

During this period of time (1988 to 1992) almost all of the big brands were British owned and this was something that brought my dad and I a great deal of pride. With the exception of Denon, Rotel, and a couple of others everything we sold was British designed and built. There are certain advantages to that. One is that the kit is built more locally and delivery times are quicker. It is also easier to get things sorted and fixed if an issue arises. Sometimes it also meant that the kit was better made and sounding. And it meant we could pick up the phone and speak to the person who had built the product.

Sadly as the 90’s marched on many of the brands we loved drifted into foreign hands. This wasn’t always bad but it did present challenges. Personally I would have preferred this not to have happened. Products manufactured closer to home and providing jobs for local communities seems to me to have always had advantages and never more so than now. But markets are driven by shareholders, investment companies, opportunists and asset-grabbers and not (as we might wish) audiophiles. China is a long way away if there's a problem that is complex or involved. I feel successive governments have reduced the exceptional skill sets we had and handed these to foreign companies that are often supported by their own companies. 

As Sheffield grew we needed more staff. We added Richard Stocks from Super-Fi and Richard fitted in very well indeed. He was a likeable rogue and our customers liked him. We put him through all the training we and our suppliers could offer and he fitted right in.

We work hard choosing our staff. Our customer relations are everything to us and so we guard the front lines and only allow the best people on it. So we train, explain, illustrate and then shadow staff. We allow them to sit in on demo’s so that they can see how we do things and how we like to respond to customers. We also try to ensure that all our staff “demonstrate” rather than explain. Explaining can be tricky especially with complex equipment, and almost abstract differences. Sitting people down, playing them music and showing them these differences is much more rewarding for all concerned.

Linn, Arcam and BADA (the British Audio Dealers Association) also started to offer training in retail. I’d taken a few years (day release) to do some education in business, computing and related nonsense. Some of it was even useful. I’d also attended a number of sales training courses and been given the job of packing it into bite sizes and passing it onto the staff. Or at least the parts that were relevant. Now we were getting offered very specific training that was at least part-tailored to our industry and its particular demands. We availed ourselves of this where possible. A lot of this was related to working well as a team. It was a mixed bag but we took something from every course we attended. Some of it related to the presentation of goods, the layout of the store and some on conducting demonstrations. I dislike scripted actions or formulas but there were good ideas buried in all of this and sometimes things that challenged how we thought. That is always good.

My dad always wanted the shop to be a low pressure environment and that’s something we have always worked hard to maintain. It should be a pleasurable experience coming into the shop. With this in mind you can see how a lot of sales training could be pretty tiresome. And if the demonstration is of the correct products then there’s very little sales actually required.

This is why we tend to choose staff who are music lovers, as opposed to salespeople. Music lovers share their enthusiasm and love of music whilst salesmen try and sell things. There’s nothing wrong with that and we wouldn’t be in business if we didn’t sell things. However there’s selling and there’s selling.

Home Cinema OR throwing the baby out with the bathwater

As the eighties gave way to the nineties we saw the arrival of Home Cinema and an increase in our involvement with BADA. Business was very good and we were established in Rotherham and Sheffield. Sheffield had become our flagship store but then again we had a much larger population to deal with and we also had parking outside the store. Parking had gotten so bad in Rotherham that some of our customers preferred to visit our Sheffield store simply because they could park. Councils have never made endless mistakes and I do not believe that they are not aware of them. I attended meetings with them to put forward our own point of view and found it like shouting into the wind. A wind of stupidity. Farad comes to mind again.

Stand out brands from this period;

Mission

Cyrus

Linn

Naim

Rega

Arcam

Spendor

B&W

Part 3 to follow.....

The Streamliner

H400 integrated amplifier replaces the extremely capable H390. It offers some tech trickled down from the H600 flagship too.

The Hegel H400 amplifier delivers 250W of power into 8 ohms and this will drive any loudspeaker with ease. It also has a high damping factor, ensuring tight control and dynamic sound.s dual mono construction and symmetrical layout maintain signal purity, while SoundEngine 2 technology provides real-time distortion correction, resulting in clear, detailed, and powerful audio.

www.youtube.com/embed/DfofYQLf14g?si=R26PVn0LOQvaAmUG

Technology

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Specifications