Part 5
I’d like to start by thanking you if you’re still reading this. It’s much appreciated, especially as the story has taken a little longer to tell than I thought.
You could say the last few years of Moorgate’s time on Fitzwilliam Street was blighted and looking back on it now the blight was purely the substance abuse clinic. The move (forced on us) by the impending demolition of the store was really an extremely good kick up the backside and to be honest it was needed.
An exception to this was the addition of Doug McCarthey to our staff. Doug was a customer but when David Gillot left to pursue pastures new, Doug came to the interview and never really left. Well not until donkeys years later anyway.
Self doubt
Almost all of us fear change and change that is unknown is the worst kind. There were a million things that flashed through my mind when I contemplated moving our store (and “home” for 34 years of my working life) and most of them filled me with sadness and horror. I felt as if an era was coming to an end and I had no idea if we’d survive it. I did not know if the company would survive it. Looking back I realise that my concerns were foundless but these are the things that run through your mind in the early hours when you wake up and can’t go back to sleep.
None of us are immune to doubt, nor envisaging things going wrong. We’ve often found when times are hard then something else happens which makes them harder. Businesses either adapt to these changes or they die. But the adapting has to be in the right direction and a wrong move can be terminal. I don’t mean to bleat but people usually say to me that running a business must be marvellous and that I am lucky. I tell them that the harder I work the luckier I get and often that is lost on them.
Everything I have done (and continue to do) has been for this business. For my dad and for the staff and for the customers who have rewarded us with their loyalty. I’m not entirely selfless because I am doing something that (at its core) I love and it pays my mortgage. But loving something can make the hardest work seem joyous. And I really do love 90% of the job.
All the things I loved about the job I do still love. But there is a minefield of red tape, restrictions, complications, legislation, paperwork, attestation and other general mind-fuckery that makes any business venture at least part nightmare. This “other stuff” gives me hours and hours of nightmares and I can assure you that this side of things is increasing as our governments believe that they should interfere more and more in our businesses and our lives. And it gets in the way of all the things you want to do with your time and stops you interfacing with your customers.
But I digress…
We had to move and we were given a year to do so. This was very generous of our landlord. He also offered us some “key money” to smooth the transfer to a new store. We knew we wanted to be out of town because of our fears of the introduction of traffic limitation (ULEZ). So it made sense to look out of town and that’s where we started.
I looked at units on industrial estates in areas served well by roads. Most of these were ideal but when I went to view them (and speak to the local businesses) I found that the police response time was poor. In fact we heard from people who said the police may not respond at all. This convinced me that it could be expensive in more ways than one.
Eventually my dad suggested that he’d seen a vacant store on Woodseats. Woodseats is an area of Sheffield with its own vibrant shopping area. It is also situated on one of the busiests roads in and out of the city and not too far from Chesterfield and the M1. I arranged to have a viewing and was extremely taken by almost all aspects of the store and its location. I got a second and a third opinion and apart from a few changes that we would need to make internally, there were no negatives and a shedload of positives. And first amongst those was our own car parking.
Initially we looked at renting half of the property. This idea was dropped as soon as we met the individual who would possibly be renting the upstairs. He was very concerned about us playing music. So we negotiated with the landlord to take the entire building and it turns out that this was a good decision for many reasons, as well as not battling with someone who didn’t particularly like music.
For three months we worked on Chesterfield Road whilst our Fitzwilliam Street store kept things ticking over and kept looking after customers. This was mostly myself because I couldn’t spare anyone else. I did get some builders to move some walls around and then a company to improve the security and install shutters along the outside of the building. I also decorated it myself in an attempt to keep costs down. Dad helped and a few good friends tipped a hand when my need was great (as good friends do).
The store had been a photography studio previously and we actually built our main demo room in the area where the pictures were taken. So a studio became a listening room. This is NOT an acoustic room or a specially treated room. In fact it has mechano walls filled with rockwool and not a solid wall out of four. So when it was decorated and carpeted we had to hang curtains and a drape to tempt good sound out of it. But we’d grown used to doing this in lots of demo rooms down the years and also at customers' houses too.
We don’t hold with tricks and room treatments. Not because we don’t think they can work but because we feel our demo rooms need to be good enough for you to hear the difference between equipment and no better. Any more than that and we’ll get a better sound than you might at home and that can lead to disappointment. In our history we’ve found very few rooms in which we’ve not easily been able to make good sound. When that has occurred it has mostly been down to extreme minimalism (all glass and tiles/hardwood floor) or ceiling beams which can divide the room acoustically. Both these issues can be fixed fairly simply.
So the two demo rooms at Woodseats were one large and one small and both of them enabled us to demonstrate two pieces of equipment or two pairs of speakers and for the difference to be fairly clear. That is all we require of them other than being places where you can relax and enjoy listening.
As the Woodseats shop took shape I relaxed a little because this was the first time where I’d had a clear vision of what I wanted the store to look like. I wanted it to be light and airy and I wanted it to be a cross between an art gallery and an open plan loft. It was a male dominated space because we know our customer. We have some great female customers of course but they’re sadly in the minority. In short, I wanted a store for somebody like me.
We’ve spent too much time and energy wondering why everyone isn’t interested in music and hearing it reproduced well at home. Nothing ever worked. New customers are wonderful but old customers are the ones that tell new customers to come and see us. So we look after our customers as best we can and let everything else flow from this. These days we spend almost zero money on advertising and we’re not suffering as a result. Hi-Fi magazines sell so few copies that they’re more or less pointless as an advertising tool. Spending money in other ways has never worked. It took a lot of time and effort to learn this hard fact.
We’ve done promotions with car dealers and it has been worse than a waste of money. In fact it is a thinly veiled attempt to access our customer database and that’s not something we will ever share. In fact we don’t have a customer database as such. We used to and it became so complex and time consuming that we threw the towel in. Linn encouraged us to work with Jaguar in one of their showrooms. I can tell you a story about that but it lasted a week before we took it all out. Utter waste of time.
At Woodseats we had the opportunity to make the shop exactly how we wanted it and fill it with the brands we wanted to stock. We knew it would take time but I think I realised that the new store would be make or break time for us. The past few years had been so demoralising that this felt like the last fight to do something better and something new and get away from all the deadbeats on Fitzwilliam Street.
Eventually the store was complete. Or it was complete as I was realistically going to get it. We bought some furniture from Ikea and a load of new display racks that were (I thought) better than the heavy duty ones that my dad had designed for the old store. Those were heavy, hard to move and not suited to the new space where all the racking would be located on all the side walls. A charity offer to collect them and pay us. They collected them but never paid us.
We gave our customers notice and moved everything out of Fitzwilliam Street over three days and with the help of some very good friends and customers. They know who they are and I’ll be forever grateful to them. At that time I would have said it was the most exhausting time of my life but as ever life was about to teach me another lesson and I’ll come to that soon.
If you build it they will come!
We opened in February 2016 and we were delighted (and unbelievably) relieved that customers immediately came to see us. And what was even better is that they liked the store. Forty two years of experience doesn’t tell you that customers will come. It doesn’t calm the nerves and the sleepless nights that are born out of the insecurities we all have. Some of them hide them better than others I guess. I am pretty good at toughing it out but these things don’t come particularly easily. I’ve done training on speaking and presentation and all manner of skills which are mostly expensive common sense. Let me assure you that they might help but they don’t ease the anxiety. At best you get all your butterflies flying in the same direction.
We opened and they came and we were all happy and relieved as I can possibly tell you. Me in particular. Dad had retired at this stage but his hand was still guiding mine and he helped when he could but felt that streaming was the Devils work and felt out of his depth with it.
Mum continued in her role as company secretary and Paul Cooper and Doug McCarthey stayed on in sales. The commute was a lot less, the parking was fantastic and all of a sudden we weren’t having to be on guard against the saddest and most unpredictable members of society.
I’ve included more pictures because we took a lot more at this time. Thanks to Dave Brearley for sharing his pictures with me as well.
Business on Woodseats started well and remained well. We discovered a lot of customers who didn’t like driving into town and who didn’t like parking outside the substance abuse clinic. But Woodseats was different and closer to where they lived. We also started to see a lot more people from Derbyshire further south. Mainly because we were closer to the M1 and we were not located in the city centre.
We opened up with more or less the brands we have now but with a few subtle changes and a few losses and additions. Our range is a work in progress and will remain so whilst we remain in business because it underscores everything that we do.
Life was better. The commute was shorter. We didn’t have deadbeats watching us like silent, twitching sentinels. Idiots didn’t say “we know where you park your car”. And customers came.
Part 6 soon.