Transcript Of Sampled FARMA Conference Speech
Jonathan Winchester delivered an engaging speech to delegates at the National Farmers’ Retail & Markets Association (FARMA) conference.
By mystery shopping a number of their farm shops and pick-your-own farms prior to the event he was able to use the results and his experience to offer advice on delivering a better shopping experience for their customers.
Jonathan Winchester: “How do your team feel about working for you? Now, if you ask them, if you say: ‘hey Bob, how do you feel about working for me?’ what’s he going to say? ‘Great…I love it, I love it.’
“But if you get someone in—could be a friend or a local facilitator—who sits down with your team for a couple of hours—and you go off, you’re not involved—and they actually ask some questions about you, the way you run your business, what they’d like, what improvements they’d like to see you doing in their business, you will get an independent report back. No-one’s named in it, but it gives you the signpost on how to run the team more efficiently, more productively and how to motivate them—it works.
“Thirdly, what is the vision? Does your team know where you’re going with your business? Does your team know? Does every single staff member, in your team, know where this business is going to be in five year’s time?
“Because what we want your staff to do, we want them to talk to your customers about it. We want them to talk about the fact that you bought some more land, or you’re going to put a deli in, or you’re going to put a meat counter in because that gets the customers excited.
“If you don’t tell the customers that stuff they’re actually going to end up thinking ‘well, nothing’s happening with this business’ where, in reality, loads might be planned, loads might be going on.
“But, you’ve got to tell your staff. You’ve got to take them out one night, or sit them down, give them a beer, give them a pizza and say ‘guys, this is where we’re going, this is our journey—come along with us’. Because if they don’t know, they can’t be involved and they will never ever have the passion that you will have, or you do have.”
Where to begin?
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