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| Business Chick Alison Lawrence |
 Alison Lawrence is the owner of The Village Bookshop (www.thevillagebookshop.co.uk), a delightful independent bookshop at the heart of the community of Woodford Green, Essex. 1. Alison, tell us what you were doing before The Village Bookshop, and what made you decide to take the plunge and become a bookshop owner? I studied Business and Marketing at University and then came to London when I was 21 to work for BT. I only intended to stay there for a few years but BT offered so many opportunities for development and learning about new technologies that I ended up staying there 21 years! I’ve always wanted a book shop – ever since I was a child and spent hours browsing the shelves wherever I went. I had decided I wanted to work locally and I was also keen to put all my BT training to use and try to run my own business and so when I saw The Village Bookshop was for sale it seemed meant to be. 2.So, tell the truth now, is this just an excuse to fill the shop with all the books you love and sit around reading all day?! I have introduced some of my favourite authors into the shelves which I think people expect as any bookshop owner is going to put their own mark on the shop. In the past 18 months I have only had a chance to sit down with a book, while working, 4 times for about ten minutes! I still read a lot at home though. 3. Can you give us a run down of a typical day at The Village Bookshop? I usually arrive 20 minutes before I open to give me a chance to get the PC up and running and to make a cup of tea! We open at 9.15am and I check emails and go through the post. My DHL deliveries come about 10.00am and I spend the next 2 hours unpacking anything between 2 and 6 boxes and phoning the customers who have placed orders to let them know their books have come in. During this time I am also serving customers and taking telephone orders. We often have a busy spell between 12 and 1pm when the kids come out of school for lunch and they or their parents pop in for a book. We send two main orders a day by internet to our suppliers and the first one goes at 1pm. Before sending it I’ll check what we’ve sold so far and what I might want to re-order as well as processing the customer orders that have come in over the phone. I have my lunch at 1pm. By 1.30pm my Royal Mail deliveries have arrived as well as those from other couriers so there’s another round of unpacking and phoning and then between 2.30 and 3.30pm I usually work on my school orders, packing up the boxes for delivery or writing out invoices for the school. We have another busy spell with customers in the shop between 3.30 and 4.30pm when the schools come out. And the second main order of the day is sent. Between 4.30pm and 5.30 pm I straighten the shelves, package up and return the books that have been damaged in transit and tidy up the desk area and then we close. After closing I back up the PC, reconcile the figures for the day, do the dishes empty the bins and break up the cardboard boxes, which we take to be recycled. I can do this in 30 minutes. Then two evenings a week I do about 2 hours of admin at home, paying bills, planning my orders, doing the accounts etc. I have three ladies who each do 5 hours during the week so when they are helping I can run errands, go to the Post Office (we post to some customers who can’t get to the shop), and meet with publishers and stationery representatives. I couldn’t manage without their help and we always take 30 minutes to have a cup of tea and a chat together. 4. What's been your biggest highlight since you started? I’ve really enjoyed the three signings we’ve had. It’s great to support a local author and with the children’s books it’s nice to see how excited some of the kids get when they meet an author. 5. And your lowest point? I’d been running the shop for 4 months when I discovered the way I was gathering the data for the VAT returns wasn’t the way I needed to do it so I had to re-do everything – I’m not big on paperwork so that was painful! 6. We've got to ask, but how do you compete with the likes of Waterstones and W H Smith, especially when you can't do those 3 or 2 offers and so on? Being an independent bookshop I can’t get the level of discounts that the chain bookshops can get from the publishers so I can’t compete on price. Instead I aim to give excellent customer service. I try to know what kind of books my customers like to see in the shop and I also make sure that we follow through on customer orders, delivering quickly, in good condition and keeping the customer informed of progress whenever a delay does occur. We are also very lucky that the Village Bookshop is well supported by the local people and the local schools who enjoy having a bookshop in their midst. 7. What, apart from money, do you get out of it? I like people and I enjoy books – this job combines both of these. It’s all about job satisfaction and being my own boss. 8. Making the change from an office to being alone (for much of the time) in the shop is a big difference. Don't you get lonely? I can’t say I ever get lonely – I love having a chat with the customers and discussing the last book they bought. Or having a chat with someone over the phone about the books they are ordering. I also have three ladies who help in the shop, each for 5 hours a week and a Saturday girl. My husband also helps with deliveries and helps in the shop when he can so it’s not crossed my mind to feel lonely. 9. Is there anything you wish you'd done differently? I wish I’d got a bit fitter before I started. Having spent a lot of time in front of a PC or sitting in meetings in my previous job it was a shock to be on my feet all day and carrying boxes around. I wore boots with a heel on one of my first days and could hardly walk by the end of the day. I am much fitter now than when I started! 10. What advice might you have for someone setting up their own independent bookshop? I’d suggest they help out in a bookshop for a couple of weeks to help learn the ropes. It is hard work but it’s enormously satisfying, however you can only really understand the work involved when you do it. 11. Who do you most admire business-wise and do you have a role model you follow? I really admire Simon Woodroffe who started the Yo! Sushi! Brand. He was once at a conference I was at as the motivational speaker and he really did his job. He made you feel it was within your power to try anything. 12. Finally, whose books do you really get excited about? I think John Irving is a great writer and I love “A Widow For One Year”. I re-read it every two years or so. It’s a mystery story within a novel about several characters from a family and a teenage boy who comes to work for the family. The idea of the photos on the walls, and the story for each photo fascinates me as do the children’s stories within the book. I recently discovered they had made a film of the first third of the book called “The Door in the Floor”. It was great too and made me read the book again! Barbara Kingsolver is probably my favourite female writer. Animal Dreams is my favourite of the Barbara Kingsolver’s, although they are all good. She paints a beautiful picture of the Arizona life in the small town the main character returns to when her Father has Alzheimers. I also love a book that can make me cry. I also love Anne Tyler and Marianne Keyes and will read their books over and over. I’m a big sci-fi/fantasy reader. I take my hat off to the early sci-fi writers like John Wyndham, who wrote about aliens and space ships long before man had even dreamed of landing on the moon. But I also like more modern writers like Anne McCaffrey and Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman. Anne often lands people on a planet and they have to survive with what they can find – it’s a theme I really enjoy where people have to pool their skills and somehow manage to build a community and survive. I adore the writing of Bill Bryson and I actually had to get off the tube one day because I was laughing so hard at one of his books (“Neither Here Nor There”). |
| Posted: 30/08/2007 07:04:10 Last Updated: 30/08/2007 07:14:37 |
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