Busy as Ever

Coming to the end of another month and things have been as busy as ever, with many new initiatives underway.

I keep referring to the values that I was discussing in my last blog and most if not all of my decisions are based around our ability to achieve them.

Staff training has commenced and I attended the first customer service program. I have to say that it was much better than I thought it was going to be at the start of the day! David the trainer facilitated the meeting extremely well. The important message that I took out of the session is that we are all different people and it is what we can achieve by working together that will really make the difference. Providing good customer service is very important to Trust House, after all, it is what makes the customer keep coming back.

I have also started doing staff presentations and will be at an outlet near you very soon! The idea around the presentations is to keep the staff and in turn the community fully briefed on how their outlet is performing, for me to share Trust House visions and values and to give staff the opportunity to ask me any questions about Trust House that they may have.

For those that haven’t heard we are exiting all of our Liquorland franchises for the simple reason that Trust House and Liquorland’s key business strategies are not aligned. The split was amicable and the commencement date for the first store change over to the new The Bottle-O brand is Monday 1st July.

Some tough decisions also had to be made in the last month and I closed the Homestead restaurant. The main reason for this was a decline in profitability which was hampering company performance. This will enable the team at the Homestead to concentrate on the Four Square and bar.

The Russell street project is also underway and is the catalyst for the redevelopment of the new bottlestore. I am hopeful that the new rebrand and upgrade will be completed by late June.
Some new appointments have also been made with Cindy Grant being promoted to Operations Manager and Nikki Burns joining Trust House as our new Marketing Manager.

My first few weeks

My first few weeks in the job have been, as expected, extremely busy. I had the advantage of spending a few months before my start date researching and analysing what changes, if any, were required to further enhance this community owned enterprise.
I was not surprised to find that we have many good initiatives underway but felt that with my appointment it was a good time to re-establish our core purpose and values. To that end I spent time analysing our purpose and came to the conclusion that the best thing to do was, well actually nothing!! We have a fantastic reason for being and one that we are extremely proud to adopt. Therefore our core purpose remains as:
To enhance the well being of the Wairarapa, Flaxmere and Rimutaka communities by:
• Operating successful businesses that benefit from community ownership; and,
• Distributing profits in support of community organisations and events.

It is clear to understand the Trust House reason for being and greatly assists in the decision making processes for me and my fellow senior managers.
I then looked at our company values and once again was greatly heartened by the good work that had been completed by my peers. There were many values, goals and objectives and I felt that to really use values as our guiding light, so to speak, we must incorporate all of our previous values into four succinct and measurable statements. Thus I and the senior management team tasked ourselves with the delivery of new organisational values. After much consultation we established and signed off on the following:
• People, customer focus and performance deliver our core purpose.
• We seek to better our communities.
• We will responsibly offer our products and services.
• Integrity, trust and entrepreneurship are our competitive advantage.

We have created powerful values to adopt and live up to but ones that I am determined will lead this company to even greater market success.
There has also been some exiting news from our bottle store segment, in that we have adopted a one brand strategy for the portfolio and have joined the Tasman Liquor company franchise, Bottle O. This partnership will enable Trust House to gain many additional market strengths such as the re-development of our stores and better everyday pricing for our customers. We are all looking forward to the changes and will welcome your comments.
That is probably it from me, I will be updating my blog regularly and would value any comments (positive and negative) that you want to send.