Monthly Archives: August 2021

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Embrace your unconventional superpowers

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By The Inside Tracc on Small Business – Advice and Ideas for UK Small Businesses and SMEs

Brij Thankey started out in the corporate world, “a numbers guy” as he puts it, but he grew weary of conventional thinking and jumped ship to create a different kind of business.

A decade on, that business – Precision FM – is a national leader in facilities management across the UK and Ireland, and CEO Publication has recognised Brij among the UK’s Top 20 Dynamic CEOs.

One of Brij’s guiding principles is that honesty and transparency are what connect with people, and as you’ll see he’s still more than happy to give voice to ideas that go against the grain.

For starters, there’s the notion that big businesses can learn a lot from the way that small businesses operate. When he was starting out at Precision FM, Brij believed he could base the new business on the assumptions he’d acquired in his corporate career, but he soon came to realise he’d need to rethink things from the bottom up.  

Above all, he says, big businesses get too obsessed about the bottom line. They need to recognise that their greatest assets are their people, and that they’ll get

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How to build your business

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By The Inside Tracc on Small Business – Advice and Ideas for UK Small Businesses and SMEs

In 1988 Andrew Walsh founded the AW Repair Group. Starting out on a shoestring, with a staff of just two, the business has grown to become one of the leaders in the UK’s bodyshop industry, with eleven branches across the East Midlands and a workforce of more than two hundred. In recent years, the Group has been selected among the London Stock Exchange’s Top 1000 Companies to Inspire Britain, and Andrew himself has just been named among the industry’s top influencers.

Among the factors behind the Group’s success have been its ability to identify and anticipate trends in the automotive industry, and its willingness to invest in people and technology to keep it ahead of the field. But there’s obviously a lot more to it than that, and over the course of this series of this Masterclass series Andrew will share some of the experience he’s picked up along the way.

As we’ll see in this first episode, he’s a great believer in the power of the brand. Right from the start, he feels, a business needs to think hard about the image it wants to

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How to grow your team

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By The Inside Tracc on Small Business – Advice and Ideas for UK Small Businesses and SMEs

Of course it’s great when your business begins to grow, but growth can generate a fair few challenges too. In this Masterclass Andrew Walsh, founder and CEO of AW Repair Group, will look at some of the issues entrepreneurs face as they start to scale up.

There’s one particular danger that they need to look out for: the temptation to spend too much time working in the business rather than on it. For Andrew, the image that springs to mind is of a captain who’s down below in the engine room when they should be upstairs on deck with their hands on the wheel. If all their attention is on shovelling fuel they won’t notice when the ship starts heading towards the rocks.

So as their business gets bigger, entrepreneurs need to accept that they can’t do everything – or at least that they can’t do everything well. They need to build a team and they need to learn to delegate.

Andrew reflects on the qualities to look for in a new recruit and on the strategies you need to keep people fully motivated and playing to

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