As a writer, I love stories – both reading and writing them – and every business person has a story worth sharing. Whether it’s the story of how you reached your present position, the story of a particular success – the story of a failed venture and what you did next – or the story you plan for the future, we all have tales to tell.
With this in mind, I’m going to be using my blog over the next few months to share the stories of local business people – their successes, struggles, hopes and fears. Using a combination of writing styles, including Q&As, full written interviews and case studies, I’ll be finding out how these entrepreneurs got to where they are today, and what makes them tick. I may also feature particular projects that some businesses are working on, so there’ll be all sorts of content to enjoy.
The aim is to highlight the very individual routes to business successes and failures – to get under the skin of people we may be connected with on or offline, but don’t really know. Hopefully it’ll be inspirational, motivational and will give everyone a shared sense of what it means to be a business person – with all the ups and the downs.
My previous post featured the talented songwriter and installation artist, Fionnuala Fagan-Thiébot, who chatted about her Station Flight exhibition at the MAC, Belfast. This week, it’s the turn of the North Coast’s Savvy Retailer, aka Anna Macaulay, who shared her business journey with me over a cup of coffee…
When it comes to retail, Portstewart-based Anna Macaulay knows a thing or two, having built up a successful career within the industry in a variety of roles. From working with food and fashion, to installing supermarket scanning machines and managing hundreds of staff, her career to date has been far from dull, and has taken her across the UK and Ireland.
Now running two of her own businesses, Anna is on a mission to help the high street flourish by offering professional advice and guidance as The Savvy Retailer. She also makes life a lot easier for busy parents on the Causeway Coast through her Kiddiecal business. For a woman who at one stage intended to be a stay-at-home mum, entrepreneurial Anna is now anything but…
Born and bred in London, the young Anna knew two things – she didn’t like office jobs, and she loved food – so, she kick-started her career by signing up for catering college. After three years of studying catering and hotel management however, a skiing accident put her out of work for four months. It was then she spied an advert that piqued her interest.
“I saw a job advertised with Safeway supermarkets, who were looking for someone to develop their coffee shops,” she says. “I applied for that but was unsuccessful. However, they were opening a store in Coventry and asked if I wanted to run the coffee shop there. I said yes.”
Although she loved the job, Anna was homesick for London, so when asked to work as part of a supermarket scanning instalment team in the city, she readily accepted.
“It involved going into stores and working overnight to install cabling that went from the control centre down to the tills, but I loved it,” she says. “We installed scanning in the south-east corner of London, which took about a year. Once that finished, I got a job working in one of the stores in the administration department.”
Not keen on office life however, Anna used her initiative and soon became team manager. She’d noticed the store was losing money on the tills and suggested helping out. It was, she says, “another turning point in my career.”
“I loved it. I realised I loved managing a team,” she adds. “It had challenges though, working with people who had done that job for years.”
The company then decided to restructure, removing middle management and assigning new roles to those staff they kept, so it was all change again for Anna.
“I finished work on Friday, and on Monday morning, I had to go to a different store as a human resources manager,” she says. “The restructuring was massive. My role was a lot more about managing absences, the rota – dealing with the people on the ground. They got rid of all the department managers so I was looking after about 200 people. I was working 12-14-hour days, six days a week, but there was something about it – I did love it.
“That’s when I found out that in retail, it doesn’t matter what you’re selling – it’s always about the people.” 
Fashion and food
The schedule and workload took its toll however, and in 1999, Anna left to work for GAP Clothing on Oxford Street, where she stayed for a year-and-a-half. She was then enticed back to Safeway when they recruited a new chief executive who was “full of enthusiasm and a real foodie.” Anna began working in “one of the toughest stores in London” – in Peckham – managing the fresh food department.
“The next big turning point in my career was the launch of a brand new concept to supermarkets in the UK – ‘Fresh to Go Food’,” she says. “I was the very first ‘Fresh to Go’ manager within Safeway. No-one else was doing that at the time.”
Based close to London’s Canary Wharf, Anna’s store had everything from a fresh noodle bar, pasta bar and pizza bar, to sandwich and patisserie areas. Describing the set-up as “very theatrical,” she adds that, while her financial target for the first week of opening was £12,000, they actually made £40,000.”
Such was the success of ‘Fresh to Go’ that Anna was then asked to implement the initiative across Safeway’s London stores and after that, in Scotland, where she spent six months. Following a much-needed holiday in Australia, she then returned to work as fresh food trainer for Safeway’s central London stores. She also met her future husband, who would later entice Anna to relocate to Northern Ireland…
Peacocks
Having never visited Northern Ireland and knowing of it only through the news, Anna was quickly won over by the province when she visited, and has called it home now for many years. Initially retaining her role as a fresh food trainer, she later became area manager for the fashion retailer Peacocks. Indeed, it was her interview for the position which helped inspire The Savvy Retailer, as she was asked to assess one of their stores and feed back on what she found.
“The store was awful,” she says. “I told them it wasn’t right and thankfully, that was the correct thing to do – I got the job.”
Helping Peacocks grow from 15 stores to 29, she “absolutely loved” her time with the company, where she spent the next nine years. “It was all about the people for me,” she adds.
During the recession however, the stores were cut from 29 to just 10 – news Anna received the day after her father’s funeral. She stayed on with Peacocks, but a phone call from her mother then prompted a reality check.
“My mum and dad used to come over and stay with us, so I asked mum if she wanted to visit and she said why, as I was never there,” she says. “I thought, I have a son and if my mum, who isn’t in Northern Ireland, thinks I’m never there, what does he think? You sit and reassess your life and think, what’s really important? So, I quit my job.”
Entrepreneur
Aiming to be a stay-at-home mum, Anna enjoyed the summer with her family. When her son returned to school however, and she was trying to arrange extra-curricular activities for him, she just couldn’t find the information she needed.
“It was very frustrating,” she says. “I told a friend I just wanted someone to send me an email saying what was on in the area and she said, why don’t you do it?”
The result was Kiddiecal, an online children’s events hub covering activities on the North Coast. With the help of her graphic designer friend, Anna had a Facebook page and Twitter account up within days, along with a Kiddiecal logo and WordPress website. She then spent the next six to eight months researching content for the site, which she constantly updates.
“I was getting about 200 hits a month, then got a new site, which at its peak was getting 20,000 hits a month,” she says. “On average, it now gets about 15,000 hits, as the spam filter has been improved.”
Retail coach
Launched in October 2012, Kiddiecal wasn’t the only business idea brewing in Anna’s head however, as The Savvy Retailer emerged from its chrysalis in 2015. Spending her first six months networking, Anna went on to complete the Lead 2 Grow programme through the Causeway Enterprise Agency, which gave her “lots of direction.”
“Sometimes as an entrepreneur you lose that vision,” she says. “Lead 2 Grow made me really focus on what I really can do.”
Anna’s aim as The Savvy Retailer is simple – to make the high street a better place for shoppers and indeed, for the retailers themselves, by offering expert coaching services. In short, she’s Northern Ireland’s Mary Portas, on a crusade to save our stores.
“There are some key operational activities which take place in big national companies that independent retailers can adopt, and it will either drive more sales or help them manage their costs and help them protect their profits,” she says.
“The high street is ailing and has been for some time. It really does sadden me.”
Offering free initial consultations, Anna has already worked with everyone from markets to general stores and coffee shops.
“I think the key aspect of what I do is honesty,” she says. “Y
ou also have to be very tactful and respectful and just remind people that when we do things every day we start to become accustomed to what’s around us – we need a fresh pair of eyes to help us move forward.
“I look at the bigger picture, but there has to be partnership. I have to know the person I’m working with will use my advice.”
With The Savvy Retailer now fully up and running, Anna is already working her magic on all kinds of stores. No doubt it’s just the start of another exciting adventure for this very inspirational Queen of the Shops…
Visit The Savvy Retailer at: http://www.thesavvyretailer.com/
Find The Savvy Retailer on Facebook and Twitter.
Kiddiecal: http://www.kiddiecal.com/