With a family history of 45-plus years in the furniture industry, Paul Grassick was on the verge of moving Emelda Grace into international sales when he started working with Be the Business.
The timing was perfect for Paul when he found out about The Productivity Programme through LinkedIn.
“I’ve got a new idea, an international furniture business, which requires me to bring in investment as well as board members,” he said. “I’ve never worked with a board before, so this was a great opportunity to give me experience and understanding of that process.”
Seeing the business through fresh eyes
Paul was immediately struck by the quality of his board. “The board is fantastic, their experience and diversity is brilliant,” he explained.
He recalls that the board had valuable insight, which has shaped the brand’s marketing, including pointing out how Emelda’s works with supply chains is a USP they should be shouting about.
“In the UK, we pay our staff above the living wage, and in Vietnam we pay our staff comparable wages to the EU. When we’re working with factories, we always look at where we can try to push them to offer staff a better salary and working conditions. Which is what we’re all about, I’ve just never thought about it as a USP, so that was really useful,” Paul said.
Developing a strategy for international success
In the upcoming meetings, Paul and the board will be looking at developing marketing and finance strategies for the new international venture – manufacturing furniture in Vietnam and selling globally to customers and retailers.
“I’ve never produced a strategy for anything, so getting to understand that will be really useful,” Paul added.
Paul hasn’t hesitated to recommend The Productivity Programme to his network.
“Through the Department of Business and Trade I’ve got a network of business owners, and when I first found out the board I’d got, I contacted a lot of them straight away through LinkedIn and said, ‘Hey, go and look at this’. I wasn’t expecting it to be such a strong board.”
Stress-testing the new business plan
At his second board meeting, Paul and the board discussed his business plan and financial forecast for the new venture, which he’d also given to a potential business partner.
“It’s a large-scale international furniture business, so it’s a very large forecast, I think the board were a bit taken aback by it, but once I started going through it they started to see that it’s possible,” Paul recalled.
Paul explains that the board members were thorough with their questions, but it gave him an opportunity to demonstrate the resilience of his business plan:
“We would need between one and a half and two million pounds in financing, and they asked me if it was realistic that we could get that. They also questioned if the supply chain was strong enough.”
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