Graham Osborne and his wife opened up Tubs and Loos, a bathroom design and installation business back in 1980. Now in its 29th year of trading, the business is predominantly run by Graham's two children Rick and Jane. The mid to high end showroom has a turnover of around £2m and Rick Osborne took time out of his busy schedule to tell us about a typical day in this busy showroom......

7:45am
I get up around 7.45am and grab a shower first of all. When I'm ready I'll go downstairs and see the kids and get licked to death by the dog. My wife does my breakfast for me, it's cereal or porridge at the moment because I'm on a diet.

9:00am
I only live just around the the corner from work. I moved nearer so that I'm always on hand if needs be. The showroom is in a great location on a main road so we get a lot of passing trade and there's also a big John Lewis store up the road which brings people in. Footfall is high here and we can have anything between 50 and 100 people in the showroom per day and that's just mid week. At the weekend we're looking at anything in the region of 200 people. 

10:00am
Before I open up I have a wander round to make sure everything looks good for when the general public arrive. In the morning I also make a point of dealing with any problems that might have occurred the day before. Throughout the day there are the general admin tasks to deal with like trawling through the hundreds of emails and wading through the mountain of paperwork that normally gets put on my desk. Post is another one, I got lots of it but I enjoy looking through that because it's where I hear about any new products on the market. Really it's just a case of catching up on all of the general admin tasks, the things that make the business tick, when you can grab five minutes in between showing customers round and dealing with their needs.

11:00am
The showroom was relatively small when we first bought it but we've extended it so much that it's now a huge building. I couldn't begin to tell you exactly how big the place is now in terms of square feet because we just keep adding to it. 
The layout is extremely important to the business and something we put a lot of thought into. We've divided the showroom up into manufacturers so each one has its own dedicated area of displays. We're aimed at the middle to upper end of the market and have areas dedicated to Sottini, Roca, Jacuzzi, Vitra, Ben De Lisi and Imperial Bathrooms with about 80 lifestyle displays in total.

We're currently in the process of renovating a third of the showroom. It's a constant cycle, a bit like the Forth Road Bridge, we start at one end and by the time we get to the other side we have to start all over again. I think this is one of the reasons behind our success. We've always kept the showroom up to date with new displays and products and we actually employ a full-time member of staff whose job it is to renovate the showroom and update displays, that's how important the showroom is to our business.

12:00pm
Lunchtime is any time I manage to get it to tell you the truth and sometimes that can be as late as 4pm. When it's your own business you have a different mentality and different priorities. You wouldn't turn business away in favour of having your lunch on time, it's also the nature of retail that generally your day doesn't go according to plan and you have to go with the flow a little.

3:00pm
Competition is strong but most of the time we win our customers because we've been here so long, we're so well established and that's comforting for people. We're in a good location and a lot of our business comes through word of mouth and recommendation.
The key to surviving among such strong competition is offering our customers more choice and a quality service which we do.

5:00pm
The showroom actually closes at 5pm every evening, apart from on Thursdays, but I usually stay later because it's the perfect opportunity to tie up loose ends and finish paperwork. Because it's so quiet you can concentrate and focus all of your attention on things unlike during the day when it's hectic. 

6:30pm
When I get home I catch up with the family to find out how their day has been and to tell them about mine. My wife is great, she cooks dinner and then after I've sat down to eat it's back to work again. I open my laptop and start again until about 10pm.