Paul Crow’s Good News: ‘We’re hoping for two more stores in 2025’
Continuing our Good News series this month, Ripples owner Paul Crow shares the positive stories he's heard from across his wide network of bathroom retail stores.
Words: Paul Crow
We undertook sales training for a mixture of franchisees, senior designers and designers as we believe in ‘sharpening the knife’ at least once per year.
We’ve held our own internal training inviting all new recruits to attend induction days so that we can help them understand our sales process, methods and culture. We also attended an event held by our charity to support their work, to pledge a substantial donation, and we have agreed to visit India to see their work – including the toilet block for a girls school that was built for over 1,000 children after we climbed Snowdon.
We started shop fitting in Banstead, and we’re looking to sign two more before Christmas.
We had our best ever social media post for reach after partnering with Rachel Stevens on her bathroom. We saw a designer with less than a few months experience sell a bathroom on the first presentation for over £25,000. The supplier, Trimline, couldn’t have done more to help us achieve the sale and it was a good example of partnership.
We funded books on child safety to be handed out to all the children at a local school in Bath. Ripples also saw a record month for new enquiries generated by our web page in September, and also held a CPD event at our showroom in Nottingham – fully supported by Hansgrohe.
We visited a bath supplier we are looking to partner with who served as an excellent example of who Ripples should be working with and the meeting was very well received by our franchisees – for which many attended the event. We have also sought out grants to help us develop different areas of our business.
Sales are hard to come by. We have some showrooms really needing more and we are mindful that many of our franchisees have under 5 years experience. Despite that, we are seeing some record figures in showrooms that are trading over ten years which is good to see and well deserved by them.
You can read the rest of this month’s kbbreview Good News stories in the November issue of kbbreview Magazine, or view the online archive here.