“Why Wellworths”pt5
I promised them all on that day that….
…I would keep in contact and help them in everyway possible to get a new job. So once a week I would ring each of them and make sure we were all ok. These could be quite emotional calls as I still felt like we were a family.
In the meantime I was still in regular contact with the landlord and it was finally in the 3rd week of January that I finally got the call i’d been waiting for, that we had the go ahead to set up the store. I immediately rang all the staff and spoke to them about the plans, a few had already got new jobs, but out of the 25 staff that left 21 including myself were coming back! That was a great moment, beng able to tell them that we were going to have our store back.
We immediately went out to find a buyer, the one job that we needed to cover that we didn’t have in store already. I had lots of applications, but most didn’t have the experience and we needed someone who could start straight away and know what to look for and where to look. I had already found out about the Spring Fair, retail trade fair at the NEC in Birmingham which was at the beginning of February, so we needed someone for then.
We hired Daniel Roy and went off to Birmingham, what an experience going for the first time, it was like being a kid in a sweet shop. There were 20 halls filled with stands of everything you could ever think of and I didn’t know where to start! We worked our way around and with a plan of what we wanted to find, were very successful in finding what we needed. This was the week before we got our first access back into the store on Monday 9th February…