Month: August 2026

WHAT RETAIL TAUGHT ME ABOUT BUSINESS – POST 2 OF 4

In retail, margin is everything. It’s the number every buyer is accountable for, the measure by which every decision is ultimately judged. You’re always looking for ways to improve it: better pricing, smarter sourcing, tighter ranging, fewer markdowns. 

But after years in buying roles at Ryman and Signet, I came to believe something that sounds almost counterintuitive in such a commercially driven environment: the most reliable way to protect and grow your margin isn’t the deal you negotiate. It’s the relationship you build. 

The suppliers who delivered the most value, consistently, over time, were rarely the ones who came in with the lowest price. They were the ones I trusted. And trust, it turns out, is worth a great deal more than a percentage point on a cost price. 

What trust actually delivers in a commercial relationship 

In buying, a trusted supplier relationship changes the texture of everything. When a product isn’t performing, a trusted supplier tells you early and helps you find a solution, rather than waiting for the markdown conversation you’ll inevitably have anyway. When something goes wrong in the supply chain, they call you before you have to chase. When an opportunity arises, a new product, an exclusive, a promotional window, they think of you first. 

None of that is contractual. None of it can be negotiated into an agreement. It emerges, slowly, from a consistent pattern of honesty, reliability, and mutual respect. You show up as a fair and straightforward partner. They do the same. And over time, that relationship becomes genuinely more valuable than any individual transaction within it. 

My best supplier relationships weren’t always with the cheapest option. They were with the people I trusted. That’s still true today, just in a different context. 

The flip side was equally instructive. The purely transactional relationships, the ones built entirely on price and pressure, were the most fragile. They worked, up to a point, in stable conditions. But under pressure, supply disruption, a difficult trading period, a product that needed support, they had nothing to draw on. There was no goodwill in the account. No genuine partnership. Just a series of transactions that neither side felt particularly good about. 

Spotting the difference between partnership and performance 

One of the most useful things buying teaches you is how to distinguish between a supplier who is genuinely invested in your success and one who is simply managing your account. The signals are often subtle. It’s in how they respond when things go wrong. Whether they’re honest about problems before they become your problems. Whether their questions are about your business or just about their order book. 

That instinct for genuine partnership versus transactional performance has stayed with me, and I use it constantly in my role at Get Ahead. 

When I’m working with a business owner to understand what kind of Virtual Expert support would make the most difference for them, I’m listening for the same signals I used to listen for across a supplier meeting table. Is this person genuinely interested in understanding the business, or are they focused on filling their diary? Do they ask questions that go beyond the brief, or do they take the brief at face value and run with it? Would they tell a client if they thought the approach wasn’t working, or would they quietly keep delivering the wrong thing? 

Those aren’t just questions of competence. They’re questions of character. And character, in a working relationship, is what determines whether it stays good under pressure. 

Why relationship intelligence is a commercial skill 

There’s a tendency to treat relationship-building as the soft counterpart to the hard commercial skills: negotiation, analysis, margin management. Something the more people-oriented members of a buying team do while the serious work happens elsewhere. 

In my experience, that’s precisely backwards. The ability to build, maintain, and read relationships under commercial pressure is one of the most difficult and most valuable skills a buyer can develop. It requires emotional intelligence, yes. But it also requires strategic thinking, patience, and a willingness to invest time in something whose return isn’t immediately measurable. 

For business owners, the same is true. The relationships that drive growth, the clients who come back, who refer others, who give you honest feedback rather than quietly moving on, are built over time through consistent, genuine engagement. Not through a slick pitch or a well-timed discount. Through the accumulated weight of interactions that left the other person feeling heard, valued, and well-served. 

That’s not soft. It’s the most durable commercial asset a business can build. 

What this means for how I work with businesses in Oxfordshire 

When business owners ask me how Get Ahead works, I find myself talking about relationships more than processes. The way we match clients with Virtual Experts isn’t just about skills and availability. It’s about finding people who will genuinely invest in understanding your business, who will be honest when something isn’t working, and who will show up consistently over time rather than just at the beginning. 

That matters because the value of good support compounds in the same way a good supplier relationship does. The longer a well-matched Virtual Expert works with a business, the more context they carry, the better their judgment becomes, and the more they can contribute beyond the immediate task in front of them. 

It starts with the right match. But it grows through the relationship. And the relationship is, ultimately, where the real value lives. 

A Final Thought

Retail taught me that the best commercial relationships aren’t the ones you extract the most from. They’re the ones that give most back. 

That requires a different kind of investment than price negotiation. It requires showing up well, consistently, over time. Being honest when it’s uncomfortable. Caring about the other person’s success, not just your own outcome. 

It’s slower than a transaction. And it’s worth considerably more. 

---

If you’re thinking about what good business support could look like for your business, and you’d like to explore that with someone who takes the relationship seriously, I’d love to hear from you. 

I’m Vicky McKenna, Regional Director for Get Ahead in Oxfordshire. 

Next in the series: Knowing When Something Doesn’t Fit. 

WHAT RETAIL TAUGHT ME ABOUT BUSINESS – POST 1 OF 4

In retail buying, the brief is everything. 

Before a single product is selected, before a supplier meeting is booked, before a range is built, there is a brief. What does the customer actually want? What problem are they trying to solve? What does success look like for this category, this season, this store format? Get the brief right and the rest of the process has a chance. Get it wrong, and you can spend months pursuing something that was never going to work, however good it looked on paper. 

I learned this early in my buying career, and I learned it the hard way. A range that made perfect sense in a meeting room could fall completely flat on the shop floor, not because the products were poor, but because they answered the wrong question. The brief had been assumed rather than established. And assumptions, in buying, are expensive. 

The question beneath the question 

What buying teaches you, over time, is to listen for what someone actually needs rather than what they say they want. Those two things are often related. They’re rarely identical. 

A supplier might tell you they have a product that will transform your stationery range. What they mean is: they have a product. Whether it transforms anything depends entirely on what your customers are actually looking for, and that’s a question only you can answer, if you’ve done the work to understand it properly. 

The discipline this requires isn’t complicated. But it does require slowing down at the point where most people are tempted to speed up. When there’s pressure to fill a gap, to make a decision, to move forward, the instinct is to reach for the nearest available solution. The brief disciplines you to pause and ask: is this actually the right solution, for these customers, at this moment? 

That pause is where the real value is created. Not in the selection itself, but in the clarity that precedes it. 

What this looks like when a business owner comes to me 

The conversations I have as a Regional Director for Get Ahead often begin in a very similar place to those supplier meetings. A business owner knows they need help. They can feel the weight of what they’re carrying: the tasks that aren’t getting done, the skills that are missing, the hours that are disappearing into things that aren’t really their job. What they’re less clear on, often, is exactly what kind of help would make the most difference. 

That’s not a criticism. It’s completely understandable. When you’re inside a business, running it day to day, it’s genuinely hard to step back and identify the precise point where external support would have the greatest impact. The pressure creates noise. And noise makes it hard to brief clearly. 

In retail buying, the brief was everything. Get it wrong and the whole range suffered. I’ve taken that same discipline into every conversation I have with business owners today. 

So the first thing I try to do, before any conversation about Virtual Experts or matching or how Get Ahead works, is ask the questions that help establish the real brief. Not ‘what tasks do you need doing?’ but ‘what would a good outcome actually look like for your business in six months?’ Not ‘what skills are you missing?’ but ‘where is the gap that’s costing you the most, in time, in energy, in lost opportunity?’ 

Those questions slow things down, briefly. But they save an enormous amount of time and frustration further down the line. 

Why getting the brief right changes everything downstream 

In buying, a poorly established brief has consequences that ripple through the entire process. The wrong product gets selected. It takes up space on the shelf that a better product could have occupied. It delivers disappointing sales. It damages the relationship with the supplier who was briefed incorrectly in the first place. The cost of the initial misalignment compounds at every stage. 

The same is true in business support. A Virtual Expert matched to the wrong brief, even a talented, experienced one, will struggle to deliver what the business actually needs, because what the business actually needs was never clearly established. The hours get spent. The invoices get paid. But the outcome falls short, and nobody is quite sure why. 

Getting the brief right upfront protects everyone: the business owner, the Virtual Expert, and the working relationship between them. It creates the conditions for genuine success rather than a technically-fulfilled arrangement that doesn’t quite hit the mark. 

This is one of the things I value most about how Get Ahead approaches matching. It’s not a transactional process – here’s a list of available VAs, take your pick. It’s a conversation. A careful one. One that starts with the brief, and takes the time to establish it properly before anything else happens. 

What I’d ask any business owner to consider 

If you’re thinking about bringing in support, whether that’s a Virtual Expert, a specialist freelancer, or any form of external help, the most useful thing you can do before that conversation is spend some time getting clear on the brief yourself. 

Not a job description. Not a list of tasks. A genuine answer to the question: what would need to be true in three or six months for this to have been the right decision? 

That answer is your brief. Everything else follows from it. 

And if you find the answer hard to articulate, if the pressure and the noise make it difficult to see clearly what the real gap is, that’s a conversation worth having too. Sometimes the most valuable thing a buying conversation does is help you understand what you actually need. The same is true here. 

A Final Thought

Retail buying taught me that the brief isn’t a formality. It’s the foundation. 

Get it right and everything that follows has a chance to work. Get it wrong and even the best people, the best products, and the best intentions won’t save you. 

That’s as true for a stationery range in a Ryman store as it is for the decision to bring in support for your growing business. 

The question is always the same: what do you actually need? Not what’s available. Not what’s easiest. What would genuinely make the difference. 

---

If you’re wondering what kind of support might make the most difference for your business right now, and you’d find it useful to think that through with someone, I’m always happy to have that conversation. 

I’m Vicky McKenna, Regional Director for Get Ahead in Oxfordshire. 

Next in the series: Relationships Are the Real Margin.