Author: Vicky McKenna

WHAT RETAIL TAUGHT ME ABOUT BUSINESS – POST 3 OF 4

One of the things buyers get asked most often, in my experience, is why they said no. 

Not to a bad product. Not to something obviously wrong for the range. But to something that, on the surface, looked perfectly reasonable. Good quality. Competitive price. A supplier with a solid track record. And still, the answer was no. 

The reason is almost always the same: it was right, but it wasn’t right for us. For now. For this customer. For this part of the range. The product itself wasn’t the problem. The fit was. 

Learning to make that distinction clearly, and to trust it even when the pressure was on to say yes, is one of the most valuable things a buying career teaches you. 

Good product, wrong fit – the most expensive mistake in buying 

In buying, a trusted supplier relationship changes the texture of everything. When a product isn’t performing, a trusted supplier tells you eIn retail buying, ‘good product, wrong fit’ is one of the most common and most costly errors a team can make. It happens when the selection process focuses on the product in isolation rather than in context. Is it well made? Yes. Is it priced correctly? Yes. Will our customers want it, in this store, at this moment? That’s the question that gets skipped. 

The consequences show up a few months later. Slow sales. High stock levels. Markdown pressure. The product takes up space that a better-fitting product could have occupied, and the margin takes a hit that could have been avoided. Not because the product was poor, but because it was chosen for the wrong context. 

The discipline of evaluating fit over features, of asking ‘is this right for us?’ rather than just ‘is this good?’, is something that has to be actively maintained. There is always pressure to fill a gap, to take the available option, to move the process forward. Standing still long enough to properly assess fit requires confidence in the judgment and a willingness to be patient when patience feels uncomfortable. 

When I walk away from something I like 

Some of the decisions I’m most comfortable with in my buying career are the ones where I said no to something I genuinely liked. 

Not products that were obviously wrong. But products that were interesting, well-presented, commercially attractive, and still not the right fit for what we needed. Walking away from those required a kind of discipline that got easier with practice but never became entirely comfortable. There’s always a part of you that wonders whether you made the right call. 

In retail, I walked away from products I liked all the time. Not because they were wrong, but because they were wrong for us, for now. That judgment is one of the most valuable things buying taught me. 

What made it easier was having a clear picture of what ‘right fit’ actually looked like. Not a vague sense that something wasn’t quite right, but a specific understanding of the customer, the range gap, the context into which a product needed to fit. The clearer that picture was, the more confident the no became

Fit over features in business support 

The same principle applies, with striking consistency, to the work I do now. 

When a business owner is looking for a Virtual Expert, the temptation is to focus on the capability list. Can they do social media? Bookkeeping? Executive assistant work? Those are the features. They matter, but they don’t determine fit. 

Fit is about something more specific: whether this person, with this particular style of working, will actually mesh well with this business owner, at this stage of their business. Whether their pace matches the pace of the business. Whether their communication style will work in a remote relationship with limited briefing time. Whether they’ll ask the right questions or wait to be told what to do. 

A Virtual Expert who is talented, experienced, and highly capable can still be the wrong fit for a particular business. And a wrong fit, even with the best intentions on both sides, tends to produce frustration rather than results. The hours get spent. The tasks get done. But the relationship never quite settles, and the business owner ends the arrangement without being entirely sure what went wrong. 

What went wrong, almost always, is that the fit wasn’t properly assessed at the start.  

Why the right fit protects everyone 

Getting fit right at the outset isn’t just good for the client. It’s good for the Virtual Expert, and it’s good for the working relationship between them. 

A well-matched arrangement allows a Virtual Expert to do their best work. They understand the business, they understand the owner’s priorities, and they can contribute with genuine confidence rather than constantly second-guessing whether they’re approaching things the right way. That confidence is good for the work and good for the relationship. 

A poorly matched arrangement does the opposite. It creates friction that nobody wanted and that drains energy from both sides. No amount of goodwill on either side fully compensates for a fundamental mismatch in working style or expectation. 

This is why the conversation I have with business owners before any matching happens matters so much. Not because I’m trying to complicate a simple process, but because taking the time to understand the context, the business, and what ‘right fit’ actually looks like in this specific situation is what makes everything that follows more likely to work. 

A Final Thought

Buying taught me to trust the no as much as the yes. 

Not every good thing is the right thing. Not every capable person is the right person for every role. Fit matters more than features, and knowing when something doesn’t fit, even when it looks good on paper, is a skill worth developing. 

For business owners making decisions about support, the question worth asking isn’t just ‘can they do the work?’ It’s ‘will this actually work, for us, right now?’ Those are different questions. And the second one is the one that matters most. 

If you’d like to think through what the right fit for your business might actually look like, that’s exactly the kind of conversation I enjoy. I’m always happy to explore it with you

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

Next in the series: The Weight of the Decision.

WHAT RETAIL TAUGHT ME ABOUT BUSINESS – POST 4 OF 4

There’s a particular feeling I remember from the end of a range sign-off meeting. 

The decisions have been made. The spreadsheets are updated. The suppliers have been briefed. And then, in the quiet after the meeting, comes the weight of it. The awareness that those decisions will show up on shop floors across the country in a few months’ time. That customers will engage with them, or they won’t. That the business will make money from them, or it won’t. That your judgment was sound, or it wasn’t. 

No one talks about that feeling very much in a corporate buying environment. The culture tends to reward confidence and forward momentum. But the weight is always there, underneath. And over time, I came to think of it not as a burden but as information. A signal that the decisions mattered. That the accountability was real. 

What high-stakes decision-making actually feels like 

InSenior buying roles involve a particular kind of pressure that’s hard to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it. You’re making decisions that will affect stock levels across hundreds of stores, supplier relationships, hundreds of thousands of pounds of investment, and ultimately the trading performance of categories that the business depends on. You’re doing this with incomplete information, under time pressure, often in the face of conflicting signals from the market. 

The decisions themselves are rarely straightforward. The data gives you part of the picture. Your instinct gives you another part. The brief you’ve established, the relationships you’ve built, the context you’ve accumulated over years in a sector, all of that feeds into a judgment call that is, ultimately, yours to make. 

You get better at it. But you never stop feeling the weight of it. And I think that’s right. The moment a decision stops feeling weighty is probably the moment you’ve stopped taking it seriously enough. 

Why that experience changes how I listen 

When a business owner sits down with me and starts to describe what’s going on in their business, I notice things that I’m not sure I would have noticed without those years in buying roles. 

I notice when someone is carrying more than they’re saying. The slight tension in how they describe a situation that they’re framing as manageable. The decisions they mention in passing that are clearly not small at all. The gap between how things look from the outside and how they’re actually feeling from the inside. 

Running a growing business involves a version of the same pressure I experienced in senior buying roles: high-stakes decisions, incomplete information, real accountability, and often very few people around you who truly understand the weight of what you’re carrying. The specifics are different. The texture of it is remarkably similar. 

When you’ve sat in rooms making decisions that affect entire product ranges and entire teams, you understand what business owners are carrying. That’s not something you read about. It’s something you feel. 

That recognition matters, I think, in the conversations I have with clients. Not because I want to project my own experience onto theirs, every business is different, and every business owner’s situation is specific to them. But because having genuinely experienced that kind of pressure means I don’t underestimate it. I don’t treat the mental load of running a business as a side issue or a lifestyle complaint. It’s a real thing, with real consequences, that deserves a real response. 

The difference between support that completes tasks and support that eases the load 

There’s a version of business support that is essentially transactional. Tasks come in, tasks go out. The diary gets managed, the inbox gets sorted, the social media gets scheduled. Everything on the list gets done. And the business owner is still, somehow, exhausted at the end of the week. 

That’s not because the support wasn’t competent. It’s because the support was addressing the visible surface of the problem rather than the underlying one. The tasks were getting done, but the mental load wasn’t shifting. The decisions were still all sitting with one person. The weight hadn’t moved. 

Good support does something different. It doesn’t just take tasks off a list. It takes decisions off a desk. A Virtual Expert who truly understands a business can start to carry some of the cognitive weight of running it: anticipating what’s needed before being asked, flagging things that need attention, making judgment calls within their area of responsibility so the business owner doesn’t have to make every one themselves. 

That shift, from task completion to genuine decision support, is where business support becomes genuinely valuable. It requires a level of trust that takes time to build. But when it’s there, the difference is significant, not just in what gets done, but in how the business owner feels at the end of the week. 

On asking for help 

One of the things I noticed in corporate buying environments is how rarely people asked for help openly. The culture rewarded self-sufficiency, confidence, the appearance of having everything under control. Asking for support felt like admitting a gap, which felt like weakness, which felt like professional risk. 

It took me a while to understand that the opposite is true. The most commercially effective people I’ve worked with have been the ones who are clearest about what they know and what they don’t, about where they need input and where they can run independently. That clarity isn’t weakness. It’s good judgment about how to deploy limited resources, including your own energy and attention, for maximum effect. 

For business owners, I think the same reframe is worth making. Bringing in support isn’t a sign that the business is struggling. It’s a sign that the business is being run well. It’s the decision to direct your energy toward the things only you can do, and to trust capable people with the things they can do better or faster than you. 

That’s not giving something up. It’s making a smart call about where the real value of your time lies. 

A Final Thought

Retail taught me that the weight of a decision is proportional to what’s at stake. And what’s at stake, when you’re running a business you’ve built, is considerable. 

The business owners I work with are carrying real responsibility. Real pressure. Real accountability. Not to a line manager or a trading director, but to themselves, to the people who work with them, and to the clients who depend on them. 

That deserves to be taken seriously. And the right support, brought in at the right time, is one of the most practical and most honest responses to it. 

Not because you can’t manage alone. But because you don’t have to. 

If you’re carrying more than you should be, and you’d like to explore what the right support could look like for your business, I’d love to have that conversation. 

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 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.