Relationships Are the Real Margin
Relationships Are the Real Margin
WHAT RETAIL TAUGHT ME ABOUT BUSINESS – POST 2 OF 4
Before I became a Regional Director for Get Ahead, I spent years as a Buying Director for major UK retailers including Ryman and Signet. This series isn’t a career retrospective. It’s about the skills, instincts, and lessons from that world that still shape how I work today, and why they matter for the business owners I support.
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.
WHY THIS MATTERS NOW
This is worth holding onto at a moment when AI is making it increasingly easy to simulate relationship-building without doing it. Automated follow-ups that sound personal. Generated messages that use your name and reference your last conversation. Agents that engage on your behalf while you’re elsewhere.
None of that is relationship-building. It’s the appearance of it. And the businesses that have tried to grow on the back of simulated connection tend to find, sooner or later, that there’s nothing underneath it. The real margin, in retail and in business support, still comes from the relationships that are genuinely built.
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
What a career in retail buying taught Vicky McKenna about business, and why those lessons matter more than ever.
- The Art of the Brief
- Relationships are the Real Margin
- Knowing when Something doesn’t fit
- The Weight of the Decision
