Examples of business storytelling

At Secondary School I recall this one PE teacher who saw my passion and talent for running and it wasn’t long before he selected me for the school cross country running team. Looking back, I realise what a positive step that was I really appreciate what he did for me. From there I joined Tonbridge Athletics Club and started competing at various events. One of those inspirational coaches was a teacher and part time athletics coach, Mike Rowbottom. It is a little known fact that he actually recorded, unofficially, the four minute mile before Roger Bannister official record was set. Those twice weekly sessions, often in cold, damp, wet conditions during winter training, as part of Mike’s athletics team really gave me early insight into the coaching experience and how he motivated his athletes. Its an experience even now I really value and it gave me that hunger to pursue a career in sports. I decided then, that I would take a year out after my A-Levels. Whilst on my gap year, I had the opportunity to obtain qualifications in the fitness industry on an apprenticeship with LA fitness, in Tunbridge Wells. That learning experience made me decide to invest in myself and so I went on to get a Diploma in Personal Training at David Lloyd with Premier Training International.

I’ve always wanted to be the best that I could be at both my running and fitness career and I was keen to be able to pursue my own passion for competing alongside my career development. My time at LA fitness gave me that flexibility which was so valuable. Often fate does play a part in where we end up and so when i was offered a freelance Personal Training role at LA Fitness, I decided to take the plunge and set up Scott Richardson Personal Training. That was in 2005 and I have never looked back.

I actually realise now how lucky I was when I first set my business up to have such supportive parents. I was living at home at the time and they supported me in putting my efforts into my business and building my client base. I often tell my PT clients that stress is all about what we perceive. Looking back I was extremely stressed, not having a guaranteed income and building my business. Now I really appreciate what Mum and Dad did for me in giving me that support system. At the time my mindset was to just knuckle down and crack on with it. I was still juggling this with my own running ambitions but in the end I had to prioritise the business set up and establishing a client base over my running goals.

Over the years I have trained some really interesting clients and some extremely driven people. One of those was a very driven chap who worked in the medical profession and he wanted me to use my PT skills and running background to train him for his first marathon. Until then I had never thought I could combine both to better my business offering. I hadn’t completed a marathon at that time, but he trusted my expertise and assured me that I had the tools to train him. A few months later he announced that he had decided he wanted to do the New York Marathon and I was to go and compete with him! I wasn’t going to say no to that, so we spent time together doing long runs on Sundays and other sessions to get in shape for the race. I was all prepared on the day to run with him but he just looked at me and said, run your own race. I was a young man running one of the best marathons on the circuit, what an experience.

I was so thankful to the guy and that inspired me further to try and help others achieve similar feats. We ended up doing other events together including Amsterdam marathon where he managed to strip off over 15 minutes off his marathon PB and I was the sixth Brit over the finish line that day in 2 hours 41mins. That was really the start of how I expanded my business to help people achieve their running goals and I have helped many clients train for marathons and other events including 5kms, 10kms and half marathons.

Goals are a really important part of maintaining motivation when it comes to keeping fit, whatever your ability and however large or small they are. In 2014 I myself was looking for a new goal and by pure accident found myself competing in a half ironman event in Marlow. That is a 1.2mile swim, 56mile cycle and 13.1mile run. That first 70.3 qualified me for the European Championships and have since competed globally in Ironman events and I am regularly part of the Team GB triathlon age group team.

Its not just about the big stuff though, I train clients through injury rehab, becoming more mobile and overcoming other health and fitness barriers. Extra knowledge is never wasted if its applied effectively and in my downtime i am regularly up-skilling myself, keeping my qualifications and industry knowledge up to date.

One of my key business lessons since I started out has to be adaptability. Three times in my career I have faced having to relocate. LA fitness worked well for me as a freelance PT but when they unexpectedly closed I had to make a decision quickly to move my business. I was fortunate at the time to be able to rent a studio in the heart of Tunbridge Wells where I stayed for 3 years. I then decided to move back to a gym environment and went to Tunbridge Wells Sports Centre. Of-course no-one really could predict the impact of COVID and in March 2020 I then was forced to work from home due to the restrictions we all have faced. It’s been an interesting past 18 months and I had to adapt massively, as well all have, to do something positive to get my business through Covid. I felt that I owed it to my customers. I now offer a variety of training environments and online in particular really took off and is now a core part of my business. I also converted my garage at home to be a full gym set up so I can offer face to face sessions with my clients in a private environment if they prefer.

As far as the future goes, there’s a word that gets thrown around a lot now and that’s resilience. When I was younger, despite studying sports psychology at A-Level, I never thought so much back then about that side of things. Now looking at my journey, maybe the study and running created my tenacity and the resilience. I am fortunate that my business provides me with a good standard of living but really I have always looked at my business as something that is there to help people, for me helping people achieve their fitness goals comes first.”

This was in the days before the internet, so I had to learn from books as well as attending a couple of courses which gave me some tips and I realised it was just a skill. I just had to keep practicing it and gradually the previous worried feeling I had, turned into one of excitement – it helped me through university, I became a lecturer and ran a training company.

With the training company I got to speak more and more in front of people but at that time I had a bit of a change in life and decided I just didn’t want to do it anymore, I was working seven days a week with too many long hours and I had to stop. At that time, I met my wife, we bought a house here in Tunbridge Wells and spent two and a half years renovating it, which gave me time to think.

I joined a public speaking club in Tunbridge Wells and started running it, doing all their education and I just loved it! It was so rewarding when people would come to the club telling me they were nervous with public speaking and when I told them I used to be like that, they couldn’t believe it. I explained that I had learnt how to do it and through that process, I had helped a lot of people, taught some courses at schools and the kids were saying the same thing, not being able to structure a speech, not being very confident or funny. It was just taking each individual and working with them. It gave me the combination of learning how to do it, the public speaking and the business element.

It got to the end of last year when I had finished the house renovation when I thought, what am I going to do with the rest of my life. I needed to make a choice and all of my friends and family surrounding me said it was just obvious that I had to help people with public speaking and that’s when I launched my business and it’s been really successful! In May 2020 I won two of the four Toastmasters UK National Speech contests, one in impromptu speaking and one in evaluating a speech.

I get to work with such a variety of people and seeing the change in them when their speech flows beautiful is so very rewarding. It’s things like that which makes my job so very cool. It’s the best job in the world! It’s been a slow steady journey of me learning how to do it myself and then just seeing the love and the passion I get from helping others be empowered to speak more effectively, with confidence and that’s been the greatest gift to me.”

I met a lady at a networking event, last year in Kensington, I got dragged along with a friend – didn’t really want to go, we had to speak to somebody next to us that we didn’t know and explain why we were there that day and what we were trying to achieve. So I started talking about my weight issues and how I was struggling with stress management, and she just said; “You’ve met the right person” she recently certified as a practitioner and as part of her certification she needed a practice client, so she said, how about we meet one to one, have a general session to see if we match, I can then see if I can help you.

It worked out well and I went on this 12-week programme which was one hour a week and she just coached me and helped me to find the underlying reason as to why I was gaining weight and working around my habits and changing these. Through that process I had two holidays, I enjoyed my life, nothing stopped, I still had fun, I’m an extrovert so lots of parties! She got down to the bottom of why I was eating and what the triggers were etc. I started having these aha moments through that whole process and started to re-frame my mind with the way that I look at food which made me more alert and conscientious, being more mindful about eating.

I lost 22 pounds in 12 weeks without even really thinking about it and through the programme we discovered I was a people pleaser. When I would previously go to a restaurant and say you have five friends with you, they’re going to have olives, bread, wine, they’re going to have starters and desserts too! I really only have a main when I eat. I don’t need all the extras and what I was finding myself doing was eating all the extras and it was just too much. You have to be in tune with your body, listen to it, using your intuition and going with it. Finding comfort in other places, having self-care instead of looking at food as a source of comfort.

My coach at the time sent me a questionnaire, and on her headed paper I saw the name of the institute where she studied which gravitated me towards being curious, so I had a look at it online and the course was £6000 pounds. It was a lot of money, but I just thought, you know what – I’m going to invest in this for myself, for my momentum, I didn’t want to become a coach in my head at that time. I wanted to try and keep this going, I didn’t want to gain the weight back, I wanted to maintain it and carry on with the journey I was having. It was phenomenal, I had tried every diet, and nothing had worked until I found this. I felt free and liberated and for once happy in my body!

So, I went on and studied and It took me a year to certify and qualify but I didn’t realise at the time how much coaching would be involved and how much I actually enjoyed it.
I had to coach 50 hours of coaching and then through that I had to take two practice clients through the 12 week programmes, both of them lost weight, through lockdown! It’s such a wonderful feeling when you go through that process with a client – when they come and meet you, and even though you are on Zoom, you can see the change and how lighter they feel, and they’re focusing on the positive. It’s all about focusing on the positive and holding that belief for those clients and that they can actually be a better version of themselves, that they have that potential, and the belief and then holding that for them and taking them through that process.

I’m now in a space where I’m helping other people to feel good about themselves and I love that support that I can give people, I’m passionate about that. It doesn’t matter whether it’s weight loss, stress management or anxiety. With the experiential exercises we do, you close your eyes and you see this version of yourself and you just can’t let it go, it’s just amazing!

I now support men and women who are stuck in self-limiting beliefs, helping them discover their confidence and power to transform their habits and beliefs so that they can live unhindered, abundant and flourishing lives. On the programme I teach you how to make lasting changes, using behavioural techniques, so that you simply have the tools and the mindset to make the right choices for you.”

My job involved driving fast cars and motorcycles, so the injury didn’t fit very well with driving at speed through London, chasing suspects with blue lights flashing! So ultimately, I couldn’t perform that role anymore, but they also wouldn’t let me out on the street, in case I got attacked or assaulted causing further injury which could cause me go blind. So, I decided to retrain towards the end of my police career, in an area that I had always been excited about, which was fitness. I joined the Police to do something that was active and quite physical, but towards the end I was just working behind a desk which I really hated. I did lots of training courses and realised that I could turn my passion into a business, so, I moved out of London and came to Tunbridge Wells and approached Jake Gowan the owner of Halo Gym to see if I could become the oldest personal trainer in Tunbridge Wells! I was lucky because he gave me a chance which I’ll always be grateful for. I got my foot in the door and this enabled me to slowly build a client base and from there to create a business.

Since then I’ve specialised in some specific areas of coaching, such as bodyweight training, handstands and gymnastic rings. My very first client told me he wanted to learn how to handstand walk! It was part of his business to show people that things can be seen from a different perspective, he was a young 50 year-old, pretty fit, had previously done triathlons etc and he wanted to walk out on to a stage on his hands! Of course I said I could teach him how to do it, truth was though, that I had no idea how to, so, I spent a lot of time falling over during the course of the next six months, got some coaching and now three years later I teach people how to do handstands. I started doing this when I was 45 and with belligerent perseverance and relentless practice have made a lot of headway in that area so it’s one of the specialist areas that I help people with.

I started working with clients in Halo Gym in January 2017 and have also worked with some different CrossFit gyms, CrossFit Tunbridge Wells and also CrossFit Tonbridge, and I still work with them doing classes and gymnastics speciality classes. I’ve run bodyweight workshops, corporate nutritional seminars, held strongman competitions and promoted an event where I invited Laurence Shahlaei to come and do a seminar in the gym which fortunately went ahead as it was right before lockdown.

The part about my job that I love is convincing people that they’re not too old to get fit and healthy and that they’re not ready for the pipe and slippers just yet. The people from my dad’s generation, at 40, were watching tv whilst smoking a pipe, now people have the opportunity to be a lot more active, for a lot longer. I want to help convince people that they can have an active lifestyle and create health and wellness and therefore be productive later on in their life. My oldest client is 87! He just wants to get fitter for walking and being mobile so he’s still actively engaged in life. I honestly believe that those who are past 40 are capable of a lot more than they think. The caveat to this is that you are not operating the same body that you had when you were 20, but you can get a hell of a lot more out of it than perhaps you previously thought – with my help of course 🙂

I’m currently doing a degree in psychology and I love the idea of behaviour change. Helping people with their fitness is more than just imparting information, this you can find for free almost anywhere these days. And in fairness people generally know the difference between an apple and a doughnut, but still they pick the doughnut every single time. So, knowing is not the same thing as doing. Information is only one part of that puzzle, if all it took was information, then everybody who ever read a diet book would be fit and healthy. So I see my job as helping people to bridge that gap between what they know and what they actually end up doing. Facilitating lifestyle habit change incrementally over the course of time accrues to make profound long-lasting sustainable changes. Knowing is not the same thing as doing.”

Finally if lockdown has taught me anything is that :

Health and wellness has slowly crept up in people’s priorities surpassing vanity projects such as the six pack abs or beach bum. You don’t need much equipment to get the job done.Working out with a small group of like minded people virtually or socially distanded is powerful.

I was fortunate enough to study in Cologne, which still has the best sports university in Europe. While completing my Masters degree in Sports Science, I also worked in modelling, dance and fitness to pay to for my lifestyle apart from accommodation etc which my parents financed. I also began providing back and fitness sessions for company staff, focusing on improving posture, which helped contribute to my university fees.

I’ve always loved surfing, windsurfing in particular. While at university, my boyfriend (who was a team rider) and I used to spend lots of time wind surfing and then kite surfing, and I would say that next to my family, it still remains my greatest passion today; and something I do whenever I have any spare time.

Studying Sports Science combined with marketing meant that I could choose from a variety of options career-wise, so I chose to go into marketing with an element of sport. It was the best decision because straight after graduating, I received an amazing job offer from an international company to run their events division based in Germany. What made this even better was that I was chosen to participate in the renowned Marlboro Expedition, with 11 others who had passed a rigorous training and selection process. So, at the age of 25, and with the help of two professional guides, I went into the wilderness in Canada and Alaska and to participate in ice-climbing, building river rafts and hiking. It was one of the best things in my life that I’ve done, and, as well as attracting media attention, it really gave me that connection with the outdoors.

Following this, I took on a music marketing role at T-Mobile, where I met my husband while working on the Robbie Williams tour 2006. By this point, I was no longer teaching, probably for a few years – as I was earning enough that there wasn’t any time left for focussing on sport other than kitesurfing and travelling whenever I had time.

I remember when I met my husband, and the tour was about to end, I was just about to set off travelling and surfing for six months and agreed to meet up with him again afterwards. He then decided to come with me for a week, before returning to work to complete the tour. That where I found my love for TARIFA, probably one of my favourite spot to kitesurf in Europe.

After my amazing experience travelling through Europe – reading, partying and kite surfing every day for about 5 months – I returned home to meet up with my then boy friend and now father of my children. We spent time working and travelling between Germany and the UK, and when I fell pregnant, we moved to Penshurst – a world away from Cologne, but a wonderful place nonetheless.

During pregnancy I had severe back problems and could hardly move, which led me to take up Pilates. It was amazing how it helped my body, and I knew instantly this was the career I wanted to pursue. I had visions of owning my own studio where I could teach people about their body, for instance ensuring they know how to sit or stand properly. And now, seven years on, after starting in the village hall in 2014, moving to my current premises in 2015, and completing a two-year Polestar accreditation, I’m proud to be running an award-winning Pilates studio right here in Penshurst.

I love the connection of people, and I’m proud to have brought people together that would have never met before. We are like a little community that grows by the day…People are so happy in my studio; it’s just such a fun place to be.”

Len’s mum is the well-known nutritionist – Dr Marilyn Glenville who has written many books appears on TV & radio and has a successful clinic in Tunbridge Wells (just along St Johns Road not far from the shop) and also in Harley Street. Len was brought up on healthy food and has that side of the health industry and knowledge in his blood. Marilyn’s husband’s company is The Natural Health Practice which supplies and manufactures supplements. I was director of this company for 10 years and also managed Marilyn’s clinic as well. Which is how Len and I met.

I’ve lived in Tunbridge Wells my whole life and went to school here (TWGGS – just round the corner from the shop) and Lens family are from Crowborough so we’re all very local. Initially we thought we’d like to buy an existing business rather than setting one up from scratch, so we were looking at things like gyms and anything that was health related. We looked at a few and kept thinking, wouldn’t it be good if you could put a shop at the front with all the healthy food and it’s then that we realised we should be looking at doing a health food shop instead.

I’ve always had a love for health food shops. Len lived in London for a while and I would go up there and visit Whole Foods and Planet Organic and loved the way most of the health food shops in London looked modern and lovely. I often wondered why the health food shops outside of London did not really have that same kind of vibe.

After a long time of searching and visiting many health food shops, we finally found the perfect one and bought our first shop in Shoreham-by-Sea in 2016. The previous owner had been there about 8 years and had done an amazing job growing the business and being well known with the local customers.

When we took over the store the first thing we did was to extend the opening hours so we were open 7 days a week and we worked in the shop every day for 9 months to learn the ropes and to understand the processes needed to run the business. We knew a lot about the food and the supplements, but we had never actually worked in retail before. Once we had got the hang of it and introduced new till systems, etc we then spend a long time recruiting staff that would carry the same ethos and customer service we had been building.

We trained them up so that they could carry on with the day to day running of the store whilst we focused our time on bring other things into the business (like doing local events that Marilyn would give; a health talk for half a day to local residents. Our first talk reached maximum venue capacity with over 150 people attending, which was amazing! So we decided we would be doing more of these events going forwards – as education is also hugely important to us). As we were confident with our team we decided to open a Best Health Food Shop in Tunbridge Wells on St Johns road (in the middle of the little row of shops along that road). As it was my hometown and somewhere I really wanted to have another shop. We specifically wanted to be on St Johns road too as I also used to work at the Atman clinic (a complementary health clinic) and also because I went to school near there. We’ve never wanted our shops to be in shopping malls as we’ve always wanted them to be amongst a community and to grow them to be part of those communities supporting local residents and other local businesses too.

At the time, in 2017, there weren’t any units to rent on St Johns road so we put a letter through everyone’s door, saying that if they were thinking of leaving we would like to take on their lease etc and we were contacted by someone who was looking to do just that! We are really pleased with where we are, right next to the traffic lighted pedestrian crossing near the antique shop and opposite Basil, with a nice community feel about it. We opened the St Johns shop completely from scratch and got it up and running in about 6 weeks.

In February last year, we had a phone call from the gentleman who owned the health food shop down near the train station on the high street in Tunbridge Wells, and he said he would like to retire and asked if we wanted his shop! We hadn’t even planned for this and his lease was running out in April, so we only had less than two months to make a quick decision! Previously when we took on the Shoreham-by-Sea shop it took us a year to finalise everything, so we had no idea how we would turn this all around in six weeks! But we knew we wanted to do it so found a way and we took it over from him on 29th April 2019.

At the same time, we had been chatting to a lady who owned a health food shop in Uckfield, we’d been talking to her for about two years as she had been looking to retire as well. Then, in June she rang us, telling us that she was ready to retire and that we could have the shop if we wanted it! So, we had to put our thinking caps on again and work out how to make this happen whilst we had only just taken over the High Street store. We worked it all out and renovated the whole of the Uckfield store to make it more modern and in keeping with the rest of our stores and we opened the doors on the 12th October. At the same time that this was going on we had a call from an agent that we had approached a few years back about a particular street in Worthing, where we wanted to open a Best Health Food Shop – he called us out of the blue to say a retail unit had come up and he would give us first refusal on it but the landlord wants us to complete on the 1st October! So 2 weeks after we’d have opened the doors to the Uckfield store! We couldn’t quite get the timing to work for us to open on the 1st of Oct but we did open on the 15th of Nov instead.

We could then now focus our attention back on the High Street shop as we had wanted to refurbish it and add in our zero waste refill stations, etc. The refurbishment of the shop on the high street in Tunbridge Wells was completed in January this year, 2020 and we re-launched as Best Health Food Shop, with brand new flooring, dispensers, shelving and the zero waste sections. We also put new signage up and had a launch party that the Mayor came to on the 1st of February this year.

Something we were hugely proud of was wining the best Retailer of the Year award (Better Retailing Magazine) for our St Johns store, for exceptional customer service and best shopping experience in a Health Food shop, across the whole of the UK just eighteen months after we had opened! We were over the moon with that as is exactly what we had set out to achieve from the beginning and to be recognised for it was just amazing.

It was always a bit of a gamble to have two shops in Tunbridge Wells but, they are very different and have a different demographic between them and they also work well from a staff and a stock perspective because we can share across the two and work together as team which in turn benefits our lovely and loyal customers as well.

I love Tunbridge Wells and am very grateful for all the support and positivity that the lovely people in the community of Tunbridge Wells have offered. We could not have done it without them and all our lovely and supportive staff. So thank you to everyone and make sure you pop in to one of our stores if you haven’t already as we’ve got lots of goodies and will hunt down pretty much anything might be after as well!

We absolutely love what we do and our passion for health, food and the environment is what motivates us to keep busy and keep the shops innovative and always offering new things. We also enjoy sharing our knowledge and getting involved with the local community with things like events, in store demonstrations and qualified nutritionists in the shops to offer advice and help to customers. We strive to give every customer exceptional service and hope that they all have a positive experience in the shops and that we can help them with anything they need.”

We’ve built a bespoke studio at our home, specifically so that we have both a yoga studio and a treatment room, it’s not a huge building but there’s often the joke that you go to the East wing for him and the West wing for me! If people are injured, they can start with osteopathy and move towards yoga or the other way around. We built the building when we bought our house, specifically to engage the whole family, to have room for all 4 of our kids. The building was built to our specifications for what we wanted to do for Yoga and Osteopathy, we opened 5 years ago and have won an award from Muddy Stilettos for the best Yoga studio in Kent for two years running!

Part of our main ethos is to help people in terms of learning more about themselves, it’s not just an exercise routine, it’s more about helping people discover and develop more, which means we now offer a lot of workshops & courses, including anatomy courses through Ben. We also offer a comprehensive yoga teacher training course which is fully accredited with some amazing, internationally known yoga teachers. We’ve even recently put together a special new 7-week course to support people in light of the challenges of Covid-19. Titled ‘Know Thyself – Finding and Trusting your Inner Voice’ this course aims to give people lots of new tools to help relive stress, build confidence and find opportunities in any crisis! There’s still time to book your space as the course starts on 9th June.

I’ve been an Osteopath for 20 years, once I qualified, I worked in other people’s practices and then gradually moved to working on my own. I bought a shop front in Groombridge village and turned it into a treatment room, which was long before I met Lucy. When I trained to be an Osteopath it was usual that a patient was treated by using a certain technique, now evidence has shown, much more, that a combination of including exercise and combining that with hands on treatment is the most effective way of getting some good results. Before I met Lucy, I always had yoga on my list of things to try, but like a lot of people, I didn’t really know who to go to, it’s quite confusing when there seems to be a lot of different types of yoga. We were introduced by a mutual friend so when we got together, I had no excuse but to try it out!

The synergy that our business has, has worked really well and from our point of view and experience the benefits we’ve both enjoyed have been fantastic. It’s important that there’s a progression to the experience and for me, as a practitioner one of the main attractions is that our clients don’t have to keep coming back. The most rewarding things is that we are getting people out of problems, long term and it’s the success stories that we love.

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic it was important for us to turn our business around within a week to move away from running classes in the studio and establishing classes online through Zoom. We now have a robust online platform where we’re running up to 3 classes a day with the different teachers that we have, specialist teachers that offer unique classes and workshops in meditation, pranayama, pregnancy yoga, or teenage yoga etc. As Ben mentioned, there are a lot of different yoga classes out there and It can be confusing, the best thing to do is to try different ones, test it, now is a great time as people are having more free time to try things. It’s really down to personal preference, you may like one coffee shops Cappuccino but not another, it’s a similar thing.

Once we are out of lockdown I’d still like to use the online platform as well as the studio classes, I read this morning that social distancing is not such a useful word, it’s physical distancing that is what’s needed, but we do need social interaction. The online platform allows us to physical distance, it also allows us to socially connect and we’ve found that, not only have we been getting the regular people coming through Zoom, we’ve been getting people in other parts of the UK or even abroad that have been on our retreats and don’t live locally joining us in the Zoom classes, they’ve been delighted to do that!

Helping people to really live the best lives they can, to really dig deep and understand who they are, to trust their inner voice, physically and mentally. We want to encourage and inspire people to live their best lives. On the Osteopathy side it’s all about sitting down with someone and understanding them. It’s a privilege that they have decided to come and see me, to try and work out a way to get them through to a better life and that process is incredibly rewarding, when it so often works out.

Both of us treat people holistically, which is hugely rewarding if you have got a specific problem, if you go to a Doctor or a Surgeon, they will only be looking at that specific problem, they won’t be looking around it. We understand that the body has a chain reaction up and down and it allows that holistic approach which can be hugely effective.”