Global Entrepreneurship Week

Exciting times this week at LS Blackpool…. we are delighted to be sponsoring the North West Division of Global Entrepreneurship week. I hope to see many of you at The Pines Hotel in Chorley on Tuesday. 

The theme to GEW 2013 is “Taking A Step Forward”. 

Let’s think about this for a moment; “taking a step forward”… 

Now, whilst more than half of the population think about and would like to start their own business, less than 5% actually do. So you might be here today as a young entrepreneur with an exciting new business plan and huge ambitions for world domination or whether, like us, you are one of the 5% that have acted upon our goals and ambitions and have been in business a while, I truly believe that every single one of us here today needs to “take a step forward”. 

Let me take a few minutes to tell you a little about Letting Solutions Blackpool and why we want to encourage entrepreneurs to set their goals and take the first step forward to achieving those goals… 

It was back in 2003 when we first got the opportunity to take on the first of two failing letting agencies. I won’t be mentioning any names but the business was failing and failing fast. A business owner without knowledge, ambition and any kind of work ethic is going to find the cut throat world of business a tough place to be. The business in question had been neglected in every sense of the word and the decision to take over the debts, chaos and the dozens of very unsatisfied clients wasn’t to be taken lightly. Thankfully for the newly born Letting Solutions, we were a determined, ambitious and strong willed bunch of girlies who hate to be beaten and so the hard work began! 

But oh where to start? 

As our number one priority is customer service, it seemed that the obvious place to begin was the grouling task of contacting the clients that still remained. Sounds easy, but when so many people have so many grievances and were so desperately unhappy with the service that they had previously received, it soon became apparent that the extent of the problems were far, far worse than we had once thought. The task became soul destroying. It was bad. It got to the point where we didn’t even want to answer the phone as we had the same complaints, time after time. It was a battle everyday to convince our clients that we could solve the issues that they had. We even worked without pay for a long period of time, in order to prove to our clients that it was worth staying with us. 

Slowly but surely, with an awful lot of hard work, organisation and sleepless nights we managed to make some sort of sense of the carnage that we had inherited. We slowly began to regain the trust of our clients and began to put each and every rental account back into order. We built up relationships with both our landlords and our tenants and went out of our way to ensure that we rebuilt the trust that had been lost. 

I think looking back that communication was key. Although we did not always have the answers at the time and certainly not always the answers that our clients wanted to hear, but we always without fail did what we said we were going to do and always relayed information to our unhappy clients. 

Some months went by and soon enough, our unhappy clients became happy ones! The complaints became fewer and then we had that one magical phone call that made it all worthwhile… 

“Hello, I am looking for an agency to manage my property and you have been recommended to us by Mr Smith….” 

RECOMMENDED!!! I think I may have even put him on hold for a brief moment with I did a little “woo hoo” and punched the air! We had been recommended! Proud doesn’t even come close. 

And so our story goes from there. Still hard work but we had done it. We had managed to covert this failing business into something that we are proud of. Somewhere, where 97% of all our new business derives from referrals. 

And so now we have a business that is succeeding. Some would say ticking along nicely. We have some weeks that are tougher than others but all in all we are positive optimistic, ambitious and motivated and 12 months after that magic call, it is that motivation that encouraged us to buy failing business number 2! Haha! 

All that was more than 10 short years ago and we now have the knowledge, understanding and experience to do what we do and we know from our testimonials that we do it well. We hope that over the next 10 years that we continue to grow and learn from every day that passes by. The moral of our little story is that there is nothing you cannot achieve. No dream that you cannot follow. With motivation and a lot of hard work and setting and implementing goals then you too can take a step forward, a step closer to building that business that you have worked so hard for. As a business, in the years to come, we will continue to take steps forward. For us, there will always be new legislation to implement or new gaols to set or failing letting agencies to buy! 

We would love to talk to each and every one of you in more detail about who we are, what we do and how we do it. We would be delighted to answer any questions you may have on the weird and wonderful world of lettings. 

We hope that you all have a great week and don’t forget that you can all achieve your goals if you put your mind to it! Also, even if you only take one thing away with you today, then make sure that you take a step forward to achieving your goals, whatever they maybe. 

I am Sally from Letting Solutions Blackpool; where we offer the key to successful letting.