Geoff Burch in the Daily Telegraph

Geoff Burch was featured in a Daily Telegraph article:



All Over the Shop

Business guru Geoff Burch tells Michael Deacon about, All Over the Shop, his new series making over Britain's small businesses

All Over the Shop, BBC2’s new factual series which starts this week, is both heartening and slightly scary. Heartening because, in these difficult times, it tries to demonstrate that small businesses can improve their fortunes with a dash of fresh thinking and a few inexpensive changes. Slightly scary because it shows British shopkeepers making blunders that would be endearingly comical if only their financial troubles weren’t so severe.

While filming the series, its presenter Geoff Burch came across shops which had misspelt signs – or which didn’t have a sign at all. In Taunton he found a flower shop with no flowers outside it. He asked the owner why not. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘if you put the flowers out, they’ll die…’



Geoff Burch: the sorry state of our small shops and how a Cheltenham business guru can sort them out

Burch’s mission was to help these failing businesses save themselves. It’s a familiar idea: in a recent series also on BBC2, Mary Queen of Shops, presenter Mary Portas revitalised fashion boutiques. But aside from the fashion angle, the main difference between the two is cost, Burch says.

‘Our programme is a sort of Blue Peter way to save your small business – it’s sticky tape and Fuzzy Felt,’ he says. ‘If I had a shop and Portas came in I’d be happy, because she’d make over my whole shop. But as a viewer, it wouldn’t tell me a lot, as I couldn’t afford to do what she does. Anyone could afford to do what we did.’


The ‘sticky tape and Fuzzy Felt’ line is only a small exaggeration. Burch’s advice to the shopkeepers is of the simplest, most practical kind, to do with presentation and pricing.

He says he knows how to solve his subjects’ mistakes because in the past he made most of them himself. In his twenties, he ran his own businesses – haulage, recycling, electronics, all sorts – before starting up a business sales training consultancy. For the past 20 years he’s been a business speaker, and written books with titles such as The Way of the Dog: the Art of Making Success Inevitable. He sounds like David Brent’s hero – an impression reinforced, a little unfortunately, by his personal website, which shows the Cheltenham-born 57-year-old posing in shades, beside a potted biography which describes him as ‘a phenomenon who delights audiences throughout the world… possibly the most original business guru in the world… Geoff will provide a very high level of excitement…’

Still, there’s no denying it – in the series, his advice helps. His first subject is Peter Hall, a 46-year-old from Cardiff who runs Rainbow – an unusual combination of a toy shop and coffee shop. Hall took over the premises in 2006 and was doing them up when a BBC producer from the area arrived and said she was looking for subjects for a makeover series. ‘Next thing you know,’ says Hall, ‘her researcher’s coming over and saying would I like to be involved because they hadn’t got a start-up business by someone who should know better.’

The cheek of this approach didn’t put him off, and he agreed to participate. It may seem remarkable how willing people are to be the subjects of makeover programmes – to have a Gordon Ramsay or Mary Portas or Geoff Burch stride into their lives and highlight, before the nation, their various failings. Hall says he did it because his father told him, ‘Any publicity is good publicity.’ Anyway, he soon had bigger worries than the impending arrival of a television crew – business was so bad that some days he didn’t sell one toy.

When Burch arrived to film last autumn, Hall found him friendly and fair, after a difficult start: ‘I remember him getting out of the taxi, quite irate that the poor taxi driver couldn’t find my shop because it didn’t say “toy shop” outside,’ says Hall, sounding a bit sheepish. The producers gave Burch no information in advance about the shops he was to visit – presumably to maximise his horror the moment he saw what a shambles they were. Still, he resisted the temptation to dish out some Ramsay-style putdowns. ‘If somebody’s an alcoholic, there’s no point capering round them them with a pig’s bladder shouting, “You’re an alcoholic”,’ he says.

Hall says Burch’s ideas – such as adding a children’s menu and high chairs, and giving out toys for children to play with free of charge while their parents drink coffee – worked well, and takings went up. But the programme hasn’t solved his problems for good. Filming on Hall’s episode ended ten months ago. After a great Christmas, Hall’s shop suffered a quiet spring and summer. Television makeover shows may give good advice, but they can’t stop the credit crunch taking place. Hall admits that he’s stopped watching the news on television because it gets him down.

Burch, however, thinks the credit crunch may not be so bad for small businesses. ‘It’s almost a window of opportunity because they can be faster and more flexible [than big chains],’ he says. ‘If you’ve got a one-man version of an M&S food hall, you can make it a one-man version of a Lidl’s food hall overnight.’

All the same, he urges owners of small shops not to slash their prices: ‘It just scares customers off.’ Instead, make your shop look classier, he says – this will make your prices seem lower. If a rival shop is doing well, pinch their ideas: ‘It’s not stealing, it’s “benchmarking”,’ he says.

Only at Christmas will we find out how well Britain’s small shops are coping with the crunch. Despite everything, Hall remains optimistic: ‘I sell books, and I think the book industry might have a good year: parents aren’t going to buy the big expensive gifts for little Johnny. I think they might come back to the Guinness Book of Records and the annuals. So I’m very upbeat about this Christmas.'


All Over the Shop is on BBC2 on Tuesday, 7.30pm