Personal Best: |
Giving the everyday runner the service levels an elite athlete enjoys has created a winning formula for Sam Hale and her squad at Advance Performance. |
During the 2012 London Olympics Samantha Hale was in her element, spending five weeks as a volunteer Gamesmaker at the equestrian centre in Greenwich. She still buzzes with excitement when describing working among the best horses and riders in the world.
“To walk round the stables and interact with these incredible horses was such an amazing experience,” she enthuses. “I was brought up in Cambridgeshire and from a very young age, my life was horses. As a youngster I rode competitively for a lady who was very particular about how everything was done. She taught me that the only way to do something was the right way and that has stayed with me all my life. It definitely influences how I operate Advance Performance.”
In the early 1980s, after leaving school, Sam’s passion for equestrianism led her to relocate to Hampshire to work as a groom to Tiny Clapham, a world-class eventer who was a member of the British team who won the silver medal at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. “I was comfortable being in a supporting role. It really suited me as I was very shy in those days. Looking after five or six expensive horses teaches you very quickly about responsibilities and, again, doing things correctly.”
When it became obvious that a stable girl’s life did not offer a realistic income or long-term job prospects, Sam returned to Cambridge and began working in retail, most happily in the toy department of Joshua Taylor, which at the time was a leading independent department store in the city. (It closed in the 1990s).
“My late mother June was a manager in Boots and also in John Lewis in Peterborough. As a young child I spent a lot of time behind the scenes, helping with basic tasks. I also worked in retail roles for Boots, John Lewis and Marks & Spencer during holidays,” she reveals.
All that experience has been used by her to create a business that is concerned with two-legged athletes rather than four-legged ones. Advance Performance has branches in Peterborough and Cambridge, which are both in 4,000sq ft out-of-town units. Peterborough is in a typical industrial estate “shed”, while Cambridge is housed in a restored mill. They trade seven days a week, with longer-than-normal opening hours. Sam stresses, however, that her success story has been a marathon, not a sprint.
“The concept was always to target runners, ranging from the serious club runner to the man or woman in the street trying to get fit. We want to be the running and triathlon store for everyone. In every case, however, the notion has been to provide a level of service that is normally restricted to elite athletes. We offer equipment, especially running shoes, and everything we do is backed by technical knowledge and real expertise.
“It’s taken about 15 years of hard work to get to where we are. The idea of being out-of-town was because we need a lot of space for our gait analysis machines, which enable us to analyse how each customer runs. We also take a lot of time, around 45 minutes to an hour, for each consultation, so free parking is useful. And we open late to fit in with customers’ working lives.”
The look of the premises is functional rather than fancy. Running shoes are the backbone of the business, accounting for 70% of sales. And these are strictly performance athletic footwear, not trendy sneakers. The footwear guru in the business is Matt Parker, who has amassed 18 years of experience at the firm and is so knowledgeable that foot-wear brands seek his opinion when developing new styles. Although by choice the business lacks an EPOS system, Matt’s own stock keeping methods and record-keeping are much admired by the company’s accountants. Incredibly, Matt has amassed over 130,000 paper records of customers’ purchases and these are now being digitalised.
The major brands at Advance Performance are “proper” running shoe suppliers such as Brooks, Asics, Saucony and Mizuno, augmented by niche labels such as Hoka, On and Zoot (all three are from the US). Megabrands with a strong fashion image like Nike and Adidas have only a small presence. The latest celebrity collaboration or design fad definitely does not impress the team.
“We never go down the trend route,” Sam insists. “We are open-minded to new ideas, but we know what we believe in. Matt is not afraid to tell the brands what he thinks to their latest gimmick. We stress to our customers that we are an independent, family-owned specialist business that can make our own decisions. They trust us.”
Given its hard-won reputation in the running community, it is not surprising that some 85% of new customers come through recommendation. The £2,000 gait analysis machines – essentially a treadmill running track with an iPad attached to film a customer’s running style from behind – are the starting point of the service. There are 26 bones and 33 joints in each foot; fitting shoes is a skilled job. The analysis allows the team to help a customer choose the best style to help prevent injury and discomfort from the 120 or so options that are kept in stock at each store.
“Problems of over-pronating (when the foot tends to roll inwards during walking and running) or supinating (when it rolls outwards) are very common,” says Sam. “We then have to find out how often the customer is going to run, on what surface, to hone in on the right shoe for them. We sell plenty of shoes to people who are not runners, but just want a comfortable shoe for everyday use because of dodgy knees or bad posture.”
Sam’s view of the Peterborough store: the mezzanine.
Prices for running shoes stretch from £100 to £150, with £115 being the most popular. Other product lines range from clothing, including triathlon swimming suits and running shorts, to goggles, heart monitors, books and nutritional snacks. To the uninitiated, it seems like a very exotic and esoteric mix, but for Sam it is merely providing the customer with everything relevant to running and related activities. Sales are split evenly between the sexes. The firm’s website is mainly for information about running, but does include some “simple” product lines such as reflective jackets. It does not contribute majorly to sales.
After a decade and a half of concentrating on its specialty, Advance Performance is the centre of an extensive running community. Its notice board is covered with details of local running clubs, events, and competitions and its feedback cards regarding service from its staff are awash with compliments. With a team of 18 across its two sites, it has experts in several specialist areas of interest to runners, such as sports science, physiotherapy, running coaching, injury avoidance and nutrition.
If Britain is a nation of shopkeepers, it is also a nation of runners, as shown by participation in the annual London Marathon (about 38,000 runners) and the Great North Run half-marathon (about 54,000). Even the Perkins Great Eastern Run in Peterborough, of which Sam is commercial director and her company a sponsor, attracts more than 7,000 runners.
Given this potential market, Sam believes that the time is right for Advance Performance to grow speedily beyond its two units. To that end, in recent months she has put together a formal board for the first time and recruited people with big-company experience - Maccs Pescatori (ex-Tate & Lyle) as non-executive finance director and Martin Chillcot (ex-Paul Smith and Thomas Cook) as director of marketing. We can expect some interesting developments in the new year.
Sam’s current top team, in addition to Matt Parker, includes Deb Miller, who has been with the company for 13 years and assists Sam with buying everything apart from footwear, and Tim Cook, who takes care of retail operations. He has been with Advance Performance for six years.
“On a day-to-day basis, Deb is the general manager, while I drive the business, with Matt as my trusted back-up as he’s so experienced. I feel we can grow bigger, but it’s taken us time to get to where we are, and we need other experience to move us on,” says Sam. “Every member of our team is incredibly valuable and plays their own important role in the business; with many of the team having worked for the business for well over six years.”
One of her own strengths, she explains, is that she understands every single part of the business – and that was learned in a very painful way. The company was set up from home, with the week’s housekeeping money, in 1998 by Sam and her ex-husband, with Sam playing her famous “back-up role” supporting her confident spouse. They graduated to a small shop in a suburb of Peterborough but in 2001 he unexpectedly exited both the marriage and the company, leaving Sam with a 10-year-old son, Ben, and a business that was rapidly growing. She was forced to ride a colossal learning curve.
“I didn’t know about running shoes and I didn’t know about running a business, but I was determined to learn,” she says, matter-of-factly. “It was sink or swim. Yet within a year, I was named East of England Businesswoman Entrepreneur of the Year.”
Winning awards has become a habit for Sam, including bira’s Bronze Independent Retail Business of the Year Award in 2016. She believes entering business competitions is a good way to self-analyse her business, it engages staff in wanting to do better, and it provides useful publicity and endorsement to customers.
As well as planning possible expansion, Sam has planned a reorganisation of how Advance Performance presents itself to customers.
“I want to present runners – of any level – with a holistic approach to serving all their needs. I want the stores to be seen as a hub for a range of complementary services and activities, not just to sell equipment. We all know that retail is not well paid, but my staff are passionate about what they do and want to share their knowledge of specialist areas with customers. We could, perhaps, have an area devoted to a ‘clinic’ on avoiding injuries. We want to explain sports science in everyday language.”
Although it is easy for an independent retailer to become introspective, to be weighed down with the day-to-day burden of getting everything done, Sam has worked hard to plug into various business networks, both regional and, in the case of bira, national. “I have been a bira member since 2004. At first the low-cost of its services attracted me, but I was really won over when I attended my first conference in 2013. It was just fabulous to meet so many people who ran businesses similar to mine, who had the same issues to deal with. It felt like a family and it felt like I could trust bira.”
The team spirit at Advance Performance, the networking among the running community, the linking up with other business groups and the fellowship of bira all help to explain how a shy single mother with no business experience has created such a successful enterprise.