Fairway Furniture

Like many furniture retailers, we'd seen sales surge through the pandemic, followed by a contraction as things normalised. On top of that, natural turnover meant we'd lost a lot of experienced salespeople over the previous few years, and recruiting people with "big ticket" retail skills was getting harder in a tight labour market.

We'd used external sales trainers before and seen the value, and I'd known of Adam Hankinson's reputation for some time. After an initial call and some reference checks, we brought FSS in to upskill the whole team.

Adam spent several days scoping the programme with our senior leadership, then time in each store observing how our sales and management teams worked, before designing the training itself. Every group that went through the two-day course was a genuine mix across our stores and experience levels — and it mattered to us that our senior team did exactly the same course as everyone else.

We ran the training intensively, and our like-for-like sales moved from low-single-digit growth to high-single-digit growth by our year end. Trading conditions across the sector were tough that year, so we feel our relative outperformance was down in large part to the FSS training. Into the following year, that improvement has held, with a particular lift in add-on sales in the areas where they'd traditionally been weakest.

I'd have no hesitation recommending FSS to any business that wants the best from its sales team. It's a genuine investment, but the payback came quickly for us, and it leaves you with a strong framework to keep building on. We've built in biennial refresher workshops with FSS as our team continues to change and grow.