Bringing Britain’s oldest bookshop back to life

“Quickly I realised that I was more the custodian than the managing director, which brings with it a huge responsibility.

“My initial intention had been to make the bookshop a little bit more inviting; new lights, layout, etc. I soon discovered it was going to need more than that, and it was probably more challenging than starting a new shop from scratch!”

After using the quieter months of the pandemic as an opportunity to sort out the bricks and mortar of the building, Steve started the Help to Grow: Management Course at the University of Winchester Business School in 2022, with the aim of restoring the shop to the success of its glory days.

“As soon as I heard about the course, I knew that I absolutely needed to be on it. Most of my retail training goes back to early on in my career, and while it was good, it was a bit dated.

“The course was exactly what I needed to both reinforce what I thought I already knew and get my skills up to date.”

The lessons on creating a mission, vision and values were instantly helpful for Steve, helping him to formalise what he was already trying to create.

Being Britain's oldest bookshop and Jane Austen's bookshop is intrinsic to their identity but, while this might bring customers to their door, Steve is clear that it’s excellent service that will keep them coming back or recommending it to friends.

“We had all inherited the ‘P&G Wells way of doing things’, but that had never been written down. Writing it down gives everybody the chance to think about what it means. We aim to maintain the traditional values, but within a modern business. Now, when I bring new people into the team, they’re instantly on board with the way that we do things.”

With 17 staff on the books, team morale has also benefitted from the management lessons Steve learned on the course.

“I have worked for so many organisations where it's all top-down micro-management, and it feels like you're not trusted. Since the course, I’ve tried to give members of my team an area of responsibility and say ‘this is yours, if you need my help and support I'm here’.”

Getting the foundations right then enabled Steve to work on a number of other projects, inspired by his learnings from the course.

“One of the key takeaways was from a case study, where they spoke about the power of small incremental changes rather than one big change.  

“I think that approach really helped. That was when we started growing sales rapidly. I'd been looking at year-on-year growth of around 5% and thinking that was okay, but a year after we started doing all these little things, we hit 17%.”

One of the most profitable changes was to fully embrace the shop’s links with Jane Austen in time for the 250th anniversary of her birth last year.

“We worked with the local tourist information office and other organisations to make sure that we were on the Jane Austen trail.

“When I took over the shop, there were a couple of shelves with her books on, and that was it. We've got two bays now, so around a dozen shelves right at the front of the shop. Our Jane Austen sales are now as much in a day as they used to be in a month.”

It’s not just Jane Austen sales that are up. The year after the course, overall sales were up 17% year-on-year, but in the last two years this figure has stood closer to 30%.

“This is significantly faster than the norm for bookshops, so that tells me that we're getting something right. The focus the course gave me has definitely helped us to progress more quickly.”

The module on digitisation has also proved useful in a shop that was still taking customer orders in a handwritten ledger when Steve first took over.

“We’d been going through the process of digitising the business before I started that course, as it was desperately needed, but that module was really helpful in sense-checking that what we were doing was on the right track.”

Changes implemented as a direct result of the course include the introduction of a new digital payroll system, a switch to a different online accounts system, and a change of accountants – to someone Steve met through the course.

“We're still old-fashioned and traditional at the front, but behind the scenes everything flows a lot more seamlessly now.”

Steve’s advice to anyone considering the course is “do it, even if you don’t think you need to.”

“I realised very early on that, even where I thought I knew something, it was probably about 20 years ago that I last studied it.

”The biggest thing for me has been the realisation that there’s always more we can do, and the importance of tracking everything, so if something isn’t working as well as it should we can spot it and look at why.”

It’s an approach that’s working well, with the shop recently nominated as one of the best independent bookstores in the South East of England, and one of the best nine independents in the country.

“I believe those nominations are a direct result of the changes we’ve implemented from being on the course and our subsequent striving for continuous improvement.”

Future plans include building on the rise in bookshop tourism.

“We can't make massive changes. We're in the building we're in, that's our USP, so our focus has got to be about what we can do to boost growth within the space we have. The focus for the next year is going to be to make sure that the people that visit us have a great experience and tell all their friends about it.”