Hallidays client Paper Salad, designers and publishers of greeting cards and gift wrap, celebrate their anniversary this month after freelance designers Claire Frost and Karen Wilson launched their business from a small studio in Houldsworth Mill, Stockport 10 years ago.
Overcoming financial challenges along the way, last year Paper Salad sold over 1 million cards, won the Industrial Award for Gift Wrap ahead of big names such as Marks and Spencer and are looking forward to turning over their first million. Their current customers include UK businesses Waitrose, Sainsbury’s and Waterstones and have plans to expand their market by selling their products online.
Karen Wilson (left with business partner Claire) describes the impact that meeting Hallidays’ Managing Director Nigel Bennett has had on their business:
“Nigel has a great handle of our business and has played a pivotal role in ensuring we focused on what was important to us and our business to make it succeed. It has been a huge help to us to know we had someone to talk to when we needed it.
“We have also regularly attended Hallidays’ Business AM events, a forum to learn how to develop a successful business. Never having run a business before, at the start all the goals and developmental work seemed pie in the sky. We have quickly realised that what we have learned and implemented has had a positive impact on our business and has contributed to how far we have come.”
Hallidays’ helped Paper Salad to reassess their business plan, condense their product range, recruit new staff and dramatically improve their finances, resulting in them reducing the time they spent running the business and enabling Karen and Claire to concentrate on what they do best: designing. Hallidays HR division profiled Paper Salad’s team to help Karen and Claire understand better how their people communicate and interact with each other.
Claire explained:
“The profiling really helped us to manage our team more effectively and for all of them to work together better. We now also have job descriptions, contracts and appraisals in place, and the contracts for homeworkers has further improved our turnaround. Hallidays feel like an extension of our own team which is why it makes it easy to work together.”
Nigel Bennett, (left) MD Hallidays commented:
“Many people who start up in business are experts in what they do; Karen and Claire were fantastic designers. But the skills you bring into a business are often not the skills needed to make it a success. This can often be a steep learning curve and the reason why so many new businesses fail in the first few years, struggling to take on all the new ideas and approaches that are key to developing and running a successful business.
“Karen and Claire had two distinct qualities that made them easy to help, they were open minded and they took action. When I first met them I provocatively described their business as a hobby – it is now a well-managed and successful business that will achieve the goals that Karen and Claire described when we first met in 2009. And the bonus for me is that I get to achieve one of my goals – to support local businesses to fulfil their potential.”
Looking back over the last 10 years, Karen added:
“After all our hard work from starting in a tiny studio with two drawing boards to the 8,000 sq ft premises we now occupy, the measureable results have gone up year on year since 2010, doubling in 2010/11 and rising another 70% in 2011/12. Since then they have continued to double each year. We are now inspired as to what more we can do to improve the business.”