Arrington Consultancy

Arrington Consultancy You’ve built something real, but it relies too heavily on you.

We help owner run businesses across Devon and Cornwall tighten structure, reduce noise and take back control.

Over the years I’ve employed hundreds of people, and not every resignation has felt the same.One that stayed with me was...
07/07/2026

Over the years I’ve employed hundreds of people, and not every resignation has felt the same.

One that stayed with me was someone who had worked hard for the business and came to tell me face to face that he was leaving for a competitor.

I respected that.

He could have sent a text or avoided the conversation, but he sat down, looked me in the eye and explained why he felt he had to go.

I listened.

When someone has worked inside your business, they see things from an angle you never can.

As the owner, I saw one version of the business. The people doing the work saw another.

Some of what he said was fair. Some of it was probably more about how things felt from where he was sitting.

By then, his mind was made up.

I wished him well and told him the door was open if he ever wanted to come back.

He never did.

What he said stayed with me, and it changed how we explained decisions and opportunities inside the business afterwards.

Too late for him, but maybe not for whoever came after.

Some people leave and the business is stronger for it.

This wasn’t one of those times.

There was no point being angry.

I took what was fair from what he said, left the rest behind and wished him well.

Looking back, that conversation wasn’t a failure.

It helped the business work better for the people who stayed.

Over the years I’ve employed hundreds of people, and not every resignation has felt the same.A member of staff once came...
07/07/2026

Over the years I’ve employed hundreds of people, and not every resignation has felt the same.

A member of staff once came to tell me, face to face, that he was leaving for a competitor.

He could have sent a text, avoided the awkwardness and let the rumour mill do the rest. Instead, he sat down and explained why.

I listened, not because I thought I could change his mind, but because someone who has worked inside your business has seen it from an angle you never can.

Some of what he said was fair. Some of it was just how the business felt from where he was standing. Either way, I learnt something from it.

The uncomfortable truth is that most owners say they want honest feedback, right up until it comes from someone walking out the door.

That conversation didn’t save the working relationship, but it did improve how I thought about the people who stayed.

One of the first lessons business taught me cost £2,500.I’d just bought my first business when the clutch failed on our ...
30/06/2026

One of the first lessons business taught me cost £2,500.

I’d just bought my first business when the clutch failed on our newest vehicle. We’d put everything into buying the business and had almost no room for something ordinary going wrong. The bank wasn’t interested, so a friend lent us £2,500 at an interest rate I’d never agree to today.

It didn’t solve the problem. It got us into next week, and that week stayed with me far longer than the repair did.

From then on I carried more cash in the business than most people thought was sensible. My accountant would often ask why so much money was sitting there doing nothing.

My answer never really changed.

“Because you never know.”

For years it looked unnecessary. There was no proof it was the right decision.

Then COVID arrived.

The buffer meant we could keep making decisions instead of simply reacting to events.

It took me back to that first week, borrowing £2,500 and realising we hadn’t saved the business.

We’d just bought ourselves another week.

I lost a £120,000 a year account when I was 26 because of one drive to an airport.We had made provisions for bad traffic...
23/06/2026

I lost a £120,000 a year account when I was 26 because of one drive to an airport.

We had made provisions for bad traffic, but not quite enough. The passenger was late and the plane did not wait. The fault was ours and ours only.

I covered the cost to the company, apologised properly and spoke directly to the MD. At the time, I genuinely believed I had fixed it. I had taken responsibility, put my hand in my pocket and done everything I thought a decent business owner was supposed to do.

I had read the book and everything.

He accepted the apology.

He accepted the compensation.

Then he ended the relationship.

At the time I felt betrayed. Looking back, he was not punishing me. He was protecting his customers, his business and the food he put on his family’s table. I was irrelevant in that picture.

Business is not a social club. You can be friendly, but you are often not friends.

There were staff involved and internal mistakes that contributed to what happened. I could have pointed the finger and badly wanted to. Even at 26, I knew that was nonsense.

If somebody on minimum wage can make a mistake that costs your business hundreds of thousands of pounds, that is not really a staff problem. That is a management problem and, in my case, a Tom problem.

The real failure was not the late airport run. The real failure was allowing that much risk to sit in one place.

After that, every account booking had to be confirmed by email. Every account booking had to be signed off. We built paper trails where there had not been any.

Not because we wanted more administration.

Because I had learned what a missing process could cost.

A few years later, the same MD was let down by one of our competitors and gave us another chance.

The original incident was never mentioned.

It did not need to be.

We both knew what had happened, and he knew it would never happen again.

If I could speak to myself at 26, I would tell him it hurts now, and rightly so.

But one day you will thank him for it.

The closest I’ve come to being kicked out of a business was in the first hour.I walked in, looked at their pricing struc...
21/06/2026

The closest I’ve come to being kicked out of a business was in the first hour.

I walked in, looked at their pricing structure, and started pulling it apart before I’d understood why it existed. The owner let me dig a hole for a bit, then politely explained where I’d gone wrong.

If someone had walked into one of my old businesses and done the same, I’d have told them where to go too.

What I missed was that it didn’t matter if I was right or wrong. I hadn’t earned the right to have that conversation yet. Something built through years of hard work and risk isn’t getting torn down because someone new has rocked up with a better idea.

Most owners aren’t resistant to change. They’re resistant to someone dismissing years of decisions without understanding why they were made first. Those are two completely different things.

The tightrope between staff loyalty and damage control is brutal.Anyone who has run a business for long enough will know...
18/06/2026

The tightrope between staff loyalty and damage control is brutal.

Anyone who has run a business for long enough will know this one.

Sometimes the person causing the most damage is not useless. They might turn up, know the job and be loyal in plenty of ways.

That is what makes it hard.

But if their attitude damages customers, knocks staff morale and creates a culture where nothing is ever their fault, the owner cannot keep absorbing it forever.

There are limits to loyalty in business. Unless that loyalty puts the greater good first, it can become massively damaging.

In trying to be fair, I was causing constant conflict.Anyone who worked for me in the later years may give a wry smile a...
09/06/2026

In trying to be fair, I was causing constant conflict.

Anyone who worked for me in the later years may give a wry smile at the thought of me trying to be likeable, but my God did I try to be fair.

One thing I learned running the taxi business was that fairness without clarity can make things worse.

Drivers and operators were constantly clashing, and I kept trying to smooth things over. I wanted everyone to feel heard, see both sides and work together.

The problem was that I had created uncertainty.

Drivers were not always clear where they stood. Operators were not always clear where their authority started and ended. So the same problems kept coming back to me.

I thought I was being fair. Looking back, I was avoiding upsetting people.

Eventually we made the structure clearer. Operators had authority, but with boundaries and training around how to use it properly.

Management was not about barking orders. It was about judgement, consistency and responsibility.

Once the hierarchy became clearer, things became fairer.

Sometimes the fairest thing you can do in business is make it clear where everyone stands.

An old office kept because it was convenient and easier not to change. What I didn’t see quickly enough was what it was ...
04/06/2026

An old office kept because it was convenient and easier not to change. What I didn’t see quickly enough was what it was really costing me, and it wasn’t the straight up ££.

At Abacus, we kept the old office running longer than we should have. It had been our original base before we moved into the town centre, and when we opened the walk in shop it stayed open as well because there were reasons for it. Space in town was tight, parking was difficult, and the old place was useful around vehicle maintenance. It also meant I didn’t have to change everything at once, which felt sensible when the business was already busy.

The problem was that the real cost was not the rent. It was the distance it put between me and the shop floor.

I stopped catching some of the small stuff early enough. The mood of the team on a quiet morning. The customer who was not quite happy but had not properly complained. The little standards slipping that you only notice when you are close enough to feel the place.

When we finally closed it, operations tightened almost immediately and I could see the business properly again.

Looking back, I had been swapping visibility for space and convenience and not pricing it as a cost.

A decision that once made sense had quietly become part of the furniture, and I didn’t question it properly because it used to be the right call.

That is the bit I keep coming back to. Some of the things costing a business most are not always the obvious numbers on the P&L. Sometimes they are the old decisions nobody has rechecked for too long.

The reverse economy of scale.Last week I was talking to a business owner who was frustrated that, despite growing turnov...
02/06/2026

The reverse economy of scale.

Last week I was talking to a business owner who was frustrated that, despite growing turnover, things felt harder than ever to manage.

Customer issues were taking longer to surface, small mistakes were becoming expensive, and they felt constantly pulled into firefighting.

It reminded me of my own experience.

As my business grew, I assumed more sales and more people would naturally make things easier.

The reality was the opposite.

The further I got from the front line, the less visibility I had.

Problems I would have spotted immediately in the early days started slipping through the cracks.

By the time some things reached me, they had already cost money, time, or trust.

You can be busier, turning over more, employing more people, and still have less control than you had when the business was smaller.

Growth does not remove pressure on the owner unless the structure underneath grows with it.

Otherwise the business gets bigger, but the owner stays trapped in the middle of everything.

That is the work Arrington Consultancy does. We help owner run businesses put the structure underneath what they have already built.

A bit of a follow up from last week on the work with Core Gym.One of the first things we looked at was where the busines...
12/05/2026

A bit of a follow up from last week on the work with Core Gym.

One of the first things we looked at was where the business already had money, space or opportunity hiding in plain sight, which sounds clever until you realise a lot of business improvement is just standing in the right place, asking obvious questions and not pretending everything needs a twelve month strategy deck.

Core Gym already has the hard bit. A proper reputation, loyal members, real kit, a strong local name and people actually through the door. Our job is not to wander in like business wizards and start moving treadmills around for the sake of feeling useful.

It is much simpler than that. Find the small gaps. Tighten what is already there. Look at where time, space and attention are being wasted, then turn that into something practical.

Not glamorous. Usually where the money is though.

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