Arrington Consultancy

Directions Website

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.

We thought we had landed a licence to print money.A shipping company operating from Falmouth Docks needed its Romanian c...
05/08/2026

We thought we had landed a licence to print money.

A shipping company operating from Falmouth Docks needed its Romanian crew transported to and from Luton Airport for shift changes.

Sometimes we had several vehicles going up and several returning. Long-distance fares, passengers in both directions and very little empty mileage. On paper, it was brilliant work.

The journeys were profitable. Getting paid was another matter.

We paid the drivers and bought the fuel immediately, but could wait up to ten months for our invoices to be settled. At times, the company owed us tens of thousands of pounds.

They were not deliberately withholding payment. The shipping company was waiting to be paid itself and the money simply was not there. That made it understandable, but it did not remove the risk.

Eventually, we had to refuse further work until the balance came down.

I handled larger companies differently. When FTSE 250 companies left invoices unpaid because of oversight or poor internal processes, I continued accepting work but made it clear that I would take legal action if necessary.

That always resulted in payment.

A legal threat would not have made money appear at the smaller shipping company. Instead, I spoke honestly with the CEO about the pressure it was putting on our business. The balance was always paid and the relationship survived.

Payment terms give you rights. They do not put money into a customer’s bank account.

A profitable job is not necessarily good business if you have to finance the customer for nearly a year.

One thing we’ve learnt from being inside businesses is that owners are often the last people to see just how much still ...
28/07/2026

One thing we’ve learnt from being inside businesses is that owners are often the last people to see just how much still relies on them.

When you’re making the decisions, solving the problems and keeping everything moving, it’s difficult to stand back and judge objectively how dependent the business has become on you.

That’s exactly why we created the Owner Check.

It gives you the chance to step back and look at the business in a different light.

It doesn’t judge your business. It simply helps you understand where you stand.

Sometimes the result confirms you’re already building something that can stand on its own.

Sometimes it highlights dependencies you hadn’t noticed.

Either way, you’ll come away with a clearer picture of where your biggest opportunities lie.

If you’re curious, you can try the Owner Check here:
https://www.arringtonconsultancy.com/owner-check

Do the results reflect your business? We’d be interested to hear what you think.

I watched an owner explain away a stock problem the other day.I say problem. I mean completely empty shelves.On the surf...
23/07/2026

I watched an owner explain away a stock problem the other day.

I say problem. I mean completely empty shelves.

On the surface it sounded like a practical issue. Of course it wasn’t.

Cash was clearly tight. That is bad enough, but what bothered me was that this was a profitable part of the business. Customers wanted it. The margins were there. Yet the business wasn’t giving itself the chance to benefit.

It struck me that this wasn’t really a stock problem.

It was a relationship problem between an owner and their business.

Sometimes owners become so tired of the business they’ve built that they stop making the obvious commercial decisions. They chase other things, avoid the basics and make excuses for problems they already understand.

From the outside it can look like they don’t care.

I think the truth is often harder than that.

They cared once. More than that, they loved it.

After years of pressure, responsibility and sacrifice, they can start to resent what the business has become.

That’s one thing I never expected when I started Arrington Consultancy.

Sometimes it feels less like consultancy and more like relationship counselling between an owner and their business.

Not coaching. Not therapy. The idea of that makes my skin crawl. We stay firmly in the commercial world.

But boy does the relationship matter.

Sometimes it can be repaired. The business gets better structure, clearer responsibility and stronger control, and the enjoyment slowly comes back.

Some marriages cannot be saved though. If you’ve caught your spouse with the pool boy and your credit card, it’s probably time to look for the exit ramp that isn’t going to financially destroy you.

Businesses can be exactly the same.

In that case the job isn’t to force the love back. It’s to get the business into the best possible shape for sale and make the split as valuable as it can be.

Either way, pretending the problem is stock, software or the next opportunity won’t fix it.

The real question is whether the relationship can be repaired, or whether it’s time to prepare properly for what comes next.

I was sound asleep over the festive period when a customer I knew to maybe say hello to felt it was acceptable to messag...
16/07/2026

I was sound asleep over the festive period when a customer I knew to maybe say hello to felt it was acceptable to message me at 4am, ranting about a late taxi.

My warped sense of what was normal meant I replied and then rang the office to sort it.

The following morning, my wife asked who had been messaging me at that hour. I explained, and she said: “How can anyone possibly think that’s acceptable? What if I contacted the CEO of Marks and Spencer with a complaint?”

She has an art of hyperbolising the extent of a breach of boundaries, but she was also completely right.

At the time, we were handling around 10,000 customers a week and somewhere along the way I had confused caring about customers with being personally available to them at any hour. Once people know they can reach you directly, it is very difficult to walk that back.

It took a 4am message over Christmas, followed by my wife’s reaction the next morning, to make me draw the line properly. We still smile about the Marks and Spencer line, but she was right and I should have done it sooner.

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.

Address

0
Ivybridge
PL21

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 5pm
Tuesday 9am - 5:30pm
Wednesday 9am - 5pm
Thursday 9am - 5pm
Friday 9am - 5pm
Saturday 9am - 2pm

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Arrington Consultancy posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category