Storytelling for business is all well and good when it’s going well and you’re getting your message across in the way you expect it to be received.
But what happens when your story makes an impact for all the wrong reasons.? That’s what happened to Mark Turnbull from Turnbull’s Northumbrian Food, in the North East of England.
He tells Katie Flamman how he dealt with the backlash from his most expensive pork pie creation to turn it into a positive; Mark also shares his journey from a high street shop to an out-of-town food hall and how storytelling played a pivotal role in his marketing strategy.
Key Takeaways
- Adaptation is essential for business success: Mark Turnbull’s business experienced a significant boost during the COVID-19 pandemic by adapting to changing circumstances and capitalizing on domestic tourism.
- Storytelling is a powerful marketing tool: Mark highlights the importance of storytelling in marketing. Engaging narratives can capture attention, generate publicity, and create a memorable brand image.
- Responding to controversy with authenticity: When faced with criticism over selling Britain’s most expensive pork pie during a cost-of-living crisis, Mark’s team quickly responded by pledging to donate the proceeds to the local food bank. This authentic response turned a potential negative into a positive story that garnered widespread media coverage.
- Marketing is essential for business growth: Regardless of how great your product or service may be, effective marketing is crucial for business growth. Mark emphasizes the need to promote your business and ensure that potential customers are aware of what you offer.
Guest Information
Check out Mark Turnbull’s family business, Turnbull’s Northumbrian Food, here: turnbullsfood.co.uk
Follow Mark on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/markpturnbull/
Want to go from Shopkeeper to Retail Pro?
Join Mark’s Retail Success Club at Impact Retail Training:
Website: www.impactretailtraining.com
Email: mark@impactretailtraining.com
Your host:
KATIE FLAMMAN (she/her) – Voiceover Artist, Presenter, Announcer, Podcaster, Founder of Storyteller Media.
Website: www.katieflamman.co.uk
Podcast: https://katieflamman.co.uk/the-storytelling-for-business-podcast/
Voiceover services: https://katieflamman.co.uk/voiceover-services/explainer-videos/
Presenting services: https://katieflamman.co.uk/presenting/
Get in touch for a FREE demo read of your script:
Email: katie@katieflamman.co.uk
Phone: +44 (0)1892 249 001
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katie-flamman/
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Transcript
“Hello, and welcome to Storytelling for Business, the podcast that helps you build better customer relationships by telling stories your clients want to hear. I’m Katie Flamman. I’m a voiceover artist specializing in corporate storytelling.
I’ve worked with clients like Sainsbury’s, Abel and Cole and Schwartz, helping them to share brand stories and business developments. But why is business storytelling important? What makes a great story?
And how can storytelling create leads for businesses and build lasting client relationships? I’m on a mission to find out the answers and I’ll be sharing my discoveries along the way. In today’s episode, we’re talking food retail with entrepreneur and coach Mark Turnbull from Turnbulls of Anick.
So let’s get started. Mark Turnbull’s story is what you might call a classic. His family butchers, Turnbulls of Anick, was founded in 1880 when Queen Victoria was on the throne.
Electric lights were a wacky new invention and the average wage was 42 pounds a year. It’s hard to believe then that six generations later, Mark’s business is still thriving despite competition from supermarkets, society pressures to eat less meat and of course the pandemic. So let’s find out the next chapter in this story of resilience and reinvention.
Mark, welcome to the podcast.
Hi Katie, how are you?
I’m really good, thanks. Thank you so much for being here.
Oh, you’re very welcome. Thanks for having us.
Well, I want to start by just finding out what is your business? Can you tell me a little bit more about it?
So I think as you said in the introduction, we were actually established back in 1880 by a guy called Roger Turnbull who I think was my great, great granda. Business was then passed down to my great granda and his brother, Murdy and John Turnbull. It was then passed down to my granda, Bobby Turnbull.
Then my dad, John, and his two brothers, Roger and Peter Turnbull took over the business in mid 1970s. I think that would be about five or six, mid to late 1970s. They actually acquired the shop next door in Annictown Centre, a little town in Northumberland.
And they knocked the two shops into one and we became a much bigger shop. We expanded back in late 1970s. We opened a sandwich bar, which looking back is really interesting because it was probably quite forward thinking at the time.
I don’t feel I’ll always give my dad and his two brothers enough credit for where they put the business back in the day, if that makes sense. And we also opened a green grocery. So we became a bit of a mini food hall, if you like, I guess, back in the late 70s.
I joined the business in 1987.
So how old were you then?
I was 16. So it’s funny because I’ve reflected on this quite a bit lately, just out of interest more than anything. But I did walk away from school with at the time was six, I think it was five or six O levels, including a grade A English literature.
Back in the day, you could get a grade A English literature, even though your language wasn’t very good. I always struggled with my spelling at school. And anyway, I walked away with six O levels.
So I probably could have gone on to do university and stuff like that. But it was never an option in my head. From about the age of 14, I’d work Saturdays and school holidays.
I used to get paid a pound an hour. And I could work 40. But then I could get my money.
I could go through Newcastle city center and I could, I was into clothes as a 16 year old. I was into music. I loved the Pet Shop Boys.
The Pet Shop Boys were just like massive in my life. And back in 1987. So I’d spend my money on records, records cassette CDs as they started coming in and clothes.
I guess I was blinded by that a little bit back then. And that was just, I’d made my mind up at 16. I was going to work in the family business.
Was it ever an option at all? Like from your parents, was there pressure on your parents to just take over? Or was it just kind of like naturally organic?
This is what’s happening.
I would say it was naturally organic. There was certainly never any pressure. It was decision I made.
I’ve never regretted that decision.
It’s really interesting because I’m talking to all kinds of different businesses and kind of startups and people who just run the business by themselves. And to have that kind of, that story, that history of the family business behind you, do you think it made it difficult going forward to try and reinvent things? I mean, you talked about your kind of forward thinking dad and his brothers opening up a sandwich shop.
And how have you found that in terms of kind of the pressure maybe from the family or that weight of history?
Yeah, I was just about to say, I’ve never felt any pressure whatsoever. It’s just not in my nature. Really, I’m just, I do what I do.
It was a natural progression, I guess, as I look back, it’s like, it’s almost like I was, I was charging ahead without thinking where the business had come from at times. So, so.
Yeah, always looking to the future.
Yeah, absolutely. And back in, I think 1988, I’d been in there about a year and we started, I’d always been into computers, strangely enough. I guess it probably explains a lot when it comes to being hands-on as a butcher.
I’m certainly not the country’s best butcher. In fact, I have no desire to be known as a great butcher. I can do everything I need to do.
I’ve learned it all. But I always had an interest in computers. And I think back in 1988, we introduced computers, which at the time we were probably quite forward thinking.
We got payroll, we won a Sage, everybody that has heard of Sage accountancy, Sage payroll. We were one of Sage’s first clients back in 1988 or something. So, and I drove all of that forward.
So I very quickly at a young age at about 17, got involved on the actual business side of things.
So do you think of yourself as a business owner, an entrepreneur or a butcher or something else?
Oh, business owner and entrepreneur first. Butchery just happens to be a food retail just happens to be the vehicle that I’ve got into. And it is what I know best.
I look back as well, I guess my mom, my mom when I was growing up, mom was she opened, she had a bookshop. So I remember growing up being very little and she owned a bookshop. And we used to spend school holidays, we’d be sat in the bookshop sometimes.
I have like vague memories of that. And then when we were a little bit older, she opened a fitness center, she did her training down in London. She became a fitness instructor.
And this was probably early eighties, which once again, she was very forward thinking. So I guess I had a bit of an entrepreneurial background I’d grown up seeing my mom and dad drive businesses forward. So it’s probably had, it’s probably had an impact on the direction I took.
So take me on a virtual tour of your food hall. If you come in through the door, what sights and smells do you assault your senses when you step inside?
So the vision behind the food hall, we very much wanted it to be, I didn’t want to call it the Turnbull’s Northumbrian Food Hall, it didn’t really at the time feel, maybe it’s wanted something a little bit more sexier or trendier, I don’t know than Turnbull’s Northumbrian Food Hall, but we had to run with it in the end because it summed up what we wanted to do. We wanted to showcase local Northumbrian produce. Northumberland has got much better at doing it.
Places like Scotland, Wales, Yorkshire, regional food sort of through the 2000s became 2010 onwards of stock, real growth because they’d pumped some money in. The Thumbland County Council actually did a great job or have done a great job over the last sort of probably six to 10 years, I guess, certainly the last decade of driving forward the Northumbrian food brand. So we wanted the food hall to be a showcase of Northumbrian food.
Obviously it started-
What is it? What is Northumbrian food?
Well, we start, so you walk through the door, we’ve got fresh fruit and vegetables, for example. We will buy Northumbrian, it’s quite difficult at the minute. I think I have leeks and Swedes in there.
I have strawberries from Spain. So it’s like, you know, wherever possible, we want to showcase local foods, just fruit and veg. Obviously all our meat, our beef, our lamb, we buy still out of the local auction mod.
Pigs we buy from local abattoirs. We deal direct with some farmers both in Northumberland and we buy some out of the borders. Now Northumbrian actually stretches from the Hull to Edinburgh.
So Northumbrian gives us a slightly, legally gives us a slightly bigger area to work with. We buy a lot of cattle, you know, direct out to farms in the borders. We get some fantastic beef off of, we’ve built up a great relationship with the farmer up in the borders.
So, you know, all the meat is local. Then we take that meat and then we process it into things such as bacon, sausages. We do pies, cooked meats.
So a whole range of things. And then on top of that, we buy, you know, we sell a lot of local cheeses, dairy produce. So I guess the idea is that we, there’s still, you know, we’re not a supermarket first and foremost.
We are very much a specialty retailer. But at the same time, we want you to be able to cook a fantastic meal using wherever possible local ingredients. I guess that’s the aim.
But once again, the idea in the home and gifts section is we want to, wherever possible, showcase local, local people’s, you know, local craft wherever possible. So the business grew and grew and grew. And I now tell the story that it was the journey of, you know, a family butcher at a million pound food hall.
So that was the journey from the mid nineties. The food hall location, “if we fast forward to probably about 2014, 2015, the business had grown to such a size where it was, where did we go from there? What was the next step?
Anick as a town, as probably many market towns around the UK, was developing out of town. I think it was about 2008. There was a big Sainsbury’s in August, had opened.
There’d been a big sports centre had opened.
So it was very much going down retail parks and the town centre was definitely in decline. I would always give a positive message out that, you know, the town centre was the life and soul of Anick. And I guess deep down, my business brain was constantly asking the question, where is this going?
Where is this going?
I don’t know if it’s too dramatic to say adapt or die, but you decided that the next chapter in your business story needed to be an out of town food hall. And is the food hall thriving?
So it is now, but it’s been a journey. So we opened, we take it back where it, it was a roller coaster ride to get there. And I guess what I’ve learned is that, you don’t double in size overnight and it’s easy.
That isn’t going to happen, you know. Brought a designer in to design the food hall, who had come highly recommended. His costs spiraled out of control to the point where we couldn’t afford it.
And I think it cost us 10,000 pounds just to get out of, just we had to pay them 10,000 pounds just for some plans that they’d drawn up. So I literally ended up as being project manager. This was before we’d even stepped on site to start kitting the place out, you know.
So we delayed it. Eventually we got in in October 2019 to start kitting the place out. My initial goal when I look back was crazy, but it was to do the, was to take an empty shell and to kitt the place out in six weeks and people kept telling us I couldn’t do it.
And as your costs start spiraling, you deal with them. What I do chuckle when I look back on how we managed. A large focus of the finance was on NatWest.
We’d applied for 150,000 pound NatWest loan came through weeks after we’d opened, weeks after we’d opened, just before Christmas, I think we managed to get the money through. So in the meantime, I got the bank of dad, literally went to my dad and said, dad got this problem NatWest loan hasn’t come through. Can you help us out?
And my dad’s lived and breathed the business all his life. And he didn’t mind at all. He just handed his pensions in and handed over 150,000 pounds.
Sorry, I do get a bit emotional when I tell this story. So that was great. We had the 150,000 pounds.
The problem was when the 150,000 pounds came through from NatWest, I’d spent that already. We’d overspent and I’d used. So when the NatWest money came in, that was so I’d actually spent my dad’s 150,000 pounds.
So the overspent came from the…
Pressure.
That’s pressure. At that point, that was pressure. We’d focused on getting open for Christmas and like literally from the 6th of September till the 24th of, sorry, the 6th of December till the 24th of December, the focus was just on Christmas.
Then we had to get New Year out of the way. And then January, it’s kind of like the calm after the storm, but it’s our quietest month. So we hit January.
Now M&S hasn’t opened. M&S planned their opening for the end of January, beginning of February. So for eight weeks, we literally sat.
There was, there is a Starbucks drive-through on the estate. It opened probably about three weeks before us.
But nothing else.
Nothing else, nothing else there at all. No M&S, just Turnbulls and Starbucks. So we actually, when I look back, I’m quite proud of how we managed to trade.
But what was worrying for myself that I didn’t share with anybody at the time was that the two businesses, the Town Centre Shop and this brand new food hall, were trading at similar levels. So it was like, all of a sudden you’ve got these little doubts in the back of your mind saying, have we made a mistake here? We’ve doubled in size and all of a sudden the Town Centre Shop and this brand new food hall are trading at similar levels.
So this was in January, so.
January 2020.
January 2020, I went away skiing, myself and my son. I got back and two key members of staff handed the notice in. It was a Friday morning, I got the phone call.
Two key members, there was a full-time baker and a full-time butcher. And the butcher had been with us for 20 years. We’d lost a few key members of staff, which we knew we would because it was a change in business.
But this was a blow in February for me personally. So I had all these challenges, two key members. And I remember going to bed every night in February.
And literally, my mum brought us up as a religious person, but I don’t go to church and I don’t really pray. But I can tell you in February of 2020, every night I went to bed and said a prayer every night. And my prayer, I wasn’t bothered about the food or all the business or anything.
All I wanted was to get my dad’s money back. At that point, nothing else mattered. Just wanted to get my dad’s money back.
Every night I would go to bed. And it’s funny you know, I’ve got to be careful how I put this, but COVID wasn’t sent by God to save Turnbulls, but COVID did save Turnbulls. And it got my daddy’s money back.
And it’s not something I’m proud of because I know a lot of businesses struggle through COVID. So I have to be careful how I tell, how I share this story. But for me personally, you know, it saved our business.
There was three crucial things happened to us that saved the business in 2020. The first one was the, we’d set this up as two separate businesses. Both businesses got a grant of 25,000 pounds.
So 50,000 pounds had come in. And then I remember driving through, listening to Five Live and they announced the government bounce back loans. Now we’ve got to remember is I’d spent about three or four months trying to borrow 150,000 pounds off NatWest.
And literally I got back from the fruit and vegetable market and I picked the phone up and phoned our finance director. And I said to Tricia, I said, bounce back loans. She literally applied one 50,000 pound loan for each company.
And by the end of the day, we had 100,000 pounds in the bank account. So that there’s my dad’s 150,000 pounds has come into the business. Yeah, the VAT had become a big problem for us because of the way there were massive VAT costs in setting the food hole up.
And we managed to defer the VAT payment because of COVID. And that was the third thing that allowed us to save the business. Of course, what happened is all of a sudden, everybody who was being told not to go to work was stuck at home.
The weather was fantastic. They announced furlough and all of a sudden, everybody’s at home with nothing to do. What did they start doing?
They started cooking at home. The restaurants were shut. And I remember a good friend of mine, he said, you know, for all these years, we thought a supermarket has been our mainstream competition.
And in actual fact, they weren’t our competition. Restaurants were our competition.
That’s so interesting.
Yeah. Like you will be going in on a Monday and you were selling more steak on a Monday than what you’d ever sold on a Saturday before because every day was the same. So like quite literally, our business took off.
Into June, we thought we were busy. Then, I don’t know whether you remember, things kind of slightly opened up for the summer.
In the summer.
But of course, there was no international travel. So what happened is everybody decided to come on holiday to Northumberland.
It’s a very beautiful part of the world, isn’t it?
Absolutely. I mean, it’s a ma- You know, tourists, the tourism industry for us in Northumberland, it’s huge.
The coastline is just beautiful. Coast and castles, we always get great weather, but it’s never as bad as what people make it out to be. Well, the summer of 2020, the weather was fantastic.
So we got overrun. People couldn’t go abroad. Bed and breakfast, hotel, everybody was selling out.
And we thought we were busy in 2020. The summer of 2020, we thought we’d gone to an unbelievable level. 2021, we hadn’t gone to an unbelievable level.
2021, we went to an even higher level. 2022, it ramped up again. So every year we just got busier and busier and busier.
So COVID was definitely the tipping point. What would have happened without COVID? I’m sure we’d have been fine.
I’m sure the summer would have come and I’m sure we’d have traded successfully. But in my head, back in February of 2020, I didn’t think we were gonna make the summer. So quite literally at the time it did save the business and it kind of answered my prayers in a sort of roundabout way.
Well, I don’t know about praying, but it seems to me you owe your success to maybe some lucky breaks, but some strong business skills as well. And I think we make our own luck. And one of your major strengths is marketing, isn’t it?
You know, the key advice to any business is whether you’re in food retail, or you know, whatever you do, is the key is to market your business. Cause you can be the best at what you do, but if nobody knows about it, you’re never gonna grow your business. That would definitely be the advice.
How important is your story to that marketing?
Ah, stories. It’s much more interesting to listen to somebody talk who’s got stories to tell. And when it comes to marketing your business, it’s the same.
So I always want to tell a story. We do every year, we do a pork pie festival. Pork pies, they’re not massive for us, but when we do pork pie festival, we sell, we like literally sell lots of pork pies, but we do a range of about eight different pork pies.
And we decided to do Britain’s most expensive pork pie. I’ve had this idea in my head for a long, long time. And I’m a marketing guy now who does everything for us.
And he ran with it in August, 2022.
So what goes into Britain’s most expensive pork pie?
Well, yeah, this is the thing. There was caviar in it, funny enough. So I hadn’t had, I hadn’t done any of the work behind it.
My pork pie would have been completely different to the one we did, which worried us because I don’t think it would have been the best pork pie, but there was caviar literally on the top of the pork pie. Anyway, we made the pie, we made one for each shop and sold it at a price of a hundred pounds, 99.99, I think or something, a hundred pounds effectively. And Matthew put it out on social media and within five minutes he came to see us and he said, Mark, we’ve got a problem here.
He said, somebody’s just replied to the comment, how dare you do Britain’s most expensive pork pie when we’re in the middle of a cost of living crisis. Cause this was just kicking off back in August last year. And like literally it was an oversight.
So we told this great, he told this great story cause he was the marketing guy, but he hadn’t covered off this. You got to kind of, you know, when you tell a story, you have to think these things through. And we hadn’t thought it through properly, but like instantly.
And this is where you’ve kind of sometimes just got to think on your feet. I said, look, we haven’t thought this through, but here’s what I’m going to say to you. If we sell that pork pie, we don’t want the 100 quid for it.
Let’s just give it to the local food bank. So like literally he replied to the comment on social media and explained this. And it’s funny when we were only doing it as a bit of fun to get, to create a story that we could put out to the media and get some attention on the back of it.
So publicity effectively, we were buying publicity and the money from the pie was a rad. We didn’t, we weren’t bothered about selling the pie. In fact, I didn’t want to sell the pie because I knew how bad it would taste.
And we’d only made two and we couldn’t taste it. We should have made one and tried it first. So anyway, he’d replied to this comment to say that anybody who buys it, the money will be donated.
And she came back and it was like, we were all of a sudden, we were like golden balls, if that makes sense. David Beckham thing, we just transformed that comment. And like the next thing before we knew it, within a day, it had appeared in every single national newspaper that I can think of around the country, either online or actual physical printed in the paper.
And I think we ended up doing about two or three radio interviews and we did a radio interview on Radio Newcastle. And on the back of that, we sold both pies, which was a challenge because the pies at that point had been sat in the counter for five days. And I didn’t think they would have tasted very good on day one, but fortunately, both people didn’t want the pie.
They just wanted to give the money to the food bank. Lovely. So anyway, in the end, it was a great story, which I hadn’t thought it through very well at the start, but it’s a great example of how when you start telling stories, marvelous things can happen for your business.
You’ve come from a high street listed building to this amazing out of town food hall, and both the businesses are now thriving. Where do you see your business story going next? And where’s the story going to go in the next five years?
That’s a great question. So I do have a vision statement. One of the things that I’ve taken from my mastermind group across in America, retail mastermind group, is we all have vision statements.
So I know exactly where I’m going to be in five years’ time. The food hall will just continue as it is. I have no desire to open a chain of food halls.
I’m quite happy with what we’ve got. Still a little bit of uncertainty, but the goal is to make our food hall one of the best independent food retail outlets in the UK. That remains the target.
We’re getting close.
You’ve won awards, haven’t you?
We’ve won lots of awards over the years. The business is phenomenal. At times, it’s been hard work.
The last three years, there’s been a lot of hard work to get there. For me personally, we’ve managed to take the town center shop to a level where what I describe as run on rails. So everything just happened.
The food hall, I’ve had to drag there. So it’s been hard work for everybody in the business to get it. And it still is.
This is a five year project and we’ve still got to. We’re not there. We’re not out the woods yet.
But we know where we’re going. And the future certainly looks good now. But it’s a five year project and all the loans, all the finance we took was a five year project.
We’ve developed this million pound food hall and we’re getting close to the finish line. So we just want to keep developing that. We just want to get better and better at what we do.
On top of that, I’ve started a business coaching business. I’m now coaching around about six or seven independent food retail businesses. And I’ve launched what I call the Retail Success Club.
So I guess the coaching side of the business is I’ve got this 25, 30 years of knowledge and I just want to share it and give it back to other people to allow them to drive their businesses forward. So that’s a big part of the next five years as well for myself personally.
That’s fantastic, Mark. Thank you so, so much. It’s been really interesting talking to you and hearing kind of your storytelling perspectives from both sides of it, your own personal family history story, your own business journey, and also how you use stories in your own marketing.
So it’s been really super talking to you and thank you so, so much. So what did we learn from this episode? Today’s key takeaways are, one, even if your business is steeped in history, it’s important to move with the times and be prepared to start a new chapter in your company’s story.
And of course, to talk about it. Two, don’t panic if a story gets out of control. When Mark was criticised for selling Britain’s most expensive pork pie during a cost of living crisis, his team quickly responded to their audience and said they’d be donating the proceeds to the local food bank.
The publicity was great and all it cast was, well, quite a lot of caviar. If you’ve enjoyed the podcast series so far and hopefully learned something too, please like, subscribe and share. Coming up in our next episode.
And we say on the website, look, none of us wear Rolexes, which we don’t, we don’t drive Ferraris. And there’s nobody in the office called Tarquin.
That’s independent financial advisor, Dai Rose from Sterling Welsh. He knows a thing or two about how to avoid being pigeonholed and how to stand out from the crowd. There’s lots more from Dai in episode eight of Storytelling for Business, Authenticity, Owning Your Story.
That’s all for today. A massive thanks to my guest, Mark Turnbull. If you’d like to join Mark’s success club for retail business coaching, he’d love to hear from you.
His contact details and of course the website for Turnbulls of Anik are all in the show notes. And if you’re looking for a voiceover artist to tell your story, please get in touch. You’ll find my contact info in the show notes too.
I’m Katie Flamman and this is Storytelling for Business. Until next time, goodbye.”
From Storytelling For Business: Drama: A New Chapter, 4 Sep 2023
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