YouWish

Hi All

I am asked how it is that a soft handed marketing chair jockey like me ended up setting up a car rustproofing business. Well let me tell you a story…..

I didn’t know a great deal about rustproofing when I took my Landrover to the self appointed expert who had been advertising in the mags for 20 years. I do however know rather a lot about customer service and brand efficacy.

So I took my Landrover to him, handed over hundereds of pounds in cash (he only does cash- I wonder why?). I then returned to London and  turned up as agreed to pick it up the next day (at his ramshackle premises about 100 miles West of London at the time, since moved)  and received a disinterested response that it wasn’t ready or indeed even started and that another customer’s vehicle needed to be finished first. He also suggested he needed to have a sleep at lunchtime!

I sat around for 5 hours joined by the other customer who was himself the victim of a delayed delivery. Together over a cup of tea ( bought ourselves – no customer care here)  we discussed  this behaviour and concluded it was no doubt because there was almost no UK competition.

That said the job looked good and I felt unhappy but okay before he broke the news that after his treatment  no guarantee could be made as it was rusty already in places. It was made worse when some months later, when having a door glass replaced after a break in it was clear that no Waxoyl was present inside the door cavity. Two e-mails and a call later there had been no response from the provider. I then decided that enough was enough.

I committed there and then to set up a competitive business that would only operate to the highest standards and found a kindred spirit, an  Australian who had worked directly in the automotive trade for 15 years.

Together we  launched Rustmaster Ltd and created some real competition in the UK market.

To ensure that we had the best product, training and equipment we contacted Chris Mitchell, the man who had been responsible for Waxoyl’s sales and marketing drive in the 1970’s and from there found out about the fact that Waxoyl’s rights outside of the UK and been sold to a Swiss company, who unlike the UK owners, had continued to develop the product into the Waxoyl Professional trade only products.

After meetings with the top Waxoyl team in Switzerland, responsible for global distribution and training for their corrosion products across the world, we were given intensive training based upon this global experience – most significantly how their Waxoyl version was more costly than the UK product but much more effective if properly applied. We also received exclusive UK rights to these products.

Set up near St Albans to be handy for the M1/M25, the business is quality and service obsessed and by power of word of mouth and efficient digital advertising has been very successful. The competition’s reaction to us is proof that we are doing as intended and raising the stakes of what a 21^st century professional automotive brand should be about, in the technology we use and way we respect people’s custom.

Mr self appointed expert has been found lurking in the busihes outside our premises and is always looking to knock Rustmaster because clearly we are winning business that was otherwise his. Perhaps he would be better to deal with the issues that caused us to set up Rustmaster in the first place – after all his slack arsed complacency created it!

So next time a company fails you don’t just moan, take action and make sure they take some pain. This doesn’t mean set up in competition (always) but at least let them and anyone else who may be interested know. Word of mouth matters.

In the meantime if look under your car and if it looks at all crispy or you never want your pride and joy to get that way visit www.rustmaster.co.uk and book it in. Mention You Wish and get £50 off when you do (not in conjunction with any other offer mind – business is business!!).

Until next time. May you chassis never crumble.

Nick

…to my wish for a personal trainer!  3 responses, in fact.  Coupled with my weigh-in at Wibbly Wobbly club this morning, which told me I had lost 5lbs over the last week, and a slimmer, healthier me is starting to look more achievable.

Now that I have three responses, I think it’s time for me to get in touch with them all to see which I feel most comfortable with.  And then bite the bullet.

The one thing that bugs me?  I feel bizarrely guilty that finding a personal trainer may prove to have required so little effort

The May-June period of every year is fraught with retail fear for me. While others are busy buying up their holiday wardrobes, picking up sun block or choosing bestsellers to take to the beach, I’m starting the biggest retail challenge outside of Christmas.

From 17^th May to 11^th July, I have to sort out birthday presents for my son, my brother, a nephew, a half-sister, my Dad, my Grandad and my Mum. Add to that an anniversary present for my husband – and frequently one for me, too, to save his blushes – and sorting out Father’s Day, and this becomes both challenging and expensive.

Harvey, thankfully, is at an age where almost anything with wheels on would do the trick – and long may that continue! My brother can be nudged into updating his Amazon wishlist if I’m truly lacking inspiration. But the rest are more difficult.

Once upon a time, I had the time and the energy to think carefully and in great detail about what would please each recipient most, whether for birthdays or Christmas. I earned something of a reputation for choosing presents people enjoyed, and so people apparently anticipated that, whatever they opened from me, it would be something they liked, whether they had ever thought of wanting one before that or not.

This is obviously not sustainable. For one thing, inspiration can dry up for all kinds of reasons. For another, time and money may also come to play their part. I have married into a large family where they all see each other regularly, so cousins, aunts and uncles all expect presents as well. At the same time, while they all expect presents, not all of them apply much thought to the presents they give –including one lot I’ve caught recycling presents from one year to the next while just removing the sell-by labels – so I have been known to feel resentful of the efforts made when all I’ll get is the equivalent of the metaphorical pair of socks or cartoon tie.

Last Christmas, therefore, with time and money pretty tight, I decided to make presents for the majority of the family, buying things only for parents, siblings and children. The rest were given two different types of chutney, some gingerbread biscuits, some coconut ice and some vanilla fudge. Mr Melanie and I agreed that people would either genuinely appreciate the thought of a handmade gift that took hours to make, or would be too polite to say anything. We won, either way.

This was hugely successful, and it had the added bonus that Harvey was able to help out. And when my arthritis got too much to handle the coconut ice, even my husband got involved, so we could say the presents were truly a family effort. The family genuinely seemed to enjoy receiving something home-made… and I managed to sort out Christmas presents for 30 or so people for £150 total.

Birthdays, however, can’t as easily be handled. After all, Harvey views biscuits as a human right, not a present. My brother is rarely home to eat any culinary gift I might make him. My father’s birthday this year was his 60^th, so jam and sweets weren’t really going to be quite the thing, my 17 year old half-sister is not an easy one to guess at and… you get the picture.

You would have thought, with the advent of the internet, that these tasks became simpler, but it seems that’s just not the case. There are any number of sites that offer ‘present finder’ applications, where you broadly give them gender and age band and hope they come up with something not too hideous, but none of them are doing anything very clever. Also, the results they come up with depend in large part on what they have to offer on their site, which may in fact not have anything you’d want to give the person in question, but by the time you’ve gone through their results you almost feel you have to buy something there, if only to justify spending 20 minutes or more going through what they think a 60 year old male might like.

Findmeagift.com doesn’t really help me much: their ‘men’s gifts’ include such delights as a ‘boob stress reliever’ or a ‘breast mug’ or that other masculine must-have, the swearing parrot key ring. And there’s no way I’m buying Dad a ‘candy posing pouch’.

A question on Yahoo Answers asking about birthday gifts for a 60 year old man elicited such thoughtful responses as ‘three 20 year old girls’, haemorrhoid cream, Viagra or a massaging recliner. Notwithstanding the potential objections my stepmother may have to some of the options, Dad’s a pretty young 60, so off I went again.

There are, of course, various options to get a fake newspaper printed to mark the big day, just as there is the chance to get hold of a front page from the date he was born, but that again seemed to be just rubbing in the age thing, and I couldn’t see Dad glancing at it more than once, so that idea was binned.

In fact, overall, the quality of the recommendations was dire. About the only thing that showed any real thought was a recommendation for a site that produces custom jigsaw puzzles from photos you supply… but even then I wasn’t convinced. It’s not really Dad’s thing. And that’s ignoring all the nasty pre-designed gift packages containing CDs of music from the forties and a low-content history book about 1949 packaged with a photo album or maybe a framed collection of stamps from that year instead.

For all our technology, then, we still seem to have no further advance on finding the perfect gift for someone special. Not in any automated sense. I want to give something that says ‘I care enough to find you something you’ll really like’, not ‘I needed to find you something and ran out of ideas’. Not that I’m averse to a little help along the way, but it seems clear my expectations of what constitutes the perfect gift differ from those of the sites trying to sell me things.

The solution? In the end, I cast my mind back to Christmases and birthdays past. In fact, I had a pretty good track record for getting Dad something he liked, since by his own admission nobody ever bought it for him and yet it was what he really wanted. Callaway HX Hot Plus golf balls. Not exciting, no. But the genuine pleasure on his face said I had, finally, found the perfect gift.

I have a confession to make. You remember that blog post where I decided to post a wish for a personal trainer, just to see whether that might be a way forward for me? I so very nearly did it, but I’m ashamed to say I bottled it.

Was it asking too much of myself, I wondered? Would I really be able to find the time, or would work and life and motherhood get in the way again? Perhaps it would be better to give it another few months, given it’s going to be getting hot outside again soon (I hope!) and such weather wouldn’t be conducive to vigorous exercise for a lady of my proportions.

And you’re absolutely right. These are all cop-outs. The truth is that I sought and in short order found a few spurious reasons to stay away from exercise and ignore the spectre of the diet that really needs to happen if I am to avoid finding my own place in the Guinness Book of Records one of these days.

I am apparently that lazy. And it takes a special kind of laziness to not even bother to lift one’s hand as far as the mouse, click on a link and type a few words in to create a wish, then wait and read whatever results come in. How much effort does that take? It would probably expend about 5 calories, assuming I swung my arm a few times before letting it alight on the mouse.

Except that I’m not, in truth, a lazy person about most of my life: I work, I’m a mum, I cook, I sing, I write, I spend time with friends and there’s rarely a time when I’m not actively doing something. So why should this whole issue of diet and exercise be so different to other areas of my life? Is it because it’s difficult? I’ve done difficult, not scared of that. Is it the money? No – if hubby can justify buying a pack of fags a day, I can spend just as much on a personal trainer without feeling guilty. Do I want to stay fat? Hell, no. So what’s going on?

The fact is, there’s a nagging part of me that thinks any personal trainer I agree to meet is going to take one look at me and, once they’ve stopped crying with laughter, tell me there’s no hope and I should go straight to a gastric band without passing go. Or that if I ring round a few in Yellow Pages or have a look on Gumtree or somewhere, I’ll find nothing but toned and vacuous gym bodies who aren’t into doing clients who need quite so much work as me.

Fortunately, it seems one of my friends has started reading my blog posts on here. She has pointed out that the whole beauty of YouWish is that I get to post what I want and have no contact with people or companies until I’m ready and am sure I’m talking to someone who will accept me as I am and work with me.

No more excuses, then. If you’d like to join me and gain safety in numbers, the wish is here.