a nationwide business when you’re based in Western Australia and the state guidelines are all different? Gavin Culmsee: There was some confusion early on. When the Victorian premier announced he was closing all non-essential services on Sunday March 22, I was at home watching the news. Then my phone started ringing, and I had the Victorian state manager on the phone, then the franchise recruitment manager based in New South Wales, then the franchisees started calling. On that day, we issued advice. We were issuing advice almost daily! I wrote something and sent it out but four hours later, they’d had a national cabinet meeting and I had to reissue advice after that. We went through a process of standing down casual staff, then standing down permanent people and getting down to a skeleton crew. In franchising, our strength is that the people who operate the business are the owners, so we got to the point where it was almost just the owners working – the husband-and-wife or mother-and-son teams. We have a lot of families in our business. Then Jobkeeper came out, which has been tremendous and very helpful for some of our more heavily affected guys, as it allowed people to come back to work. We pride ourselves on being family-focused and a lot of our team has been with us for a long time, so those decisions made by people who had an employee working for them for 10-14 years were heartbreaking. Our guys were devastated about having those discussions but to their credit, there have been a heap of times when I’ve been proud of my franchisees and management teams, where they’ve stood up and had difficult conversations with people close to them. Everyone has been aligned and gotten on with it. Our team members have been tremendous throughout it and very understanding of the pressure on a small business. There is certainly a challenge around understanding what’s going on state by state, interpreting that and giving guidance to the network. That was a constant requirement almost daily, especially in the early days. A lot of competitors closed their stores. Our decision was based around servicing customers, attempting to take market share and sustaining cashflow. The only thing that was definite was that if we closed our doors, we would have no cashflow. All our franchisees are small businesses and that would have put them in jeopardy. So, we implemented a lot of restrictions in-store around social distancing; we had disposable pillow protectors and there were piles of hand sanitiser around.  In the early days, there was almost a desperation from some customers. We had a lot of customers who had more people staying with them than usual because of lockdown and their parents were staying so they wanted a mattress straight away. There was a nervousness around being out shopping – the interactions were really quite brief, very demand-driven. People wanted to know what they could buy right now. The feedback from franchisees and customers about wanting to buy our stock was interesting. Our business model means we hold a lot of stock for immediate delivery, so they were pleased we could help them straight away. That was a point of difference for us, whereas a lot of our competitors make customers wait eight to 12 weeks. Because of the flexibility of our franchise network, we have franchisees who delivered products to their customers’ homes that night because their mum and dad would be arriving then. There were lots of nice stories around community interaction and our franchisees helping out people who couldn’t afford what they were buying. A lot of our guys stepped up. It was a tough time not just for our guys, but the community and that uncertainty was huge, especially in the early days. IRW: Where are people in Western Australia at the moment in terms of going out and shopping? GC: There’s a level of awareness around the health side of the pandemic, but what we’re seeing is the people who have benefited from it financially. If you have job security and a stable income, then you’ve made money. You may have cancelled your European holiday, and now you’ve got $10,000, so we’ve got more people coming through. Some people have more money than they had pre-COVID, and it’s cash in their pocket. For someone like me, there’s no kids’ sport, so all of a sudden, I’ve got my Saturday and Sunday mornings back. Depending on where you are in your life cycle, there are people who have benefited in some way or another. There are customers with a lot of cash out there, which is good for us. People have been at home for a period of time and they might be a bit tired of the mattress and their bedroom suite. I’m seeing numbers from CommBank and household goods spending is up 40-odd per cent. You only have to see the queues outside Bunnings – people are spending money in and on their homes, which is great for our business and our franchisees in particular after going through a tough time. IRW: A lot of retailers have been focusing on their e-commerce in this period of time. Where is Bedshed at with that side of things? GC: In our business, we’ve been rolling out a new POS system since February with a view to launch e-commerce in June. How’s that for timing? That was one of the main reasons for keeping our stores open, too. We think we’ll launch a tremendous e-commerce platform for our franchisees. In traditional e-commerce, you service from one warehouse and account, but our franchisees will get service from 36 warehouses and cash from customers’ payments will go straight into their bank account. It’s taken us some time to get there. These things are simple when you put them on a whiteboard, but the end results are going to be spectacular. We’re in the final stages of testing now and we’re getting ready to launch soon. IRW: How did your team respond to the pandemic? GC: I think the nature of franchising is that you don’t have an enormous head office structure. Our business is flat, including our entire accounts team. We have 15 people, then four who work interstate. During the pandemic, I suppose what I saw from my management team and franchisees was that ‘Let’s just get on with it and focus on the outcome’. I think we’ve got a high level of trust. We had a national members’ meeting in February when we talked about resilience and growing market share. The timing of that work on resilience was perfect. I wrote a note to the guys on Good Friday to say, ‘I never thought when we presented on resilience in February that we’d actually be utilising the tools just a couple of months later’. That level of trust and alignment is what got us through. That gives me an enormous level of pride around the work my management team and franchisee did in their businesses and communities. It’s a pretty cool feeling. IRW: Tell me about that work you guys did on resilience during the meeting. GC: We had a guest speaker called Cameron Schwab. He was an AFL CEO who has worked through his own issues. He’s had depression for a long time and worked through that. He presents from an honest level around what happens when you go through depression and how you have to stay focused on it to get through it. We also used a profiling tool called the Predictive Index, so we got to understand all our franchisees and management team. That’s also about sharing who you are and how you respond at work, so you understand your [team’s] triggers and how to work with them. In a franchise network, franchisees traditionally get very little personal development. In the corporate world, it’s normal. For the last couple of years, we’ve been trying to take our franchisees on a journey to grow them personally. You become a better dad, husband, wife or business owner or manager through growing yourself personally. Sometimes in franchising that gets ignored. Having people who don’t have as much self-doubt or don’t have a monkey on their back and are concentrating on their business, family or both, means we all benefit from that. That’s also about showing that you’re human and some vulnerability. To me, that’s being able to say when you get stuff wrong, especially during a pandemic. IRW: Bedshed has been around for 40 years and its stores are in most states, except for New South Wales. Do you see that changing in the future? GC: Last year, we employed a franchise recruitment manager based in Sydney and that’s purely about our New South Wales expansion plans. We needed someone on the ground who can meet people face to face at the blink of an eye. We’ve employed that person – he’s been on deck for almost a year now and we were actually doing a lot of progress in terms of franchise recruitment pre-pandemic. It’s tapered off a little bit, but what we see are some exciting opportunities in terms of retail property and network expansion in New South Wales. As always, when times are tough, the cream rises to the top and people who are struggling will struggle to come out on the other side. Some property opportunities will arise out of that. Now we’ve got to get back on track with our recruitment network. Southeast Queensland, northern New South Wales and Sydney metro are our targets over the next couple of years. IRW: How would you describe the furniture sector right now? GC: We’re seeing strong demand right now – business is pretty good. The challenges I think that people are going to see are what they do with their overseas supplier bases. That’s a bit more challenging, especially when you can’t operate face to face. We take a group of 20 franchisees on overseas buying trips twice a year. They’re involved in going to factories and the selection process. They love it, and it’s great fun. You go to factories all day, then you have drinks at night and people share ideas on how they run their business. It’s a cool time for franchisees to bond with each other. I don’t imagine we’ll do that in September and there’ll be a lot of other retailers who will now have to work out how to manage their supply chains remotely. We put steps in place back in March around how to evolve our product ranges and do samplings and showings when we’re not actually there. We’ve put steps in place, but for guys who are relying on other means and working through wholesalers, that will be a lot more challenging. I think there are certainly some larger bulky goods retailers who have found this period really difficult and don’t have the agility of a business like ours. Trying to turn the Titanic around is always hard. I think a few of those guys will struggle to come out. They won’t come out stronger, so there’s an opportunity for us there in terms of market share and expansion. It might be an opportunity for us to pick up some good people as well. IRW: I feel like there are some furniture retailers who are quite slow to change and are stuck in their ways. GC: [The sector] doesn’t move fast. We think our business moves quite quickly, but we work really hard with franchisees in terms of alignment and consultation. During training with our franchisees, we spell out the strategy, get them on board and ask them how we should implement things. We get great ideas from our guys. That’s part of the personal development stuff I was talking about earlier. That means we get better execution, but also better feedback and ideas – they’re the people implementing it. A lot of businesses talk about it, but it’s hard to do. It requires constant work and I think we pride ourselves working face to face with our guys, which has made us a lot stronger when we couldn’t. But our franchisees trust the management team and are comfortable with the directions, so we’ll go ahead with it in these times, but it’ll be great to go back to seeing them face to face again soon. But you’re right about bulky goods retailers being stuck in their ways. That has to change. It’s part of the e-commerce program we’re building. It’s about doing things differently and having a better approach.