Day in the life of
Aquarium Shop Owner – Charlie Ingham
A day at Complete Koi & Aquatics is extremely variable. It all starts with the most important factor, animal welfare. The mornings are often consumed with thoroughly checking the thousands of fish, invertebrates, and corals. This level of preventative maintenance allows us to identify and target any potential issues early, to reduce losses and improve the overall quality of the animals. This is followed up by routine maintenance such as aquarium and pond cleaning, water tests, and feeding.
Stock is a constant battle in any form of retail so you must spend time during the day monitoring stocking levels and preparing purchase orders to ensure you’re well prepared for the week ahead. This is a daily task and we often have to conform to a strict timetable of supplier ordering dates i.e.certain suppliers take orders on Tuesdays as an example. It is vital your housekeeping is good here, to ensure nothing is missed.
Of course, this is intertwined with taking phone calls, responding to customer emails, serving customers in the shop whilst monitoring the e-commerce side of the business. Complete Koi & Aquatics is still a fairly young business and as a result, all of the staff members get stuck in with most aspects of the job. As a director, I have the added responsibility of ensuring suppliers are paid on time, whilst undertaking the bookkeeping for the shop in line with specific government deadlines (e.g. daily takings, VAT returns, etc.).
Last but not least, myself and the staff use any spare time, ensuring the shop is clean and tidy with stock merchandised correctly. We want our floors immaculate and our shelves full!
Pros and cons
The job is extremely full on which is exciting but can also be exhausting. A busy day is exactly that! Forget having any time to clear your mind or even have 30 minutes for lunch. On the contrary, the day goes incredibly quickly!
Retail really never sleeps. The shop is open 7 days a week and our e-commerce side of the business is obviously open 24/7. We have an array of highly skilled staff covering weekends, which is usually our busiest and most exciting period. Therefore as a director, I am often using my days off to work on business areas such as planning and SEO development. It can be difficult to work on these when you’re in the shop as you often get roped into other activities.
This again can be tiresome but it is absolutely essential and allows me to reflect on the progress of the business thereby developing it further. We do not like stagnating at Complete Koi & Aquatics – we are always looking for ways to improve our internal processes, infrastructure, and product offering.
To finish, the job is extremely fulfilling. We work with some amazing animals from large impressive Koi Carp to stunning SPS corals. Likewise we deal with some incredibly passionate customers who have ponds and/or aquariums and are often self-confessed fish addicts. I speak for myself and my staff when I say we all enjoy helping people and their aquatic animals.
This is why we all work at Complete Koi & Aquatics.
