The Most Exclusive Club in Britain

Britain’s got its fair share of exclusive clubs, but there’s one in particular that unquestionably takes the cake. It’s perhaps the hardest to get into, has a miniscule number of members, and being a member is a giant source of pride.

It’s the Tercentenarian Club, and if you know your prefixes then we’ll bet you know what it means already: the Three-Hundred-Year-Old Club. Not for people, of course, but for businesses. There are only a dozen or so members of the club, and though they have all been around for a long time, that’s about all they have in common.

There is a wine merchant, a hat maker, a butcher, a ribbon manufacturer, a builder, a candlestick seller, and a wide array of other businesses that have managed to stay relevant and successful through the years. Together they have been through nearly fifty recessions, the Industrial Revolution, two world wars, the fall of Napoleon, the rise of automobiles, the domination of the Internet, and several banking and stock market crashes.

Most have advice to businesspeople today, but can’t necessarily put a pin on why they’ve managed to survive so long. One other requirement for membership: the same family that started them must still own the business.

“If I knew how we’d survived, we’d bottle it and sell it,” said one businessman, Alan Hughes. Hughes owns the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which was founded in 1570 and is now 443 years old.

But getting through three hundred plus years isn’t necessarily insurance for the future. The economy is still struggling and some of the club’s businesses have seen a steady decline over the years.

“Reputation and quality,” says Hughes, pointing out two of the things that have gotten Whitechapel through its many years. “You have to leave really satisfied customers.  Of course, you always need to cut costs, but you just can’t take short cuts in the same way other businesses might, the quality of your products is everything.” Whitechapel has a strong customer service policy: their bells are supposed to last for several hundred years, so if it gets out of tune or a crack develops, the great-grandchild of the original purchaser can still file a formal complaint. Talk about customer service!

Because businesses are passed down through the family, “[t]here is enormous pressure on the children at these companies,” says Lynn Durtnell, who married into her husband John’s family business. “They don’t want to be the generation that mucks it up.”

Leadership tips from Jim Collins

August Turak is a writer at Forbes, as well as an entrepreneur and inspirational speaker, and he’s got a great piece up about leadership tips that he learned from his mentor at A&E: Jim Collins.

These tips are ones that he remembered because they are eminently practical and easy to use.  According to Turak, Collins gave him these tips on a day when Turak was particularly overwhelmed by a project that he was working on.

The first tip that Turak discusses, is to never work on more than ten things at once.  Make a list of everything you have to do, then pare it down to ten things that you get your boss to sign off on.  Once you complete a task, go ahead and take a goal from your complete list and add it to the ten, but never work on more than ten things at a time.

The second biggest tip that Turak learned from Collins was to go ahead and let fires burn.  As he puts it, “lack of focus is the single biggest reason for failure. Confronted by multiple fires we tend to spread ourselves so thin that we never succeed in putting any of them completely out.”

Turak also suggests interviewing constantly, rather than when you only need people, and to move quickly when you do take a new job.  First impressions are incredibly important, and it’s always best to blow your new employer away.  He also suggests that if a job isn’t working out, if you are unhappy and don’t think that there is any way to change your circumstances then it’s important to find a new job as soon as possible rather than becoming more and more disgruntled and difficult to deal with.

But perhaps the best tip that Turak gleaned from Collins was that you shouldn’t ever procrastinate when firing someone.  Essentially, waiting to fire someone who isn’t working out it usually just prolongs the pain and ends up worse for everyone.  According to Collins, you interview twice and if that doesn’t work out then you let the person go.

It’s a good group of tips, and we recommend reading the entire piece by Turak over on Forbes.