71 BUSINESS right five years ago, is it right this year, or next year?” 4) USE TECH TO STRENGTHEN PHYSICAL RETAIL, NOT REPLACE IT One of the most pragmatic moments in Theo’s talk came when he acknowledged a problem many retailers have quietly suffered through: online fulfilment for lowvalue products is often a money-losing game once you add picking, packing, and delivery. So instead of treating digital as the endgame, Theo’s approach is smarter: use technology to pull customers into your store, the place where you’ve already paid for the lights, the lease, and the team. His example was elegant: an app that lets customers design and order personalised cards, then collect them in-store. It’s convenience plus economics. It’s technology that doesn’t replace retail, it rescues it. “Use technology to drive people into store, because in store is where we’ve got our biggest cost.” 5) SMALL BUSINESSES DON’T NEED TO BE “THE BEST”, THEY NEED TO BE KNOWN, TRUSTED, AND CONSISTENT Here’s where Theo dismantled a myth that keeps small business owners awake at night: the belief that they need to be objectively superior to win. They don’t. Market history is littered with examples of the “best” product failing because nobody knew it existed, and mediocre offerings winning through visibility and consistency. Success isn’t usually about being theoretically best; it’s about being best known, best trusted, and most reliably present. This doesn’t mean you can cut corners. But it does mean your energy is better spent on visibility and reliability than on chasing impossible standards. Build something solid, show up consistently, tell people about it, and you’ll outpace the perfectionist next door who’s still tweaking their product in the shadows. That inevitably means social media. It’s no longer optional, any more than AI is. At this point, its infrastructure and treating it as some nice-to-have doesn’t keep you pure; it just guarantees that someone else is in front of your customers now. “Do the best things always win? No… Is it best or best known?” 6) SPEED BEATS PERFECTION, BUT ONLY IF YOU’RE LEARNING AS YOU GO When someone asked about failure, Theo’s response cut through the usual motivational noise. The statistics are brutal: many small businesses collapse in their first years. But Theo flipped the script. The real failure isn’t trying and stumbling. The real failure is staying so afraid of stumbling that you never try at all. What matters is velocity with awareness. Move fast, make mistakes, course-correct, move faster. Every business that survived long enough to matter has a graveyard of decisions that didn’t work. The difference between those that made it and those that didn’t wasn’t perfection; it was the willingness to be publicly, obviously, embarrassingly wrong and then do something about it. Theo’s point wasn’t that failure is fun or that you should court it. His point was that if you’re not failing occasionally, you’re probably not trying anything worth trying. “The person who says they never get things wrong is someone who’s never made a decision, or is a liar.” THE CLOSING CHALLENGE: DO THE HOMEWORK, KEEP CHANGING, AND STAY RELEVANT Theo’s final message wove everything together into one discipline: challenge your business before the world forces you to. Change doesn’t wait for you to feel ready. Repositioning can’t happen overnight. The best time to adapt is before you desperately need to, when you still have runway, resources, and options. And the foundation for all of it? Do the homework. Know your market. Understand your competitors. Stay alert to what’s shifting around you. Because knowledge is what separates good decisions from desperate ones. Spring Fair 2026 will take place from February 1st to 4th February, 2026, at the NEC Birmingham, showcasing a wide range of products in the home, gift, and fashion sectors. www.springfair.com
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