Hello All,

We are Dave and Maureen from Barnard Castle in the North East, just over four years into our Trophy franchise covering predominately the County of Durham area with small incursions into north Yorkshire and Tyne & Wear.

For a number of years I’d been self employed as a sales consultant representing a variety of companies. Maureen was a former BT senior account handler.  Trophy as a business allows Maureen and I to work together to build a business specialising in an area, ‘pets’ and dogs in particular we both love along with our two highly trained and motivated sales executives Toby and Elsa, our Hovawarts. Looking as they do on Trophy food shows everyone how their dogs ‘could’ look on what is a fantastic product, believe me, dozens of customers whom we meet daily on walks and shows have taken on the brand purely because of those two. Since then we’ve developed a working relationship with Westies in Need nationwide rescue based up here and have in fact rehomed two ourselves, George and very recently Daisy, so now we’ve four walking adverts.

This is now developing into a stable business; thus far we have not been disappointed even though we’ve been in the midst of a recession and high fuel costs with the related challenges this brings. We won’t get mega rich but quality of life and the arena we work in is wonderful. At this point we’ve registered 425 customers but of course you learn that you can’t keep everyone and sadly dogs die, people move away etc however our retention rate is in the order of 86/87%  with circa 370 active and still growing which tells us two things:

1: Our service is excellent and it’s what we strive to offer and we take the word service very seriously.

2: No matter how good your service is, if the food was not good people would ‘have’ to leave you, their pets are too important to them, most have stayed with us.

So many dogs and cats still to help and we never under estimate how much the home delivery, service and quality advice is playing and it’s a competitive market but it helps to be one if not ‘the’ best.

At this stage we can see that we are making a living working in this environment of choice but still with lots of work to do, it does not happen overnight.  Trophy allows you the grace to run your company with just the right amount of back up and advice when needed. The equipment supplied and training from the outset has been first class and after looking as we did at the competition (I use the term competition loosely) we are so glad we went with our instinct and chose by far the best product and team to work with. We genuinely believe that there is no better pet food on the UK market this is constantly reinforced as we become yet more knowledgeable and the periodic seminars on Nutrition are right up to date but more importantly we repeatedly see the benefits in our customers dogs health, no magic to it just good natural ingredients and more often than not, they see it too.

Best from Dave & Maureen, Toby & Elsa, George & Daisy (and of course the 3 cats)