Mark

Our shop is rarely busy enough to need 3 people working there at once. Perhaps this Saturday will be one of those days
However, having said that, Tim and I are spending more and more time away from the shop. Be it visiting schools with authors, meeting publishers to try and organise new initiatives, sorting our accounts out, marketing, piddling about with the website, talking to different organisations about what we can do for them, delivering books on our bicycles or flyering 1000 homes (like I did today). Whatever it is we're doing, it means that we're getting to the point where, despite each of us working around 50 hours a week, we were having to turn stuff down. All this non shop stuff's vital if we're going to thrive and survive, so we had to do something about it.
And this is what we did.This is Mark. He's a bookseller at the Big Green Bookshop. He works on Wednesdays and Thursdays (although this is very flexible) and understands exactly what real bookselling is all about. He's reads lots and lots of stuff and is passionate about reading (not the place in Berkshire), gets excited about new books that turn up and is able to translate this excitement and passion into noises from his mouth at customers (recommendations). He's fluent in bookspeak, having worked in bookland for a number of years, and is able to put up with Tim and I for almost 73 minutes at a time. He is the defenition of the word 'asset'. Or something like that.

We took on Mark, not because we're making millions of pounds and thought we could do with a breather, but because we couldn't really afford not to. It gives us a chance to do all the stuff we need to do outside of the bookshop to enable the good ship Big Green' to keep bob bob bobbing along.

I realise I haven't used the word goat in this blog, but sometimes it's not possible.