Andrew Thornton, owner of a community supermarket in London, talk to Dawna Jones about putting the heart back into business and how to be a different kind of business leader.
Entrepreneur Andrew Thornton changed from being a traditional profit-focused entrepreneur to one whose mission is to bring heart back into business.
Grocery stores are typically managed in a command-and-control fashion. What the manager says you do! But Andrew does things differently. As owner of Thornton’s Budgens, a community supermarket in North London, and the founder of Heart in Business Limited, Andrew runs Thornton’s Budgens differently by putting people and planet first and encouraging employees to actively contribute to doing things differently from shops that are focused on quarterly targets.
Andrew talks about how he changed his approach and how being more heartful is actually better for business. His story is insightful and entertaining, a real life practical example of how a leader and a business can change. In his conversation with Dawna you’ll learn:
- How the journey began
- How an April Fools joke involving squirrels contributed to raising the store’s visibility
- The personal skills of being a different kind of leader
- What happens when mistakes get made
- What to do if you’re thinking about doing something different, instead of being a part of the pack.
Andrew was a founder director of social enterprises “The People’s Supermarket” and “Food from the Sky”, founded and ran the retail consultancy SRCG, is an Ambassador for Embercombe, the sustainability centre in Devon and is a fellow of the Royal Society for Arts, Commerce and Industry. He lives in London and has two children.
Evolutionary Provocateur
