Kellys eye number ten?

After brothers Pearce and Shaun Kelly acquired their ninth store – the award-winning JC Stewart’s. NR hears how the deal came about and their plans for the future.

While JC Stewart’s Foodhall in Magherafelt looks up at its competition from the bottom of the town’s steep gradient, most of the country’s experienced retailers look up to it.

Just last year, the store took home the prestigious title of Neighbourhood Store of the Year for premises over 7,000 square feet at the Neighbourhood Retailer Awards. That was just one of a mantelpiece-buckling litany of awards over the years, which includes the overall Neighbourhood Store of the Year prize.

The shop’s success and wide esteem in which it, and fourth generation family owner Paul Stewart, is held made the news it had been sold in October all the more shocking.

The deal brought to an end a 120 year dynasty, but will see the beginning of a new era – one featuring the talents of two of NI’s most exciting independent retailers, Pearce and Shaun Kelly.

The brothers have retailing in their blood; a workman-like dynamic duo that has been steadily amassing an empire.

Their tally so far includes four large stores: EUROSPAR Moneymore, EUROSPAR Main Street Maghera, Vivoxtra Castledawson, and now JC Stewarts. They also have five smaller stores: SPAR Magherafelt, SPAR Moneymore, SPAR Toomebridge, SPAR Maghera, and Vivo in The Loup.

Despite flying high with nine stores – including some of the best in the country, like former Neighbourhood Store of the Year, Eurospar Moneymore – Pearce and Shaun remain grounded.

“We don’t get too carried away with ourselves,” said Pearce, in an interview with Neighbourhood Retailer.

It’s no exaggeration. Both men still drive their trusty vans packed with tools, and dress for a day’s graft in jeans and a rugged shirt.

“We like to get our hands dirty,” Pearce said. “We get stuck in, and wouldn’t ask our staff to do anything we wouldn’t do ourselves.”

Indeed, on Christmas Eve, Pearce found himself stacking shelves in JC Stewarts, as customers cleared shelves faster than staff could fill them.

“Whatever needs done we’ll do it,” Pearce said. “You’ll find us moving fridges, driving forklifts, and stacking shelves, and we’ll do general maintenance jobs if they don’t require someone a bit more specialised. We’ll even jump on the tills if we’re needed.”

Also in the family business are Oonagh, Pearce’s wife and company accountant, and Shaun’s wife Kyra, who manages their Vivoxtra store in Castledawson.

From their headquarters in Maghera, both men can strike out to each of their satellite stores within minutes, and plan to get hit store every day.

With 335 workers to manage daily, along with the daily running of the businesses, the brothers rely heavily on area manager Damien McElhone to oversee much of what goes on. Having become one of the region’s biggest employers, it’s no easy task, as the nine stores also include five post offices, an off-licence, and two petrol stations, which also require regular attention.

“After we put in our first post office, we ended up with a total of five within a year and three months,” Pearce said. “Anywhere a post office has gone in has seen sales rise significantly.”

Post offices are complex operations, and with little time on their hands for dealing with these complexities, the brothers have come up with a simple solution.

“Wherever we have opened a post office, we’ve kept the postmaster or mistress on so we have an experienced team still in place,” he explains. “They are all regularly audited and Stephen Mallon, the manager of Eurospar Moneymore, plays a big part in keeping them running smoothly.”

Keeping things simple is a theme of Pearce and Shaun’s leadership style, and there’s little doubt this was imparted by mother Denise who instigated the family’s move into retail.

She converted a small unit by the side of their house in Maghera some 45 years ago into a newsagent. In 1990, at the age of 18, Pearce began helping out in the store, with brother Shaun joining three years later.

“Most of the expansion has taken place in the past six years,” Pearce explained. “Shaun and I are driving it now, and it has really gathered pace. We really get a kick out of it, especially when we acquire a new store. It’s a challenge – are customers going to back you? How will they react to changes? But it’s very exciting at the same time.”

But it looks like customers are backing the Kellys’ most recent acquisition.

“There’s plenty of competition in Magherafelt,” Pearce said, rhyming off the number of butchers, bakers, off-licences and other major traders within a stone’s throw of the brothers’ new store. With a Lidl and Tesco nearby too, one false move could spell disaster.

“Paul Stewart did a great job here,” he said of JC Stewarts outgoing veteran owner. “We wanted to make sure standards didn’t drop and that the regular customers see that we’re not planning on getting rid of the things that have made it so popular.

“This was always deemed to be one of the best supermarkets in the North. A lot of people view it as the Marks & Spencer of Magherafelt. We don’t intend to change very much, which is why Paul maybe decided to sell it to us. It’s one family business selling to another.”

One way its popularity will be maintained is through the extended handover agreed with Paul Stewart, who stayed on to help with the transition.

Paul and the brothers have developed a warm working relationship since the takeover, and it’s clear from Pearce that the Kellys have a great deal of respect for Paul. Going by their jovial conversations in the food hall’s corridors, it seems the respect is mutual.

“It was not a long-held ambition to take over the store,” Pearce said. “The opportunity presented itself and it was too good to pass up. His focus was always on fresh food and food-to-go, deli and butchery, and those are areas we have a big focus on. We’re getting along very well, and it’s made it easier that Paul really wants it to work for us.”

For the Kellys, butchery runs through the family almost as much as retail. Their cattle farming father and brothers already supply many of their other stores, and by now provide JC Stewarts with freshly farmed, fully traceable beef.

Pearce said: “Our cattle is sent from the family farm to the abattoir and then arrives directly in our stores – it’s the definition of farm to fork traceability.

“Our meat sales have been responsible for quadrupling our sales in the Moneymore store within five years. We will be upping the range on the meat counter and hopefully that will get people talking about it – that it’s the best in town.”

Along with attractive offers, the brothers also place a big emphasis on having the right staff.

“You need the right people in the right place at the right time,” he said. “We have excellent staff, and they’re a major part of our success. We have trusted staff that can be sent to other stores that can help motivate those teams, drive sales, help with merchandising, and offer advice.”

The Henderson Group, under whose symbol brands the brothers operate, often use the Kellys’ stores to provide training, and the brothers are enthusiastic about developing their people. According to Pearce, the support from Henderson’s business development partnership representative, Paul Hepburn, has been invaluable to their growth. Meanwhile, Henderson’s sees the Kellys as key players in their NI operation.

Both parties share many goals of the other, including developing their people.

“We would spend a lot on training, and would hold monthly management meetings, where managers can talk about what they’re doing, and if there are strategies that the rest of the estate should adopt. Everybody has different strengths, so it’s important to pool that experience and make changes for the better.

“If you sit back and do nothing, the chances are that you’ll begin to go backwards. You always need new ideas and to implement them.”

With things going so well for the Kellys, we wanted to know if their goal was continual expansion, or whether they were now happy with their lot.

“We always set out to have a number of stores, but if you bought every decent store that came your way you’d never stop,” Pearce said. “It’s not something we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. When a good store becomes available, we take a look at it, and if we think it’s viable, then we’ll consider it.”

Pearce also explained that the proximity of the stores they’ve acquired over the last six years has kept running the estate manageable. Did that mean they had counted out running a shop in the city?

“A city store is entirely different,” he said. “We’re country people, and we understand that way of life, and what rural people want from their shops. I would never say never, but it’s not something we’re looking at.

“This year, we want to focus on the stores we have, and we have a number of plans for what we want to do.”

It’s a process of regular refurbishment and refreshment that saw the brothers last year manage growth of between five and six per cent across all their stores.

Meanwhile, their insight into the rural mind-set has allowed them to focus on the things rural shoppers hold dear. That includes full community engagement, across all divisions, and ensuring local people are at the heart of the business.

“Everything in our shop is local,” Pearce said. “All our suppliers, and even our contractors and builders are all local people. That’s important to us, and we think it’s important to our customers.”

For Pearce and Shaun, it all comes down to having a “common sense approach”, and simply giving the customers what they want, when they want it, and at the right price.

And if the brothers’ efforts don’t match the expectations of their customers, they’ll react immediately.

“If we get customer queries of complaints, we always respond to them,” he said. “If you don’t take things like that on, you’ll lose that customer, and in the country, you’ll also lose their sister, brother, aunts, and uncles. That’s just the way it works, so you have to take every query seriously.”

The Kellys may have a Midas touch when it comes to retail, but even their stewardship of JC Stewart’s will not be without risk. The brothers know how easily it could all go wrong for a store so beloved by the rural population.