
If trade feels inconsistent - busy one week, quiet the next - you’re not alone.
Join my upcoming live online session where I’ll walk you through the 4-step marketing system I use and teach to help food retail owners generate more footfall, higher basket spend, and more predictable trade.
This session is designed specifically for owners who want a structured approach to marketing - not more random posts, discounts, or guesswork. Everything I’ll share comes from real-world experience inside a working food retail business, and from mentoring butchers and farm shop owners across the UK.
Impact Retail Training works to educate, motivate and inspire Food & Drink Entrepreneurs just like you, taking you on the journey from a Wannabe to Professional Business Person.
In this video, Mark Turnbull discusses the Business Success Pyramid and how Impact Training can help grow your business!

The Impact Retail Success Club is a monthly group for growth-minded independent business owners who want to keep learning, stay motivated, and improve the quality of their thinking as they run their business.
It’s designed for owners who are serious about developing professionally and value being part of the right conversations, rather than trying to figure everything out on their own.
Members take part in regular online group sessions and have access to the Impact members’ area, which includes training videos, expert interviews, and a practical resource library to support ongoing development.
Entry to the Success Club is by application and invitation.
Membership is £50 + VAT per month.

The Impact Retail Mastermind is a small, in-person Mastermind for established independent retail business owners who want clearer thinking, better decisions, and sustainable growth.
Hosted at Turnbull’s Food Hall, the group meets every other month from January to December, bringing together a maximum of five owners for full-day, peer-level conversations focused on what really drives long-term success — clarity, profitable growth, positioning, leadership, and accountability.
This is not coaching or training.
It’s a deliberate space to step out of the business and work on the business, alongside other serious operators.
The Mastermind runs on an ongoing basis, with an investment of £600 + VAT per month. Places are limited and offered selectively to ensure the quality of the room.
If you’d like to learn more about the Impact Retail Mastermind - and whether it might be right for you - click below to view full details.

Business Growth Days are deliberately small, in-person strategic thinking days for independent business owners who understand that they are a critical part of their business’s brand and commercial success.
This is not a workshop or a sales training course. It’s a facilitated day designed to help you step back, think clearly about your role as the face of your business, and make better decisions about how your brand shows up — through you and through your team.
You’ll work on your business alongside a small group of like-minded owners, exploring how leadership, visibility, and simple sales behaviours shape customer experience and results.
The first Business Growth Day takes place on Tuesday 21st April, starting at 8.00am, hosted at the Turnbull's Foodhall in Alnwick, Northumberland.
Places are strictly limited to protect depth, focus, and quality conversation.
£499.00 + VAT

Impact Retail Private Consultations are designed for independent retailers who want focused, practical support tailored entirely to their business, delivered on site and in context.
I spend the day working with you in your shop environment, not in a meeting room and not from a generic framework. This allows us to look honestly and constructively at how your business is performing day to day, and where the biggest opportunities for improvement really sit.
The consultation includes two 90-minute focused working sessions, shaped around what you want to achieve right now. This might include improving margins, strengthening your offer, refining your customer journey, clarifying your positioning, or making more confident strategic decisions as the business owner.
Alongside this, I carry out a full customer experience audit, reviewing your business through a customer’s eyes — from first impressions and flow, to product presentation, pricing signals, communication, and the small details that influence buying behaviour.
You’ll come away with clarity, direction, and practical next actions that fit your business, rather than a list of ideas that look good on paper but are hard to implement.
Private consultations are ideal for owners who value honest feedback, clear thinking, and measurable progress.
Investment: from £750 per day + VAT, plus reasonable travel expenses.
Availability is limited.

Running an independent business can be rewarding - but it can also feel isolating when you’re making big decisions on your own.
That’s why I recommend Entrepreneurs Circle to retailers who want broader business support beyond the food sector. It’s one of the UK’s largest communities of established business owners, focused on practical marketing, strategy, and leadership - not hype or shortcuts.
Members gain access to proven frameworks, live training, peer support, and ongoing guidance to help them grow with confidence and clarity. It’s particularly valuable if you want exposure to ideas and thinking from outside retail, while still applying them in a grounded, practical way.
If you’re serious about developing as a business owner - not just working harder in your business - Entrepreneurs Circle is well worth exploring.
Find out more here by clicking below.

Recommended Retail System: The Whizbang Retail Mastery System.
If you run an independent retail business and want a proven structure for improving performance, consistency, and profitability, the Whizbang Retail Mastery System is well worth exploring.
Whizbang has been developed specifically for independent retailers and focuses on the fundamentals that matter most day to day -merchandising, customer experience, retail disciplines, and getting the basics right consistently. It’s not about trends or tactics that change every five minutes, but about building strong retail habits that compound over time.
The system provides clear frameworks, practical tools, and structured guidance that help retailers think more clearly about how their shop works - from layout and displays to customer flow, conversion, and repeat visits. Many retailers find it especially useful when they want something more systematic than ad-hoc advice or one-off ideas.
I often recommend Whizbang to retailers who want an established retail-specific system they can dip into alongside other development work, or use as a reference point for improving standards and consistency in their business.
If you value practical thinking, clear retail logic, and learning from real-world retail experience, the Whizbang Retail Mastery System is a solid resource to investigate further.
Find out more about Whizbang by clicking below...

If you're looking for a Speaker for an audience of Food & Drink Entrepreneurs, then look no further than Mark who, with over 35 years of food & drink retail business experience, will entertain your audience with a number of presentations, that will both resonate and deliver long term-benefits.

This week inside the Impact Retail Success Club, we welcomed retail expert Bob Negen as our guest speaker.
And what a session it was.
Bob spoke about how to sell more without discounting — and that matters because when sales feel slow, or we want to drive growth, the knee-jerk reaction is usually the same.
Put an offer on.
Drop the price.
Hope more people come through the door.
But that’s a slippery slope.
Because once discounting becomes the answer, it’s a race to the bottom — and there’s always someone willing to go lower.
And then we got a real-life example of exactly that.
Ryan, one of our members, shared what happened when he changed a promotion that had been working brilliantly, a multi-buy deal.
Customers understood it. Bought into it.
And kept coming back for it.
Then costs rose.
So, Ryan changed the offer to protect the margin, reducing the qualifying number to make it stack up better on paper.
Made sense.
Except customers didn’t agree.
Sales dropped by half.
That’s when Bob dropped the golden nugget.
Go back to the old offer, just find a different way to fix it.
Because customers vote with their wallets.
And when they stop buying, they’re not being awkward — they’re giving you feedback.
Clear, honest, unavoidable feedback.
Fast forward to this weekend.
Ryan brought the original offer back, but adjusted the quantities inside it to make it more profitable.
Same offer in the customer’s eyes.
Better margin in his.
The result?
He sold twice as many in one day as he did over the whole previous weekend.
That’s the power of listening.
Sometimes in retail we think we need to improve the offer, tweak the pricing, sharpen the deal.
But often the customer has already told you what works.
Your job is to protect the value they see, while making the numbers work behind the scenes.
That’s the balancing act.
So here’s the question for this week:
What are your customers telling you right now?
Where are they buying more than usual?
Where have they quietly stopped buying?
And what offer have you changed… that might need changing back?
Retail always leaves clues.
The smart retailers are the ones paying attention.
That’s exactly what we do inside the Impact Retail Success Club.
Real retailers. Real problems. Real solutions.
A space to test ideas, share what’s working, and fix what isn’t — before it costs you sales.
If that sounds like the kind of room you need, you can find out more here.
Have a great week.
Mark