Moy the Force Be With You!

Friday and Saturday was the Highland Field Sports Fair. That’s it’s Sunday name; in the Central belt it’s known as the Moy Fair; and in Moy, it’s probably known as that damn thing down the road that causes all the traffic…. I’ll call it Moy.

WJM are one of the main sponsors of Moy – and I’d like to congratulate my colleague, the Bacon Roll Man (you know who you are!) and his team for organising things so well for us.

A field sports fair is built around shooting, fishing and other country sports. But, Moy is more than that: it was great to see how many families were there over the weekend. The weather helped: glorious wall to wall sunshine, except for a couple of hours early on Saturday when the midgies were out in force. My black lab was gradually turning grey until the sun came out and the pests thankfully disappeared.

BRM and I opened up our stand on Saturday while our colleagues slept: well, someone had to do the hard work. Once the work was done, it was great to have the time to chat to those running the neighbouring stands, find out how they were doing and so on.

And, finally, that’s the point of this missive. Virtually every business represented at the fair was an owner managed business. Apart from hearing the good news about how they were doing – and almost everyone does seem to be doing well in the Inverness area – and how responsive they were to customer needs. That’s one of the great things about smaller businesses: the lack of bureaucracy means they can change course, quickly, to meet customer demand. It’s the old analogy about a big business being a super-tanker and a small business being a speedboat.

It was said in the past that “big is beautiful” – but I’m not sure that is right. Profitability is beautiful; lack of bureaucracy is beautiful; and doing what you really enjoy doing is beautiful.

Come and see us next year at Moy. But meantime, I thought I’d share this photo of “Don Corleone” MacWilliam as he approaches retirement: lot’s of time for pizza soon, George!

John Clarke