Farmhouse Furniture

Musician and historian Stephen Burden discovered a rare medieval hunting lodge rich in archaeology more than 20 years ago. Stephen developed the business from repairing this ancient fabric and later furnishing it. The key element of the business now is to make hand made kitchens and furniture and restore pine furniture. Kitchens made by Farmhouse Furniture are totally hand built using only quality wood and materials. Wooden worktops are cut and planed in house and no laminates or pre-made panels are used.

The role of Dorset Business Mentors

Stephen read about the Dorset Business Mentors programme from a copy of the East Dorset Newsletter, a quarterly publication from East Dorset District Council. What caught his interest was that the business featured in the article was one that he knew, so he rang up the owner and asked him if the Dorset Business Mentors programme was really as good as he had made out. He was told it was so he rang up and asked to get involved!

Owners, Stephen and Nichola meet regularly with their mentor. As Nichola says, “I worked for 10 years for the National Trust at Corfe Castle. After a break to raise our children, I got involved in the business. Our mentor has raised my confidence, much of it was lost after my break from full time working. He has helped greatly to improve our book–keeping processes, and we now produce cash flow forecasts which we never used to do."

For Stephen the attraction of Dorset Business Mentors has been that it meets the individual’s requirements because the focus is on one-to-one meetings rather than group workshops. “Before I met our mentor, the business was running me! He has made me think about the business more, has made me focus on what are the important things to drive the business forward and I am now running the business rather than the other way round. We know have a long term strategy in place to grow the business further. We are currently recruiting for new administrative staff to support the business, which will enable Nicola to focus more on marketing activity.

We have introduced weekly staff meetings. We now have a weekly production schedule which the whole team is aware of. We have focused much more on the needs of our customer, and everyone knows what we need to do to make them happy. We even know who are customers our. We have built up a database of our customers. Quite simply we did not know who they were before.

I was nervous before I got involved in the Dorset Business Mentors programme. Previous experience with business support organisations had failed and in some cases had cost us a lot of money. They all seemed to be focused on helping bigger businesses than ourselves, perhaps with more business knowledge than us too. I can honestly say that the mentoring support is the best thing that has happened to us ever”