Having started her working life as a shop assistant at John Lewis Mary Portas discovered a talent for transforming big-name brands like Harvey Nichols. With true entrepreneurial spirit she later went on to write about retail therapy and in 2007 launched her TV career with the popular Mary Queen of Shops. You can find out more on her great website here.

In ‘Secret Shopper’ Portas starts by tackling fashion stores and company Pilot. The programmes contain a lot of nuggets of wisdom for wanna-be retailers or as Mary calls it ‘Fast Fashion’, I’ve listed some below:

Episode one: Fashion

• Keep your store tidy.
• When helping customers with enquiries, show people where products are, don’t just tell them.
• Train your sale staff properly to be polite and helpful. Make sure they know the status of stock.
• The culture of a business comes from the top.
• Put customers not profits first.
• Make sure the fitting room’s are staffed.
• Mary’s three golden rules of retails- A smile/A ‘hello’ and service.
• Keep fittings and fixtures clean and in good condition and build changing rooms big enough to dress in.
• Don’t let customers wait more than 3 minutes to pay, reduce queues.

Episode two: Sofa superstores

• Don’t use ‘hard-sell’ tactics, be senstive.
• Avoid misleading customers by lying about dates that sales end, and don’t make empty price promises.
• Sales people shouldn’t use a script, robots can’t sell and becomes problematic when they have to discuss something unusual.
• Don’t put sales on if they’re not genuine sales.
• Treat customers as individuals.
• Help customers find the best product for them don’t just push them into inappropriate buys to make sales.
• Ask the right questions to understand your customers lifestyles.
• Answer enquiries on the web.
• Invest money in customer service.

Episode three: Phone shops

• Don’t use confusing jargon.
• Listen don’t just tell people what they want to hear.
• Don’t baffle people with statistics.
• Show working examples of products.
• Consider new shop layouts to make people engage more with the product.
• Embrace change.

Episode four: Estate Agents

Wednesday February 9th, Channel 4, 9pm

When Adrian Portlock left his mobile phone on the tube in 2000, he was shocked at the kerfuffle involved in getting it back. “They asked me for the IMEI number of the handset,” says Portlock. “This was back in 2000, I didn’t even know what an IMEI number was.”

He finally tracked down the code and reclaimed his phone, but not before he’d found out that Transport for London recover some 10,000 mobile phones every month, which were only returned when people had their registration numbers.

“I decided to launch a service where people could register these details so that they were easily accessible if their phone was lost or stolen,” says Portlock, “But then I realised there was an even bigger potential for the idea.”

Portlock approached major mobile insurers like Carphone Warehouse, as well as the networks, global mobile databases and even the police. “It took lots of charm, persuasion and hard work to get them on board,” says Portlock. “But now we have the most comprehensive database in the world. We’ve got 30 million stolen handsets on our books.”

In 2000, the CheckMEND service was launched. The idea is simple: for £2.99 buyers and sellers of second-hand electronics can check anything from mobile phones to iPods and Satnavs against a global database to find out whether their gadgets are kosher, or whether they’ve fallen off the back of a lorry.

No other registration service can boast the kind of high level partnership wangled by Portlock. Recipero even provides the UK Police Service with a unique interface to check recovered phones and equipment. And the relationship is reciprocal: CheckMEND is informed when handsets are handed in.

Portlock is no untried businessman, he’s a serial entrepreneur. His chain of 15 restaurants, bars and leisure centres was sold in 2000. Recipero was founded after a brief attempt at retirement: “I was only 40,” he says. “I got bored.”

Takes me back to my Loseitback.com days ….

Some say business success is in their DNA. Maternity-wear designer Liz Lange recalled her mother taking her to visit her grandfather’s necktie company at the Empire State Building. Lange’s father also owned a business, so her parents understood when she abandoned a coveted job at Vogue magazine to pursue her own designs.

Lessons mothers pass on to children can nurture the entrepreneurial spirit. Zipcar co-founder Robin Chase says her mother showed her how, on a shoestring, one can turn a passion into a business. Chase, the daughter of a diplomat in the Middle East and Africa, grew up abroad, watching her mom create craft businesses in the countries where they lived. “She’d cobble together these things, doing something that she’d love to do with some tenacity, and go out there and make it happen.” Chase used the same approach to start the car-sharing company.

Pete Kadens, a Chicago entrepreneur, and Troy McCullough, a homeless man, met, by chance, one chilly morning eight days ago.

Kadens had arrived early for a 6:45 a.m. conference in the West Loop. He was sitting in his warm car and noticed a man in a well-worn shirt and tie, outside the offices of StreetWise, the newspaper sold by homeless people.

It was McCullough, waiting for the doors to open at 7 a.m. so he’d be first to get his bundle of papers.

McCullough, 52, looked like “he had a mission,” according to Kadens, who invited him in from the cold, to wait in his car.

They started talking. McCullough told Kadens how he’d come to live on the streets. He talked about his wife’s death in 1996, about a major stroke he had two years later, and how he’d lost his laborer’s job after that. He was in a nursing home a while but, with no long-term care insurance, ended up living in alleys, parks and churches.

He’d had some tough breaks, McCullough said, but he kept selling his papers six days a week, didn’t drink or use drugs and always made it to church, not missing a Sunday in the last year.

Kadens listened. He ended up being late for the conference.

What struck him, he said, was, “that every one of us is only a few bad breaks from being like Troy.”

Kadens wanted to help. But first he issued McCullough a challenge: Be here tomorrow morning, and I’ll see what I can do.

The next day, a Sunday, McCullough was there at 6:45 that morning in suit and tie.

Kadens gave him $200. Then, he went home, set up a Web site — www.savetroy.com – and e-mailed about 50 friends and business associates. He asked them to help him raise $10,300 — what he figured it would cost for a studio apartment, basic furnishings, groceries and medical care for McCullough for a year. If McCullough could bank at least 70 percent of his StreetWise sales, Kadens figured, he’d have $12,480 in a year, enough to cover a second year of expenses.

Maybe it was the way Kadens opened people’s eyes with McCullough’s story. Maybe it was the way McCullough didn’t fit stereotypes about the homeless.

Whatever the reason, the response was overwhelming. In just a week, the Web site raised $15,000, plus $20,000 more in donated items and services. Word spread quickly. Donations came from 32 states, Mexico and Canada.

“It’s been unbelievable,” said Kadens, who’s 30.

Now, he’s working to roll the extra money into a not-for-profit fund to help another homeless person.

“I helped one person, but hopefully I challenged people to think a little bit differently about people who live on the street,” Kadens said.

McCullough called Kadens “an angel that’s sent from heaven.

“Someday,” he said, “I’ll be there for somebody else, too.”

A British web-millionaire is to launch a social networking site to help raise awareness about malaria worldwide.

Tom Hadfield set up Soccer.net when just a teen and sold the site for $40 million to to US sports network ESPN when he was just 17-years-old. He then managed to raise millions to setup Schoolsnet.com

However, he has now turned his attention to charity projects and believes that the power of the web, specifically social networking sites, could be used to help fight malaria, which kills an estimated one million people a year.

“I believe in the power of friends telling friends telling friends”, Hadfield told Reuters in an interview.

“Our dream is tens of thousands of people will use social networking tools to build a movement that eradicates malaria.”

Hadfield, who is now 25-years-old and studying at Harvard University, thought of www.MalariaEngage.org during a trip to Zambia last summer.

“Traveling across Africa and seeing the devastation caused by malaria made me realize there was more to life than putting up soccer scores”, said Hadfield.

“Everyone I met at an aid project making mosquito nets in Zambia had either lost a child to malaria or knew someone who had.”

The trip also took in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania where Hadfield met researchers working on malaria treatments.

The new website will ask people to donate $10 or more to support seven research projects in Tanzania, but it will also be unique in connecting the people who donate directly with the researchers so that donors can really see where their money is going.

“It’s about more than about giving money – it’s about creating connections. By encouraging individual participation and involvement, we will create international communities of common interest. This is the essence of social networking”, explained Hadfield.

Ex-offender Ira Brownlow, 31, did not let his past of drugs, poverty and violence  dictate his future. In 2002, while serving a four-year prison term for gun possession, Brownlow sat in his cell at Maryland Correctional Training Center in Hagerstown, Md., and filled out papers to register his cleaning company — Shyyning Path.

“Other inmates would talk about it but never really did it,” Brownlow said about starting a company. “They had ideas such as clothing stores, barbershops, car washes and children’s books. If you don’t have help–and a lot of inmates don’t–on the outside to assist your vision, it’s extremely hard.”

Brownlow’s monther was the outside person who handled the details for starting Shyyning Path, a residential and commercial buildings cleaning business with 15 clients a month and annual revenue of $30,000.

Brownlow began getting into trouble with the law after his father died in 1987. He was 14 and soon was lured into the fast money lifestyle of the streets. “I wanted nice clothes, cars, jewelry and other luxuries of life,” he said. He began peddling drugs.

On January 1, 1994 at 18, Brownlow started serving his first prison sentence. He was convicted of assault and attempted murder and served five years. He was released in 1998, but he immediately reverted to selling drugs.

In 2000, Brownlow was at a friend’s house preparing for a trip to New Jersey to buy drugs when the police raided his friend’s truck and found cocaine and a gun. Shortly after, they busted into Brownlow’s house in Capitol Heights and charged him with possessing fire arms and attempted drug distribution.

He served 4.5 years. In 2004, his younger cousin was shot and killed. The clear and present danger of his lifestyle compelled him to turn his life around.

When he was released in 2005, he searched for a job for four months; nobody wanted to hire an ex-con. He decided to venture into the field of self-employment. After seeing a group of rebels named Shyyning Path on television protesting their government, Brownlow decided to name his business after the group.

“I realized people needed housecleaning and things cleaned on a daily basis; they don’t have time to do so,” Brownlow said. “That’s where I come in and take the skills I learned in prison and do it in the real world.”

He attributes his success to the drug-selling tactics and street wits he acquired as a youth.

“I figured if I could manage to sell drugs, I could be an upright business man,” he said. “But this time I decided to surround myself with positive people. I began going to church and reading the Bible.”

Since his escape from the street life, Brownlow lives by the motto “Freedom ain’t free.” The father of two says, “You have responsibilities in society you have to take care of and you can’t violate the laws of the land.”

He started out with only 3-4 clients and he still remembers his first sell. “My first client was a lady and her mother who found out about my business from my website,” he said.  “We performed a move out cleaning in Northwest Washington and I made $700.”

He also recalls the old beat up van he worked out of in the first years of his business. “People would say, ‘They aren’t bound to do a good job.’ But that’s when we go in and prove them wrong, and they see that we do an excellent job.”

Brownlow upgraded into a 1995 Pontiac Transport that looks a lot nicer. But what helps his image, says Brownlow, is his appearance: a dark blue printed T-shirt, a clean shave and a conservative haircut.

Brownlow says he is a living testament for young people who continue to transform their lives from drugs and crime to becoming upstanding citizens.

“Don’t waste your life. A lot of kids don’t see their future in sight, but there is hope. Persevere, struggle and push,” Brownlow advised.

Florist Moya Topsom was upset when she lost her job as manageress at a florist in Wymondham, but she then branched out on her own.

The 21-year-old had been working at Jasmine florists for three and a half years when the owners shuttered the business because of soaring rents, the Eastern Daily Press reports.

“I was the manager of Jasmine, but due to a major rent increase and the lease coming to an end, my bosses decided to cease trading,” she said.

“I was gutted at being made redundant. But instead of getting upset I decided to look for my own premises in Wymondham.”

Her entrepreneurial spirit was aided by her former employers giving her the company’s name, telephone number and remaining stock in order to help out.

“I’ve got contracts with local businesses, including Wymondham Leisure Centre, and the wedding bookings from the old shop, and I’m really pleased at how it’s all going,” she said

Execution is king!

Take this story of a struggling entrepreneurs story as inspiration: Baker tells her story and how she dealt with Wal-Mart

I became an inventor while working two jobs and taking night classes in Columbus. Every Monday, to reward my efforts, I’d treat myself to barbecued Buffalo wings – extra-saucy ones – for dinner.

One night, as I was getting ready to eat my messy wings, I hesitated. I looked at the wings and then at my manicured fingernails. I thought, “There has to be a better way.” That’s when I came up with the idea of using small plastic tongs to eat wings.

After designing the product in 2005, I hired a local attorney and applied for a patent. I named my company Utensils, found a manufacturer, and built a website. With no advisors, I didn’t know how to market the tongs. I was still building my business at night after work.

One day, during my lunch break, I ran to Wal-Mart to buy creamer for my office. When I walked by the registers, I noticed four employees wearing suits and Wal-Mart nametags. I passed them and then froze – I remembered that I had my wing tongs in my purse (I carry them everywhere).

I turned back, walked up to them, held up my tongs, and asked who could help me get my product into Wal-Mart. A store manager signed the papers that let me submit my supplier application.

At my first meeting with Wal-Mart executives, they were impressed that I’d already made the product, which they thought filled a market gap. Three months later my wing tongs were on the shelves of seven Wal-Mart stores in the Columbus area.

After the December 2005 rollout, I was thrilled: My tongs were in America’s biggest store. I left messages with Wal-Mart’s regional office to check on my product’s progress but didn’t hear back. So I figured I should be hands-off. I ignored the tongs and went to work every day, hoping I’d get word of a reorder. I expected a call, a fax, anything – but got absolutely nothing. A year passed, and my tongs were dead in the water.

At the start of 2007, I got a mass e-mail from Wal-Mart to female entrepreneurs. It set me off. I put my questions and concerns about my tongs into a response. To my surprise, I got a reply from Wal-Mart’s main office and eventually obtained a meeting at the company’s Bentonville, Ark., headquarters to discuss my wing tongs with the national housewares buyer.

From that point on, I became proactive.

I began regularly visiting stores to talk to managers about product placement and my tongs’ progress. Instead of waiting for people to find my product, today I write hundreds of e-mails and letters to potential new retail outlets, such as home stores, and to other possible distributors – if your restaurant sells wings, I’ve probably contacted you.

I now know that I’m my best salesperson, not Wal-Mart.

Being hands-on has gotten my wing tongs noticed. A few months ago my product was picked up by Kroger and put in 150 stores. The added exposure should boost annual sales, which were almost $50,000 in 2007.

These days I’m as involved as possible: I recently walked into a Kroger’s and saw my tongs, which sell for $3.50, displayed in the meat section. I had them moved and placed near the barbecue sauce, where they’re a better impulse buy. As an entrepreneur, you have to do more than bring a product to market: You have to make sure it succeeds.

Go and do one thing now that will take your idea into reality ….

If Michael Whelan’s dream comes true, the Atlantic ocean will soon help keep the lights on in Ireland. And if it does, it will complete a circuit for Whelan: 30 years ago he was a commercial diver working on North Sea oil and gas installations. Returning to Ireland in the 1980s, he started a marine towing and salvage company. After selling that business, he opened a quayside hotel in Cobh near Cork. But now he has returned to the sea – to generate electricity from wave power.

His enthusiasm for the project, a wave energy converter called an Ocean Energy Buoy, knows no limits. While everyone else was celebrating Christmas Day last year, Whelan was mooring his 28-tonne prototype in Galway Bay. Over the next eight months, the quarter-scale model was battered by storms.

Whelan felt like a fish out of water when he opened The Waters Edge Hotel on the quayside at Cobh – and the lure of the sea soon grew irresistibly strong. “Building a hotel was great fun but when I started selling food and beds to people, I knew I was in the wrong business,” Whelan says. “I had an interest in renewable energy and I needed to get my feet back into the water.”

Turbine drivers

He then met Dr Tony Lewis of the Hydraulics and Maritime Research Centre at University College Cork, who in turn introduced him to oscillating water columns which drove turbines to generate electricity. Inspired by what he saw, Whelan promptly funded further research and formed a technology company – Ocean Energy – in 2002. “We were going forward to try and develop a floating structure to capture wave energy,” says Whelan, who later sold his hotel.

Over the past five years, Whelan has pioneered wave technology in Ireland with the assistance of the Hydraulics and Maritime Research Centre, the Irish Marine Institute, and Queens University Belfast. He started with a 1:50 scale model, working up to the latest quarter-scale device. He even took a 1:15 scale prototype to France for tank testing.

The current quarter-scale buoy – 12 metres long, six metres wide and six metres high – was built using the data obtained from earlier models. In section, the Ocean Energy Buoy is an L-shape lying on its back with a vertical oscillating water column. The wave motion alters the subsurface pressure to drive air in and out. This movement is harnessed by a Wells air turbine – the only moving part – which turns the air flow into a continuous rotary action in one direction.

After a 200-mile tow from Cork, the Ocean Energy Buoy was moored in Galway Bay in a spot chosen to match – for scale – the conditions that a full-sized version will face. It looks more like a small barge than a buoy.

“She’s very strongly built. The front end is blunt and the back end is open to the sea. When she lifts and falls, she acts like a jet boat and the mooring forces go flat,” Whelan says. “On New Year’s Eve, we had one of the worst storms in Galway Bay in over 20 years.” After riding out the storm unscathed, the buoy spent the next eight months collecting air flow, pressure, and mooring force data. Although not fitted with a Wells turbine, the trial confirmed that a commercially viable source of electricity was possible.

Whelan recently retrieved the buoy from the sea for cleaning and a fresh coat of paint. And now he’s installing a small 16-kilowatt power generation system for a further trial. “It’s a modified Wells turbine that we will be putting in,” says Whelan, who reckons a modest metre of wave motion will generate two or three kilowatts. “If we’re satisfied with what she’s pumping out, we’ll be immediately going to build a full-scale prototype.”

Weighing 600 tonnes, this will be 40 metres long, 20 metres wide and 16 metres high. Twin 750 kilowatt Wells turbines are planned, with the combined 1.5MW output sufficient to power hundreds of homes. Are there many calm days in a year, though?

Total dedication

“Along the west coast of Ireland, I think we’ll be generating for easily 300 days if not more,” Whelan says. Ocean Energy Buoys would be moored in groups in depths of between 30 and 50 metres with the power going ashore via submarine cable. The predicted payback time for a full-scale buoy is seven or eight years.

Getting this far has demanded total dedication from Whelan. On the day he spoke to the Guardian, he was cleaning barnacles and mussels off the prototype, typical of his hands-on approach. His vast experience in deep sea diving, tugboats, and marine salvage has proved invaluable. “If you love your job, it doesn’t seem like work at all. But at the same time, I’m not doing it for the love, I’m doing it to make it commercial,” Whelan says.

Supported by grants from the Irish Marine Institute and Sustainable Energy Ireland, the research programme has cost more than €1m (£692,570). Whelan is hoping for a good return on his personal investment.

Dr Tony Lewis of the Hydraulics and Maritime Research Centre believes that Ireland is well placed to exploit wave power. “Ireland is on the edge of a large ocean so we’re exposed to some of the biggest waves in the world. There is a continuous flow of energy into the coastline which is almost equal to the electricity consumption of the whole country in a year,” he says. The Irish government has committed to producing 500MW from wave energy by 2020.

The energy expert Professor Ian Fells has also been involved with marine energy systems. As a former chairman of the New and Renewable Energy Centre in Blyth, he appreciates the challenges faced by the Irish developers. “What encourages me is that it’s a fairly simple device and it uses proven technology for generating the electricity,” Fells says. “It just remains to be seen how it works and what it costs to bring the power ashore.”

Although the Irish government seems inspired by wave energy, Fells worries that the UK government is neglecting marine renewables – tidal stream, wave energy, and tidal barrage – in favour of wind: “Marine technologies are important but the [UK] government has a blind spot. It seems to have put all its eggs into the wind basket and wind is turning out to be very expensive. Wave power has a very important part to play.”

Neurosurgeon and entrepreneur James Doty, MD, was feeling generous when he agreed in 2000 to give a multimillion-dollar gift of stock to Stanford University School of Medicine, but he didn’t realize at the time that he would end up giving away his entire personal fortune.

Doty, who had planned to retire on his stock earnings and share his time between San Francisco, his Italian villa and his private island in New Zealand, instead wound up with virtually nothing as a result of his philanthropic commitments.

“I’m happy to give it. I’m thankful. It’s actually been a wonderful experience and has made me a better person,” said Doty, 51, who served on Stanford’s adjunct faculty for four years between 1997 and 2004.

As of Sept. 17, the school had sold all of Doty’s donated stock—398,400 shares of Accuray Inc., a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based medical device maker. The sale brought in nearly $5.4 million and amounts to one of the largest to the university to date from a current or previous faculty member. The funds will support an endowed chair in the Department of Neurosurgery and other related programs such as research on spinal cord injury and repair, including stem cell therapy. The funds also will support a collaborative project with the Dalai Lama on the neurological basis of human compassion and altruism.

“Jim is a truly remarkable individual,” said Philip Pizzo, MD, dean of the medical school. “A highly successful physician-innovator and committed academic leader, he is also an incredibly honorable individual with admirable integrity. He has continued to commit his support even though his own personal wealth has unfortunately declined. We stand in awe.”

The remarkable story of Doty’s gift began in early 2000, by which time he had accumulated about $75 million in paper profits from investments in medical technology companies, including Accuray, where he had served as chief executive officer from 1997 to 1999. He was doing some estate planning and had decided to put a substantial amount of stock into a charitable remainder trust in which the Department of Neurosurgery at the medical school was one of the beneficiaries.

But then the dot-com meltdown occurred, and the value of Doty’s holdings plummeted. All of his hopes for early retirement were dashed. He had already made a down payment on a $5 million San Francisco apartment with a view of the bay, and was in the process of buying a 6,500-acre island in New Zealand and a villa in Tuscany. He had planned to divide his time between the three homes, while also volunteering a significant part of his time as a neurosurgeon in Third World countries, he said. All those plans evaporated overnight, along with Doty’s personal fortune.

“In six weeks, I not only had lost the paper profits but was $3 million in debt,” he said. While he did not complete the purchase of the island, the villa or the new San Francisco apartment, he was able to keep an existing home in San Francisco for himself and his family.

At this point, Doty had not yet put the committed stock into the trust, and some advisors told him there was a fine legal line that could allow him to back out. A few told him he was a “complete fool” to give away his remaining assets, but he said, “I felt an obligation to do what I said, and I went ahead and did it.”