Island Life Magazine Ltd October/November 2015 | Page 28

INTERVIEW

“If someone says
‘you can’t do that’ it
just makes me more
determined to do it”

Caroline’s sense of customer service:
“If we were short on stock, I insisted
on letting customers know. You have
to have those high standards, treat
customers how you would want to be
treated”.
While all this was going on, Caroline
and Steve were planning their wedding
– which somehow got squeezed in
between stints at the office!
“The night before we got married I was
in the office until 9pm and on the day
of the wedding, Steve sorted the answer
machine messages and got the drivers
organised.
Not surprisingly, Caroline recalls being
“pretty exhausted” during the wedding.
She and Steve did manage to escape to
Barbados for a seven-day honeymoon
but then it was straight back to work,
where again they would battle to run
the operation with “Three old Sherpa
vans that were on their last legs, two
new vans, 12 staff and two girls in the
office”.
The amazing thing is that, with such
modest resources – plus a whole lot of
grit and determination – Caroline and
Steve began turning Medina around.
Sales began to increase exponentially
– some weeks by 50%, 75%, and one
week, by a whopping 125%.
The business grew so much in fact
that it started offering frozen food –
which ultimately was to become the
company’s big area of growth.
“Each year, we’d build another freezer,
until finally we had 100s of pallets
worth.”
In tandem with this, the company
gradually took on more reps, more
office staff, and updated the computer
systems.
In 2002 Steve’s parents retired, and he
and Caroline purchased the remaining
shares to establish them as owners of
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