‘Throughout my career, I’ve been dropped into challenging situations to work out what can be done differently’
A British Rail graduate trainee, Bellamy had joined
the rail industry soon after graduating from Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon Institute of Technology with a business degree, but not before she had racked up some sales and consultancy experience, which served as a good grounding in customer service. ‘I worked for four or five years in bars and
nightclubs to pay my way through Robert Gordon’s Institute; I didn’t get a grant. I had three jobs and I relied on my tips. So I learnt what it was to really understand what customers want and how profitable it could be if you actually delivered.’ She even managed to blag a job training people
in customer service skills, despite only having limited experience in the field. ‘I was only 21 and I didn’t know anything about anything! The fact that somebody took me on says something about my sales skills, I suppose.’ On her return from her backpacking trip, she
started her own interim management business, working on a range of projects outside the rail industry that needed a ‘fixer’, including working as a turnaround director with a chain of builders merchants that was losing money. ‘My decision had been, right, I’m going to leave the railway industry. I’m going to do something else. A real buzz for me has always been about building successful businesses out of delighting customers, seeing them come back again and putting money in your till. Throughout my career, I’ve been dropped into challenging situations to work out what can be done differently, better and more efficiently, then asked to get on and do it.’ But before long, the railways beckoned again. A
job working on a bid for the Tyne and Wear Metro led to a spell with East Coast working on delivery of the new timetable and then to a project with First Great Western on the Reading blockade. ‘I got another call from FirstGroup, this time to say:
“We think there’s going to be an opportunity at Hull Trains, how do you fancy coming back and running a railway again?” So I went full circle! But I didn’t have to think about it very long, to be honest, because I’ve always been driven by the firm belief that successful companies are able to really understand what their customers want and have the courage and the capability of adapting to do that. ‘Open access is the ultimate opportunity for that
within the rail industry. So if I was going to come back to any railway company after Chiltern – which was just a fantastic company to work with and we achieved so much – it was going to be a company like Hull Trains.
PAGE 20 MARCH 2012
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