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‘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