In an exclusive interview with The Christian Institute, the founder and owner of multimillion-pound toyshop chain The Entertainer has spoken of his mission to be salt and light in the world of business.
Gary Grant left school with just one O-level in Maths. At the age of 23, he and his wife Catherine took over their first toyshop in Buckinghamshire.
Now approaching retirement, Mr Grant recently announced that he will hand over his successful family business — with 160 UK shops and a healthy profit margin — to his employees.
Grant became a Christian in 1991, after attending a men’s event at his local church. He said of God: “I wasn’t looking for him, I didn’t feel I needed him, but he just turned up at a men’s breakfast and as they say, the rest is history”.
He explained: “shortly after I became a Christian, six weeks in, I really felt that carrying on being a Christian and running a business just weren’t compatible.”
When a local accountant challenged him on that very issue, Grant transformed the way he ran his business, and ever since has sought to be “salt and light in a retail environment”.
Grant recounts how, months before becoming a Christian, a lady came into his shop one autumn and challenged him on stocking Halloween products.
She told him, he recalls, “that I was encouraging children to play with darkness”, and if he stopped selling Halloween products “the lost business would be replaced in other ways by the Lord. And as a retail owner, as a non-Christian, I just laughed”.
you can rely on God to honour those that honour him
Six months later, following his conversion, Gary decided to stop selling items for Halloween: “We had the most amazing month without Halloween, biggest increase in turnover at three shops that we had in the history of the business.”
He said: “My motive was just to do the right thing and you can rely on God to honour those that honour him. Simple as that.”
A few years later, in 1995, Sunday trading laws changed, and unlike the rest of their competitors, the Grants chose not to open on a Sunday.
He said: “there were a few tricky years where landlords insisted that new tenants should open on the Sunday – you couldn’t retrospectively force people to do it – and we lost a few shops”.
However, the following years presented The Entertainer with “a huge number of opportunities” to open shops around the country.
we do value our staff having the opportunity to spend time with their families
Gary explained that while the website operates 24/7, employees do not “pick, pack or dispatch” orders on the Lord’s Day as, he added, “we do value our staff having the opportunity to spend time with their families.”
Grant spoke of the importance of caring for his staff, and offers to pray for them if he knows they are going through difficulties. He described it as “a privilege” to be able to pick up the phone to encourage his employees.
He explained: “So to be able to get alongside them and to encourage them in a way which maybe doesn’t happen today. Maybe 50 years ago it would have been commonplace for somebody to say to them, ‘Can I pray for you?’. But it doesn’t feel like it is the norm response today.”
Lee Adlam, who’s been with The Entertainer for almost eight years, told the BBC that Gary has “always had employees at heart and their best interest at heart. He’s always looking after us”.
The veteran business owner said he made the decision to pass the company into employee hands in order to “honour the staff who’ve helped me make The Entertainer the business that it is today” and to preserve the company values built over 44 years.
Sharing his experience in running a business, Grant encouraged Christians to guard their reputation, live lives of integrity, and show radical generosity.
He said: “I want my faith to be living for seven days a week, not just for Sundays when it’s possible to go to church.
“So I would be praying for other Christians to be bold, an opportunity in a controlled and non-confrontational way to be able to speak about their faith, to look at opportunities, to be able to get alongside staff, particularly if you’re an employer.”
Only a few decades ago, a high view of the Lord’s Day was standard among English-speaking evangelicals. Yet today, there are many Christians for whom the whole notion of one day set aside for God seems a quaint throw-back to Victorian values. It is easy to feel intimidated by the tide of this popular thinking within the evangelical world.