Moore establishes locum booksellers business
Stacey Moore, owner and founder of independent bookshop Bookgrove in Ocean Grove, Victoria, has started another business, BreakAway Books locum booksellers.
As part of the new business, Moore is offering her services as an experienced bookseller to other shops around the country ‘to alleviate the problem of finding trained, reliable and honest people to manage and or work in their bookstore’. While Moore is currently only offering her services at this early stage in the business, she told Books+Publishing that she feels there is scope for the new locum service to grow.
‘Many bookstores around the country are single-person or family-owned and operated, with maybe some casual staff. This makes it difficult to go away for more than three weeks if you want to have a real holiday. The reality is a lot of people might go on a holiday and take their computer and it’s not a real holiday—that’s the way it is but it doesn’t have to be.’
Moore says, as a small business owner, ‘One of the biggest challenges I found was the ability to go on extended breaks for recreational and/or medical or carers reasons, and leave the business in capable hands.’ She first got the idea for a locum bookselling business when she took an extended break in 2018 and her friend and owner of Melbourne independent Brunswick Bound Rob Arambasic managed Bookgrove for five weeks. Arambasic got to have a working holiday by the seaside, while the following year Moore worked some shifts at inner-city Brunswick Bound while Arambasic was on leave.
‘We both totally loved this experience and learnt that although demographics may differ, the essential processes and customers are very similar,’ she says. ‘It was fantastic! He got to have his five weeks away and I got to my have my holiday. So it’s always been in the back of my mind how I’d love to do this for other people.’
Since that time the idea never left Moore’s mind. After another Australian bookshop owner put a notice on the CircleSoft Facebook page putting the feelers out for someone to run their shop for two weeks, Moore says, ‘it clicked in my head again, there’s this capacity to do something and someone has to do it’. This year she conceptualised a name, registered an ABN and started to get the word out at the ABA conference. Now it’s a matter of advertising the business more and, next year, once the busy Christmas retail season is over, Moore plans to get in touch with more bookshops around the country.
‘There are all these agencies that do these kinds of things for other industries,’ says Moore. So why not bookselling? ‘The intricacies of being a bookseller are quite complex,’ she adds, noting that she is experienced with two POS systems, BookNet and CircleSoft, plus all the operational processes involved with running a bookshop—not to mention she possesses extensive book knowledge, which goes back to her time as a public librarian.
With her children grown and Bookgrove ‘running like clockwork’ after 13 years, Moore is keen to indulge in her love of travel and help her fellow booksellers along the way—and she has experience doing similar locum-style roles. ‘As a public librarian I was often the person who would manage the branch while the branch manager went away,’ she tells B+P, adding that she also worked in similar roles in childcare for local government. ‘I have this capacity to be able to just move into a role within my skillset and do the operational stuff.’
With the pandemic fundamentally altering the way people work, it makes sense that now would be the time for Moore to give the business a shot. ‘I just thought I’m going to do it! I’m going to try get this off the ground.’ Her philosophy is that excellent customer service is appreciated and sought after no matter where you are.
‘Fundamentally people are the same,’ says Moore, ‘They’re all looking for the right book.’
Category: Features
