Last week I visited Advanced Aquarium Consultancy, in Essex, England. I’ve been there several times before, I always recommend it, but this time I didn’t go there to shop, I went there to work. And gain a unique insight into the running of one of Britain’s best aquarium stores.
This isn’t my first rodeo, I’ve managed stores, so I guessed some of the usual anxieties before owner Paul Hughes even turns the key in the door in the morning. Big anxieties, like whether the shop has been broken into or caught fire before they get into the intricacies of whether the system pumps are all on, any pipework leaks, or dead fish.
But in the modern realm, Paul’s checks actually start at 12:00am, when he checks every one of the store’s 16 cameras and all its aquarium automation apps before he goes to bed. Aquarium stores have never just been 9-5, Monday to Friday type jobs but due to things like smartphones, aquarium monitors, and CCTV, they’re now 24-hour, seven-day-a-week jobs, and all the stresses and anxieties that come with it.
Two-hour store check
After feeding his seahorses at home from 6:30 am, Paul and his dedicated team start at the shop at 8:30, but the store doesn’t open until 10:30. They spend two hours checking livestock, cleaning, calibrating and maintaining all those aquarium monitors, as well as topping up ATOs, reagents, checking skimmer cups, and salt and RO reservoirs.
I started with Cyrus, the fish guy, and together the two of us took an hour and a half to check every single fish up close. Paul says if you haven’t looked every fish in the eyes, you haven’t checked them. And he’s right. We health-checked both sides of every fish, fed them, and checked that they were labeled correctly. They keep a record of every fish sold for pet store licensing, and we went through the fish that sold the previous day as well. It was probably the most thorough fish check I’ve ever done. And I’ve done a lot.
At 10:30 doors open and up to six staff are on hand to serve customers, order dry goods, and take joint responsibility for multiple social media posts each day. A family business, Paul’s wife Angela works there too, as well as his two sons, Connor and Dylan. The other staff are just as dedicated and I watched as two of them collaborated to diagnose an issue on a KH Keeper. AAC has its own coral farm on site and as we all know, you can’t let standards slide when keeping Acropora. All of the staff are monitoring the monitors constantly too. It’s relentless but necessary.
Paul breeds seahorses as well as farming Acropora, and the babies are fed every hour on the hour. We spent hours just talking about the right type of Mysis. He then goes through his 150 daily emails before going next door to build his new farm, seahorse facility, and podcasting studio. Paul has 35 years of aquatic retail experience and came from another top store before AAC. When he’s not working he’s on busman’s holidays to reefing shows and other stores around the world, and he’s still learning, still perfecting fish and coral health, and searching out inspiring displays.
AAC is closed on Mondays, only staff are there, again cleaning, testing, and appraising every one of the seven display tanks. The team then sets about achieving one major project that day, every week.
There’s a lot more to running a top shop. Great customer service, friendly, knowledgeable staff, good products, prompt posting of online goods, and more, but to an experienced industry veteran like me, it was the attention to detail in each and every task that stood out. If you dream of opening a world-class store, you’ll need a world-class team of people who share your vision. And the constant pursuit of perfection.
