It’s not so easy to eat healthily when you’re out on the road, there are so many things to tempt you when you stop for fuel – mega-size hot sausage rolls, double packs of Mars bars, iced buns, the list goes on… So in an attempt to keep us more or less on the straight and narrow, I make my reasonably healthy flapjacks – reasonably healthy because, instead of using butter, I use olive spread and before you say ugh, there’s very little difference in taste but you have a nice smug feeling that you’re not taking on so much cholesterol! So here goes with my recipe for flapjacks.

Using a large saucepan, gently melt 150g of olive spread (Bertolli or supermarket own-brand), 150g of Demerara sugar and one large tablespoon of golden syrup. Once melted mix well and add 275g of coarse porage oats (I use Scott’s Old-Fashioned Porage Oats) and stir to combine. At this stage I throw in a good quantity of dried cranberries but you can leave the mixture as it is or add nuts, glace cherries or your own preferred dried fruit. Having given the flapjack mixture a final stir, tip it into a baking tin – my 22x22cms non-stick tray-bake tin is ideal – and press the oat mixture evenly across the base of the tin using the back of a metal spoon. Bake in a pre-heated oven (190C / 375F / Gas Mark 5) for 25 minutes. After the 25 minutes I turn the oven off and leave the tin of flapjack in the oven for a further 25 minutes to dry out a little. Once removed from the oven, score into pieces to suit your appetite (!) and allow to cool completely before removing from the tin.

As I drive around doing my postal run and collecting overnights I listen to our local radio station, BBC Radio Surrey. Its weather and traffic reports were invaluable to us during the bad weather and I would be found listening in from before breakfast until suppertime!

The other day I listened to an interesting debate on customer service, or the lack of it. Research has shown that, for the majority of us, it is not necessarily the complaint but the way in which a company deals with its customer’s complaint that causes us so much anger and frustration.

I couldn’t agree more.

Frank and I are currently popping blood vessels at the behaviour of our former accountants. Perhaps we were wrong to appoint them but we were swayed by their seeming professionalism. I can remember at our initial meeting being offered, and then drinking, a bottle of sparkling water. Later that day I wrote in my journal that I thought it was probably going to be the most expensive bottle of water I had drunk.

To cut a long and miserable story short, we delivered our year’s set of books and some weeks later a draft set of accounts were produced, although no questions at all had been asked. A second meeting, another bottle of sparkling water, we asked the innocent and, as we now realise, fateful question as to why our turnover figure for the year differed from theirs. Our accountant, a charming man, said he didn’t know but he would ask a colleague to contact us. A few days later we were emailed by his colleague with her definitive explanation for the difference – a calculation which took our turnover figure, scrambled it and came up with theirs. I went hot and cold and my stomach churned as I unpicked the logic of the calculation to reveal their mistakes.

A final meeting, our charming accountant didn’t offer me a bottle of sparkling water this time or anything else, as he agreed that they had indeed used a gross figure in their calculation when it should have been a net figure, another figure no-one could explain where it had come from or why. And, as for Sundry Differences, a figure presumably introduced into the calculation to make it work, well they were explained by three typographical errors made whilst transferring my figures to theirs, plus a little something else that couldn’t be explained.

Now at this point I expect you think we received an apology, not a bit of it. We recently wrote a 3-page letter to the senior partner detailing our grievances and all the mistakes (there were more, including a spreadsheet that didn’t crosscast). In reply we received a short, dismissive letter referring to ‘shortcomings’ that had been ‘comparatively minor’ – surely for his sake, and that of his other clients, he must have meant ‘relatively minor’ but that’s just the pedantic puzzle magazine editor in me coming out! On reading the letter I said to Frank that the senior partner hadn’t had the courtesy to address or dispute any of the issues described in our letter – presumably by default he must have accepted everything – and that this was disrespectful. Frank merely said quietly that we had been treated with contempt.

It has always been our belief, and we apply it whole-heartedly in Frank Brown Delivers that, if we make mistakes, as is inevitable from time to time, we immediately hold up our hands and apologise unreservedly and, in addition, we make amends in some appropriate way. This approach to our clients, along with quality of service, has shown enormous dividends as our young business grows from strength to strength.

It has been suggested to us that we were small fry in the eyes of our former accountants but, for us, being small is our strength. It means we can listen to our clients, understand what they need of us and DELIVER!

On one occasion Frank drove through the night to Cumbria, at our own expense, in order to resolve a problem with one of our client’s important overnight deliveries. And we hope that our client would agree that this was all done with the minimum of fuss and without demur.

Yes, the radio discussion hit the nail on the head, the complaint is bad enough but it truly is the manner in which the complaint is dealt with that leaves us seething, or not.

The radio discussion finished by saying that the latest way for people who have received bad service to complain these days is to start a page on Facebook – now, there’s a thought….

We will not enter into discussion concerning our former accountants with third parties, or reveal their name, however, any local (Redhill and Reigate) accountants who wish to disassociate themselves with our former accountants should contact us, we will be happy to publish the names of any accountants, confirming that they were not our former accountants. Please email info@frankbrowndelivers.com