The Gift of Faith
Gary Grant, business owner of toy retailer giant The Entertainer, shares his journey of becoming a Christian.
This article is taken from our latest HOPE Christmas Magazine 2024. Find out more about the magazine and how to order your copies.
Over the past 40 years, Gary Grant has taken one mediocre toy shop in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, and grown the business into the impressive chain of stores it is today. Here, the business owner shares his journey to becoming a Christian and how his faith has helped him turn The Entertainer into the largest independent toy retailer in the UK.
Could you share your story of becoming a Christian?
In 1991, my wife bought me a ticket for a men’s breakfast at her local church. I went very reluctantly, but I heard the speaker talk about faith in God that was all about relationship – and was nothing to do with the kind of RE I’d learnt at school. Here was a God who cared about me personally. Who knew me. The very next day I turned up at church and it was amazing. That’s when I became a Christian. Overnight.
How did your new-found faith change the way you run your business?
To be honest, I wondered whether it was even possible to be a Christian and run a business, but a conversation with a local Christian accountant helped me to see that I had to just change the way I was running my business. My attitude to my staff and customers had to be different, and I needed to be more discerning about the products we sold. The previous autumn, a Christian lady had challenged me about stocking Halloween toys. She told me: ‘If you stop selling Halloween, the Lord will replace your lost business in other ways.’ I just laughed at her. But the year I became a Christian we sold no Halloween products and our store experienced the biggest increase in a month’s turnover than we had ever known.
What other decisions have you had to make along the way to balance your belief and business?
There have been a number of toys offered to me over the years that I’ve felt uncomfortable with selling. Some of the toys have gone to be the year’s bestselling toy but our business has gone from strength to strength. I also went against the tide of opinion when Sunday trading became lawful and we decided not to have our staff work on a Sunday. Though it’s the second busiest day of the week in retail, our business has continued to expand. The Bible talks a lot about generosity, and we as a company really try to be radical. We donate 10% of our profits to charity each year, and try our best to support the local communities in which we trade.
What does Christmas mean to you?
The toy trade may seem to be an industry which exploits Christmas, and it is true it’s an important trading period for retail. In our case, half our turnover happens in the last three months of the year. So it’s about what we can do with the opportunity we have to speak about our faith and our values. We are really generous with what we earn, and you might see that in our shop windows we replace product with a child-friendly nativity scene. It provokes conversations within families as they come to visit the store, and it’s a reminder of what Christmas is really all about.
FIND OUT MORE
Read this and other faith-inspired stories in the latest HOPE Christmas Magazine 2024.
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