General Manager
All Star Lanes
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I’m Flora.
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I’m the GM at
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All Star Lanes in White City,
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London.
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All Star Lanes is a bowling alley in Westfield
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that offers cocktails, bowling
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and all sorts of entertainment.
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You learn to manage people, managing their time, managing expectations,
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because, you know, every single person wants a different thing.
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Making sure that we meet
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the customer’s expectations.
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The best things?
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You get to meet a world of people from different
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backgrounds, from different countries, different cultures.
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You get to teach people, which is very good.
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I think one of the things that we do is make sure that, you know,
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if anyone wants to progress, help them to, you know, go up the ladder.
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To be honest, there’s not that many bad things.
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I try to look at it in a positive way.
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But I would say the odd grumpy customer – that would be it.
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I would say that it’s very good to be resilient,
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patient.
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You need to be a people person.
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I loved school. Yes.
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History was one of my favourites.
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DT was one of my favourites,
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free drawing. I did uni in Portugal.
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I did fashion design. At that time
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Porto had a lot of industry in terms of textiles and things like that.
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My family had a textile factory as well. So,
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you know, everything worked towards that.
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One of my teachers said to me, you can’t do anything
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unless you learn English because whether you go to Milan
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or Paris or whatever it is, you need to learn English.
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So after I left university, I came to England
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to learn English.
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I went from working in a coffee shop where I was a server,
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to become a supervisor.
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Joined another company,
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stayed there for about 4 or 5 years.
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Westfield opened.
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So I was here the day that Westfield opened.
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I worked for a company called 1910.
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So they sold it to Tortilla,
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and I joined All Star Lanes about two and a half years ago.
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People often think that, you know, it’s customer service.
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It can be your 20 hours a week work
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where you earn some money to help towards something else.
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Or it can be, you know, actually, you can very well make a good living of that.
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You can make your career of that.
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I would say that, yes I didn’t do
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fashion design because, you know, life happened.
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I’m not unhappy at all.
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I’m actually very happy.
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So that’s not – I don’t look at it as losing out on something.
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I look at it as making a different choice.
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Having kids makes things harder,
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but I look at it this way.
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With the sort of business that I’m in, I can adjust the hours,
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and that’s something that I take into consideration
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for the mothers that work with us.
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I think,
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accept that it’s not going to be easy,
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but there is a reward at the end of the tunnel,
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let’s say. So you will learn as you go.
“I don’t look at it as losing out on something. I look at it as making a different choice.” After a textiles degree, Flora came to the UK to learn English. She started working in a coffee shop and went on to a range of jobs in restaurants. She now works for the bowling alley and restaurant chain All Star Lanes.