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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.