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TONY'S HAT-TRICK

November 2007

While England’s footballers can only look back on the past week or so with regret, one businessman from the New Forest has scored a hat-trick of awards for his Sway restaurant with rooms.

Tony Barnfield had already won two major prizes this Autumn and on Tuesday 27 November he carried home the inaugural NFDC Outstanding Customer Service of the Year title in the New Forest Brilliance in Business Awards 2007 (pictured, right).

In October, Tony won the same category in the Tourism South East Tourism ExSEllence Awards and last week was presented with a cheque for £5,000 to spend on practical and vocational learning opportunities for his young staff in the Edge Awards 2007, winning the South-East England Small Business Award.

Over the years, Tony has achieved unrivalled success in local, regional and national awards for his restaurant with rooms, established in the former Nurse’s Cottage in Station Road, Sway in 1992. “There’s an award out there for almost everything you can think of,” he says, “and when you are running your own small business, they enable you to focus on different aspects of what you do, in our case from breakfast to the wine list, housekeeping to accessibility, and more besides.”

“Awards are the antidote to complacency, which it’s all too easy to succumb to when you seem to be doing well. I am particularly delighted to have won these awards for customer service,” Tony added, “as this has to be the main focus for any business. “Customers are always right, they say: there’s certainly no doubting that customers are always important, they are surely the lifeblood of any business!”

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