Interview with Wayne Shaw Managing Director of The Window Company about How They’re Supporting Everyone Can

The Window Company have made Everyone Can their charity of the year for 2019 and are going to be doing lots of exciting activities to raise valuable funds. In today’s blog post, I interview their managing director Wayne Shaw, about why they decided to support Everyone Can, what they’ll be doing and how you can find out more or get involved.

First of all, tell us a bit about your company.

So we’ve been going for twelve years. We install windows, doors and conservatories, to home owners in the Greater Manchester area. We’re a family run business. We are quite well known in the area. We have a good reputation.

Why did you start having a charity of the year?

We’ve been doing it for about five years now, a different charity each year. We were always doing bits and pieces. So there were people in the team that would maybe support one charity or do a charity run for a certain charity. And it was just trying to bring it all together really.

And rather than just do a bit of a nameless charity that no one knew, try and support one charity, try and do it locally and just pool all our efforts in to supporting that one charity. And the emphasis being on someone local. Or we’ve had it before where a team member’s Mum was had an illness, so that became a charity. And although it wasn’t local, it kind of fed in to us doing something that related to us. But generally, it’s a local charity that maybe doesn’t always get as much press and attention. And just trying to raise awareness and raise as much funds for them, really.

So how did you hear about Everyone Can and why did you decide to make us your charity of the year for 2019?

So, we heard about Everyone Can while doing some banking actually. And I think they collared one of our team coming out the bank and explained what they did and who they were. I think they were doing a bit of canvassing, just to raise awareness of the charity. So they’d come back, told us about it and we’d stuck it on our list. I think this was about May time. We normally decide on the charity of the year in December. So, we stuck it on our list, as we do with a few others.

But yeah, the main emphasis again really was from looking at them is:

1. They were local to us.
2. There didn’t seem much out there for this type of charity, in terms of the way they support disabled people. There was nothing, when I looked in to it that provided a gaming centre with the emphasises being on everyone being able to use it. Say your brother’s disabled and they’re able bodied and it allows them to play together. So that being one emphasis and the other emphasis being on a consultation process and trying to identify what assistive technology is needed.

So it was something that was that niche kind of charity again and the fact that they were local. So it kind of ticked all the boxes for us really.

What are you going to be doing to support Everyone Can this year?

Every year, we always do our charity car wash. So, we do a car wash where we hold it our place and try and wash as many cars as we can. We normally raise a good eight hundred to a thousand pounds doing that. So all the team will muck in on that and help out, generally, on a Sunday out of hours.

We always do a charity gig night. So we put on a few bands. We get good prizes. We raise a lot of money doing that, generally a good few thousand pounds.

And then in between all that we have other events. And we always do a running event. This year I’m doing the marathon with Brad from the team. We’ve got a ten k that’s being taking place. And then all of us will be doing the Yorkshire Three Peaks as well. So I think there’s about ten of us doing that.

So we just try to build up all those little bits of fundraising and hopefully, while we’re doing that, we’re raising awareness. And the benefit of it is, because it’s local we’re putting things out on Facebook or the team are putting stuff out there and it all ties in so we can post on the groups. It’s local, so for the car wash hopefully, we get more people down because hopefully, someone will know someone at the charity, which gets more people down there, which will obviously raise more funds and it creates more awareness for Everyone Can at the same time, real

What event are you most looking forward to?

I would say the charity gig is always great, because it takes a lot of planning. There’s a lot of planning involved, but it’s always a great night. You’ve got the bands on there. A lot of our team go down. We tend to try and get as many from the charity down there as well. So it’s a great night of people that you know. So yeah, that’s always a good one. Although we’re there raising money and trying to raise awareness, it’s a good social event as well.

So how can people in the community get involved?

I suppose, by supporting us. For the car washes, bring your car down, let us clean it. It’s still cheaper than going to a car wash, but you’re going to: get your car clean, support a local charity and it’ll be cheaper than elsewhere.

We’re always open if people want to join us on something like our Three Peak Challenges. Things like that really. Just spreading the word.

If someone came up to us and said look I want to help raise money for this charity as well, we’d have no questions and say right we’ll get you a place in the 10 k or you can come on the Yorkshire Three Peaks. The more the merrier, basically.

How can people find out more about what you’re doing?

We’ve put a blog out from the website. We’ll be continually posting out on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. We’ll always try and tag Everyone Can in there as well. We’ve used a bit of a hashtag over the years #WashRockRun. Washing cars, rocking being the gig and running is generally something involved. When we create a post for something like the gig, we tend to use that hashtag as well.

Thanks to The Window Company for making Everyone Can their charity of the year.

If you’d like to find out more about The Window Company or the work they’re doing to support Everyone Can, check out their website at:

www.the-windowco.co.uk

If you would like to find out how you can support Everyone Can, we’d love to hear from you. Please call on 0808 800 0009 or fill out our contact form.