I suppose, if nothing else, this terrible Covid19 situation has given a lot of business owners a time to look reflect on what they do and how things could be improved, changed or left alone.

For a great many businesses, it’s been all about survival. Cutting overheads to the bone, re-negotiating over leases, loans and arranging ‘payment holidays’ while working with as few staff as possible and furloughing the rest. Business owners I know have found this to be a stressful, worrying time and there’s a great deal of uncertainty about what the future holds and what it will look like. It will be a new normal, when it returns. Our business too will need to adapt and change just like every other. Planning for the future used to be relatively easy, look at the market, compare your previous years, what worked well, what didn’t and assess the financial side to see what growth you can achieve without suffering cash flow issues. Then it was a case of planning and getting the vision, goals and message to those working with us to get us there. Few now can look ahead and plan in the knowledge that little has changed.

We’re lucky that we know our markets and thanks to amazing people, have a good reputation in the industry. We want to be better, much better and thankfully a lot of hard work, planning and ideas have been shared and worked upon over the last 15 months which will add value to what we offer and give us a much better picture of where we are and how we can move forward. Looking back, we seem to have timed our projects quite well. Luck has obviously played it’s part (who knew at the start of 2020 that a pandemic was coming?) and we’re confident that we’ll be in a great position come the new normal. We know where we want to be and how we’ll get there. We’re now recruiting and looking at several positions within the management team to strengthen our business. Without this awful Coronavirus, we’d not have spent the time recently looking at every facet of what we do and planning to improve. Staff are returning, customers are opening (or at least planning to) and there’s a far more positive feeling than there was in March and April.