COVER FEATURE
Bruntwood Wor A feature interview with Kelly McNair, communities manager, and Tony Reed, head of commercial at Bruntwood Works in Liverpool. How have your business relationships changed to become more supportive and collaborative? Tony: From the very outset, we made a concerted effort to speak to every single customer to understand how their business was likely to be impacted and that allowed us to offer tailored support to those businesses who needed it. Every customer now has their own account manager who they can turn to at any time. We have a large SME community in Liverpool, including lots of smaller independents, many of whom needed our support. We’ve helped them to access grant funding or lobby for financial assistance from the government that wasn’t immediately available. We’ve been happy to guide them during this time and pass those learnings on to support other customers. It was also important to keep buildings open for those businesses who needed them and to be flexible in our decisions while implementing Covid regulations in an evolving situation. Properties such as Burlington House, a hub for health and wellbeing organisations, needed to operate as normally as possible for high levels of occupancy. Kelly: Bruntwood Works has also created Spark, a business support programme to support our customers both professionally and personally. This ongoing programme involves webinars, one-to-one advisor sessions and curated introductions for our customers and the wider community. We’ve created an approach that is bespoke to our customers. We’re proud to have helped so many customers in so
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many different ways, especially during a challenging 12 months.
How has your business adapted to provide products and services to customers in a different way? Kelly: In ‘normal’ times, Bruntwood Works customers enjoy a vibrant community programme including networking events, wellbeing sessions, business seminars and charity fundraisers. We’ve built on
