Burhill Team News January 2022
Colin Mayes Chief Executive A New Year and hopefully a year when we are not forced to close our business and we can all start the long road back to, what I am sure we hope will be, some sort of new normality for us all. I am delighted that by the time you read this, Plan B will have been withdrawn, and this can only be a good sign but I would urge you all to apply common sense when you are out and about. I hope you all enjoyed the festive break which now seems a long time ago, I have to say it was a very strange period particularly the last two weeks run up to the Christmas period where many people just seemed to go into hibernation so as to protect their planned family get togethers. Like many people my own family plans changed as we had to cancel a planned holiday but like most people I have spoken to, the Christmas period was actually quite a peaceful time and I came back to the business feeling refreshed and ready to deal with and face all the challenges that will undoubtedly be thrown at us this year.
The senior leadership team and I are totally focused on making sure that we do everything we can to drive our business forward this year including continuing investment into both the physical element of our business, be it refurbishments of our facilities or projects that just help improve our members’ and customers’ experience with us, as well as further investment into what I consider to be our most important asset, our people. We will be improving our learning and development opportunities for everyone and in this newsletter, you will find an article about Claire Boulden our new Head of People and Culture which will outline some of the progress we hope to make during 2022.
I am sure like me you have all been left in total bemusement by the antics of some of our senior political leaders of late!!!
Overall, our performance for last year was excellent and whilst our total sales turnover was below our original budgets, primarily due to all the enforced government closure periods, our actual profitability was a great deal better than I originally expected at the beginning of 2021 and a huge improvement on 2020 when we just about broke even.
What we all need to do is to focus on getting our businesses and the economy of the UK back on track as quickly as possible.
The finance team are still reviewing the accounts and we should have the final results for 2021 early next month.