Burhill Team News February 2022
Colin Mayes Chief Executive I am delighted to report to everyone that the group has had a good start to the year with January performing slightly ahead of expectations and we are hoping the same can be said for February. Two down and ten to go now, it is just amazing how quickly time flies by when you are busy!!! Just to help everyone’s understanding of why we are doing well at the moment, it is primarily due to the following reasons. 1. Golf Club memberships are at an all-time high 2. The number of golf rounds played by both members and independent golfers are also ahead of what we expected 3. The above is due in the main because of the incredibly mild weather experienced for most of January and in the first part of February 4. Our Adventure Leisure business has been performing really well along with our two indoor Ninja Warrior UK venues at Southampton and Sheffield 5. In February we opened our new Ninja Warrior UK venue in Milton Keynes so have the benefit of this business’ trading from then. You will all have been affected one way or another by the recent storms that have been impacting the country. On Friday 18th February the whole southern part of the country was almost closed down because of the record high winds / rainfall. I am sure we will have a few stories
about that day. I was at Burhill, and I have never seen so much carnage caused by the winds, our greenkeeping and estates team literally spent the whole day clearing trees and tidying up damaged caused. A great job done by them all! The team at Burhill that day, including myself, moved our cars around the car park to ensure we dodged the very large number of branches (some of them pretty big ones) that were flying about!!! Sadly, a number of our businesses were quite badly affected with driving range fencing and support towers being damaged which alone will probably cost us well over 60,000 to replace and repair. It just goes to show that just when you think things are starting to go well there is nearly always something that literally comes out of left field or rather a major westerly storm from across the Atlantic Ocean!!! This has meant the weekend of the 19th & 20th of February saw a major clean-up operation for many of our golf teams which will no doubt take a lot of time to clean up given the amount of debris that has fallen onto our golf courses, car parks and our outdoor adventure golf venues. I would like to take this opportunity to thank everybody that has helped with this, many people have all done a few more hours and volunteering their services to ensure we got back to normal asap. A great team effort well done to all and particularly our greenkeeping teams who have taken the brunt of the storms and all the work that goes into clearing up afterwards. Now onto some good news … this month we held our awards event for 2021 to celebrate the successes of last year and to ensure everybody was thanked for their hard work and commitment to our business. Our largest function room in the group at Aldwickbury Park Golf Club, Harpenden can only accommodate up to 180 people and