BRAND NEWS

BY JOHN BLACK - THE FORT HOTEL, BROUGHTY FERRY

On Monday the 16th of March I believe our trade was officially thrown under a bus in one statement, “stay open but don’t go in!”. The following Friday the Government threw us a lifeline for our staff when it announced 80% wages would be paid, along with the closure announcement we needed at that point. I, along with another four other local premises, made the decision to close at 9pm, as we believed what we did from that point on would be remembered for a very long time to come. The same five premises ourselves ‘The Fort Hotel’, The Eagle Coaching Inn, The Anchor, The Occidental Bar & Bruach had met earlier in the week to discuss the situation, and it was at that point that Debbie from the Eagle suggested we each put £100 in to start a local food bank. There has been so many misleading statements. The Government said at first “We will do whatever it takes” which has changed to “we cannot save every business and everyone.” Probably the biggest joke of all ‘Insurance companies will pay out!’ They have not, not a penny! The Grant system which is so unfair in so many ways under £19k in Rates - £10K Grant, £19K - 51K a £25K Grant but over £51K which is where I happen to be, not a penny! This needs to change. Yes, our staff have been Furloughed with 80% pay, but again I, the employer, am left to pay them weekly for now until the Portal is ready and will we get every penny back? Well, that is another question. I have more than 30 staff how long can they expect me to sustain this. There are two reasons why I have not folded already. The first reason, is that I have used the cash due for my VAT return which I now have to get back somehow to pay HMRC in the future. The second is that I had cleared my overdraft in January, but for one reason or another, I had kept it open. That has been my main lifeline. Not the loans that the Government made out would be so easy to acquire. Only 1.4% have been approved so far. Up until now I have paid all my local suppliers first, and have a list of others which I will pay in full before this month is out. Not because any Government has helped me with this but plain and simple my overdraft! Which again is debt that I will have to pay back in the future. Our Business is like so many other businesses out there because of past renovations, constantly changing legislation and other costs we are asset rich but cash poor. My staff’s wages right now are being paid with borrowed interest added money. We need our team to be there for us when we do reopen so we need to look after them now. Day to day it has been tough in so many ways mainly mentally dealing with the numbers which juggle through your mind at every second of the day. Going from being a thriving business one week to having zero income the next. The previous week we had deliveries for future renovations which are now all in storage. When will be be able to reopen? What is our future? It’s the not knowing that’s eating at me. Daily I am racking my brain on how I can bring in an income to soften the blow on the damage this is causing to all our futures. My theory for getting through this now is, if you can, make sure you pay all local suppliers first. This will be first to impact our futures with a knock on effect. Don’t just cancel all your standing orders and your direct debits to the big suppliers, having said that the energy companies have been horrendous! Instead speak to the companies first, most have been understanding and will offer some kind of help be it for future payments. After all we need to come back from this and you will need them again. As for personal payments, mortgages, cars, loans again, my advice is speak to the companies. Most will give you a three month holiday. As a director my personal wage stopped on the 20th of March so any savings I can make right now will help. Finally if you can do anything for now ‘Be Kind!’ as I said earlier whatever you do right now will be remembered for a long time. The five pubs that initially put the £100 each in started something that has become so much bigger and a lifeline to a lot of local people, The majority of us are still working on this (one took not well). We have now raised over £10K and have a fully working food bank delivering twice a week plus emergency deliveries. But will my business survive this? I believe it will, although it won’t be easy and there will be many sacrifices and changes along the way, but I will stay strong and help as many as I can along the way.

MANORVIEW’S AIM: TO COME OUT RUNNING... Pictured left to right Steve Graham, and Steve Buckley.

BY STEVE GRAHAM - CHAIRMAN OF MANORVIEW

To be honest, the minute Boris Johnstone came out and said to avoid pubs and restaurants, I thought about closing down. This was about a week before the actual shutdown. On Monday March 16 I told my management team what I was thinking, but not everyone in the business knew. I saw other countries closing down and I thought it was inevitable. In some respects it was an easy decision to make because it had been made for us. This was before the furlough deal was revealed. But we were getting lots of calls from concerned brides and grooms and people wanting to freeze their gym memberships and such like making it difficult to operate because we didn’t know what was coming. Although we could have kept open over the next weekend we didn’t feel it was the right thing to do. We had a team of 500 people who could have picked up coronavirus, and so on the Tuesday we announced we were closing and that we would be keeping all the team on, but at 50% of their wages, for as long as it took. I think it was the right thing to do, anything else was just being in denial of what was going to come. Maybe that is easy for me to say, because that is the way I think. Once I made the decision I felt relief. I felt like we had taken back the power and at the same time, it allowed me to offer the NHS free bedrooms. That quick decision worked for us. We were able to close in a practical manner. The units were cleaned and perishable stock given away to charities and the right places – and that helped. When the actual shutdown came we were actually very well prepared. The following Friday the government announced the

furlough scheme, a year’s holiday from rates, and Government backed loans and I could see that there would be more support coming from the Government which was a real relief based on the decision we had made. We spoke to our lenders and suppliers. Then we spent days and weeks going through cashflow projections, looking at where we would be in 3 months, 6 months 12 months – and producing all the information we needed for the bank in a thorough way which ultimately allowed them to give us support. The CBIL government loan didn’t work for us because of the five-year profile thereafter. We had to look at it in longer-term aspect and Barclays understood this and had approved our increased facility by Easter Friday. The bank could also see that we are still growing and expanding our business, and certainly, once we get back to normal that is what we will continue to do. I think the Government has done a reasonable job for businesses in the circumstances. They have been reacting to what has been happening and the Chancellor comes across very well. He has an eye on the economy and with furlough, is trying to keep everyone with a wage while at the same time trying to ensure the health and wellbeing of the country. Coming out the other side the Government will have to continue with support – a year won’t be enough for some people. We think it will be a full year before we get back to the profits we were achieving at the year-end 2019. We are lucky because a lot of our business is postponed rather than cancelled. Hospitality was the first to close and we will be last to

re-open. We are all in the same predicament and we are all facing the same challenges, but there will be opportunities – certainly, I couldn’t have got more bank support without the crisis. It has changed the bank’s outlook. Before they were lending against leverage now it is against cash flow – cash flow for debt servicing. For a company like us that is a positive, because we want to keep expanding. I love change - and everything is about to change. Our best period of growth was after the last crisis. The hard work and effort that we have put into this company over the last 10 years has given us the safety net that we need now. We all will come out at the same time and same pace as each other. It will be no better for one company than another. If we all think like that and move forward it will go back to normal one day – although there will be changes. I certainly believe there will be opportunities too. Since we got the funding we have started the process of bringing our suppliers up to date – everyone has to survive. We are also keeping our team up to date. We have an internal app and we post every day. We ask everyone if they have any questions and on a Friday I answer them in a Q&A session online. We are using this time to do some maintenance around our sites which we are usually struggling to do because we are trading. We plan to get as much in place as possible to keep our standards up. When we do open we plan to come out running. We also still have staff working in units helping look after NHS staff. It has been one of the highlights of this shutdown that we have been able to offer this accommodation. I didn’t do it realising how good it would feel. It was an easy decision at the time and the response we have had has been amazing. Some of the NHS staff were sleeping in their cars to self-isolate from family. They couldn’t believe our gesture, we weren’t looking for anything from it, but when you can see that you are making a difference it also gives you a level of comfort and reassurance too. The comforting thing is that we are all in this together. People say hospitality will be very challenging when we do go back. But I have never known the business to be anything but challenging. I, for one, am always thinking about how to drive profit. I do think it will take time to go back to normality. I think people will appreciate eating and drinking and having a good time even more. We will have a busy period from this although people may be a bit cautious to begin with. I have also got four units leased out and we have given them a three-month rent-free period. We passed the support onto our tenants that we were getting. After all, we have to think about coming out the other side and I for one believe that something good always comes from something bad. I refuse to think negatively.

BY LAUREN CLEGG - R4 GROUP - DUNDEE BY LAUREN CLEGG - R4 GROUP DUNDEE

Coronavirus. We started hearing more and more about it the further into 2020 we got, we didn’t really pay that much attention to it. Little did we know, it would take over our lives and change everything. Myself and Calum began to take the Coronavirus more seriously when it started to become more apparent that it was spreading not only rapidly through China, but also to other countries around the world. It was and is still fair to say that Covid-19 and the effects it has had on our businesses, the UK and the world are unprecedented. We opened our first restaurant, The White Goose, in November 2017, followed by The Giddy Goose in August 2018, both situated in Dundee. We began to notice a slight drop in sales at The White Goose in the weeks leading up to the lockdown. The White Goose is surrounded by hotels and so massively relies on the hotel trade as its main income source. At first we put it down to the usual, January/February quiet period, however, when the quiet spell lasted longer than just a week or so we began to think, was the Coronavirus really the cause? It didn’t take long for neighbouring restaurants to make the same link. In the passing days more and more businesses were posting about their increased hygiene procedures and take away services. Both of our venues already have very good health and hygiene procedures in place, however we made sure that our staff were taking extra precautions to ensure the safety of our staff and customers. The week of the lockdown saw many of our neighbouring businesses slowly start to close their doors as the effects of Covid-19 were taking their toll. We were debating the closure of The White Goose due to how quiet it was, the cost of running it day to day was outweighing the profits. However, The Giddy Goose was surprisingly still busy as usual. There was most definitely a change in atmosphere, but we were still seeing customers through the door happy, spending money. This is what prevented us closing either of our venues, we didn’t want to prematurely close if we didn’t need to. By the end of that week we were in lockdown, with no choice but to close the doors for the foreseeable future. The following day we came up with our plan on how to still bring income into the business. With being a small and still fairly new business, we don’t sit on a massive bank balance and so something so serious as forced closure was devastating for us. The White Goose closed its doors, however, The Giddy Goose, prior to the lockdown was already offering takeaways, so this is the route we went down. We decided to open for take aways Thursday - Sunday evenings, offering the majority of our menu at 50% off. With a lot of other competing restaurants offering take aways we had to do something to stand out and so 50% off was the best way to do this. The weekend following lockdown was very busy, it wasn’t ideal offering 50% off, however it was more important to have some income, however small, coming into the business than nothing, especially at this time when the support being offered from the government was still so up in the air. Support for businesses in Scotland has been extremely disappointing. If our venues were in England, due to the rateable value we would have received 50k in support, however, because we are in Scotland and their guidelines are different, we are only eligible for 32.5K, to which we have still not received a penny. That is a substantial amount of money which would have been very helpful in our current situation, I’m sure this is the same for many other venues in Scotland also. We are still waiting on our first grant coming through for The Giddy Goose, we have outstanding bills that need to be paid, which we had planned to use part of the grant for. Now almost a month down the line, multiple emails and phone calls, which have either been left unanswered, or bypassed, we are still waiting. In regards to bank support, we are still waiting to hear back, being told that there are many applications to work through and someone will get back to us as soon as they can. Personally, as a small business owner, I don’t feel that enough if being done to support us. There have been many promises from the government and local councils to support local businesses, but again, we are yet to receive a penny of this support. We have no faith in the support that is being offered, and in our eyes, the only way we can see ourselves getting through this awful time, is by rolling our sleeves up and working harder than ever to bring in any income we can. Without a doubt, once lockdown is uplifted there will be multiple business that go out of business due to the economic constrictions of Covid-19, and it will unfortunately be the small businesses that haven’t had access to enough support or received it quick enough. This is a massive worry we have, with there still being so much uncertainty we take each day as it comes. The only thing we keep telling ourselves is that no matter what we will get through this and come out of the other end stronger and working harder.