TH IS JU G GL E I S R EA L How many of us can relate to juggling work with the demands of childcare? As we come out of lockdown we are trying to re-jiggle our lives and re-adjust to merge the online work:life balance with the re-discovered freedom.
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WAS RAISED IN NORTH LONDON (Tottenham), I met my husband at Secondary School and went to university to study Construction Management.
Today I have 4 children at 2 different schools. My home is in Hertfordshire and my office is in Harlow, Essex.
A year into my degree I was headhunted by a construction firm to work on site management and quantity surveying for refurbishments across Central and West London.
I am the Aftersales Manager for Essex Prestige where I look after everything from legal, commercial decisions and compliance. The company launched 6 years ago and we field over 150 calls a day and sell over 100 cars a month. We are doing pretty well!
I worked mainly across site management and construction procurement but working full time with a young baby and another on the way proved pretty difficult. After having my 4th child by aged 28, it became near enough impossible to have a career in construction and I decided to forge a career with my husband. I needed the flexibility for childcare that came with running your own business.
As with most people Lockdown hit us hard. Having to close the business totally during Lockdown #1 made us reassess the way we operate. Rather than sit tight, waiting for things to open up we set up a stringent ‘By Appointment Only’ system - this works really well for us in terms of COVID safety but also in adding a heightened sense of exclusivity and excitement to the purchase too.
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With our customers spending anything from £10k-100k+ on a vehicle it’s important that we can dedicate time to that customer to give them a service they not only expect but deserve. We have also setup a flexible contactless delivery system for cars too and a full video tour of the vehicle to send customers giving them an informed view of the car. Again, this worked really well – we have over 10k followers on social media and with the post COVID increase in demand for premium used cars we often sell as soon as a video/ image is posted online. This pandemic has had a huge impact on everyone in different ways. The first lockdown really made me reassess who I was, and what I wanted to achieve with my life.
