IN LIVING COLOUR
THE NatWest group had up to 60,000 staff working from home during the crisis but had managed to keep 95 per cent of branches open.
Chief executive Alison Rose said the UK bank, like every business represented on the round table panel, had been forced to adapt rapidly as the Covid crisis unfolded.
She said: “This was a quite extraordinary situation because the economy was effectively put into a hard stop.
“And now we’re facing the challenges of how you get that economy moving and what the damage and challenges facing businesses are as they get going
“My priority has been to make sure that we’ve geared up all of our relationship managers, all of our teams to make sure we can deliver ongoing service but also provide the support to bridge people through this period.”
The round table event included Helen Bates, financial director of the Greater Birmingham Chambers of Commerce, who said members had little expectation of a quick recovery, with huge job cuts and forecasts of diminsished turnover and profitability in the next 12 months.
She said businesses were also facing the impact of a no-deal or “limited” deal Brexit.
She said: “Businesses are finding it awfully difficult to predict what things will look like in three months time, let alone, longer term.”
Panellist Sean Witheford is managing director of JET Plant Hire in Evesham, Worcestershire, which has a fleet of vehicles that removes the surfaces of roads prior to relaying.
He said a lot of their private contracts with businesses such as construction companies stopped overnight, with some deciding to shut down and take advantage of the furlough scheme.
Work, he said, had picked up since June but he feared once that was completed there might be a shortage of new work.
He said: “We think we’re probably going to be operating about 90 per cent for the foreseeable few months.”
Paul Cheema is a director of Malcolm’s Stores, which manages convenience stores and forecourt businesses and sits on the board of the Association of Convenience Stores.
He his firm was forced to be clever to make up for lost petrol forecourt business but also support the growing number locally.
Mr Cheema said: “With our forecourt business, we had to change pretty sharply because fuel volume disappeared overnight. So we went from 100 down to 20 per cent of fuel volume within one day.
“Today, we’ve only just recovered to about 60 per cent of fuel volume and that’s with having a new Costco petrol station. We had to do different things. We’ve had to bring in different food components into store and make it viable.
“So, while the forecourt wasn’t busy, we wanted to drive the convenience experience back to our consumers and turn that forecourt into a car park.
“That site’s done pretty well. Our other store, which serves anything between 1,050 and 1,200 shoppers a day, that went up about 180 per cent a day in sales.
“It was really hard to get staff out and bring them into store and say, look, we need more people. Another problem with that store were the
of
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shopping challenges we had with wholesalers that started profiteering from the pandemic and increasing prices.
“We all know problems that social media plays and, as soon as you put a price up in store, you then become the horrible one in your community and people start boycotting stores. “So you have to find out ways that you can overcome that dilemma. I reported this to Paul Sculley, the business minister, and asked him what is the Government doing to tackle wholesalers that are profiteering out of this.
“Because we could not as a convenience store pass that price increase to our shopper because every shopper is important to us.
“But the business is doing fine, we’ve gained new customers, working more closely with niche suppliers, like a 17-year-old-girl that works for us and was really good at baking cakes.
“So we got behind her and have not profited from this.
“She makes the cakes at home and we sell them in store but, by tagging on the back of our Instagram and Facebook account, she’s now got hundreds of followers. So that’s inspiring the next generation.”
Simon Quantrell, deputy managing director of Carwood Motor Units, said it had been a rollercoaster ride for his team.
The vehicle parts supply and remanufacturing business deals with customers including the MoD and has its head office in Coventry. It employs more than 250 people. Mr Quantrell said: “We saw quite a dynamic shift within our business. On the Ministry of Defence side and the contract side of our business, we saw a significant increase a week before Boris put us into lockdown. “But on the automotive side of our business, dealing with retail customers and motorsport, we saw a significant downturn.
“We probably saw 80 per cent go within the space of about three days. So managing that shift in dynamics across the business and communicating to the 270-odd people that we employ, was an interesting dynamic really.
“Throughout this pandemic, we’ve been running 80 per cent of where we expected to be from a budget standpoint.
“We’re seeing a significant shift the other way so the contract elements of the business and what we’re doing for the defence sector is settling back to normal or a little bit less than normal.
“The retail and automotive elements are switching on a lot more quickly than what we actually anticipated.
“You’ve effectively seen a massive decline and now we’re seeing a massive spike within our supply chains and you know the teams are working exceptionally hard to flatten out those peaks.”
Businesses are finding it awfully difficult to predict what things will look like in three months time, let alone, longer term Helen Bates, Greater Birmingham Chambers of Commerce