‘Losing all our work wasn’t something we had planned for’

Ceri Gillett is a mother of one child and two businesses. She lives in Torfaen with her partner, James, and together they founded Those Caterers and That Fish Guy. The award-winning catering company is based in New Inn and provides event, corporate and wedding catering across south Wales and the south west of England. Ceri is a passionate supporter of female entrepreneurship and thinks that mums make particularly fabulous business owners. In 2019 she founded an entrepreneurial support organisation, Mubo, that provides a free start-up course for parents and child-friendly networking and workshops. She is the host of a business podcast Conversations with Ceri, in collaboration with Tide, the online business banking provider. In this article, Ceri reflects on how her experience as a woman and a mother in business has enabled her to quickly adapt in this crisis and to support other women in business

I’VE always felt a little out of my depth when it came to talking about business. It’s my hugest passion but someone else always seemed more qualified than me to take the reins.

My business is small and local. For the past five years we worked tirelessly to build it up, and at the start of 2020 the catering company that my partner, James, and I built was fully booked until the end of September.

This was going to be our busiest and most profitable year yet, and as a result we’d needed to take some business decisions about growth.

We had a new vehicle custombuilt, we decided to take on some premises.

I’d started a support community for mums and parents in business just like me.

I’d recently run a successful crowdfunding campaign and had some training opportunities booked in locally, so 2020 was going to be our year.

On the evening of March 15 I sat in an airport hotel as our holiday got cancelled.

We returned to the safety of home and bunkered down.

We knew the lockdown was coming and we had plenty of late-night chats about how a few weeks’ cancelled bookings would affect us.

We weren’t shocked when they started to roll in but it was the speed that took us by surprise.

Within a week our calendar told a different story – we had no bookings until September and no bookings meant no income.

Losing all our work wasn’t something we had planned for, and believe me, over the years we had planned for most scenarios, but a pandemic never came up on our radar and the result was paralysis, neither of us knowing what step to take next.

Crawling into bed wasn’t an option as home-schooling took over our days, everyone was rallying to be at the 9am PE with Joe, and I was wondering if we’d lose our home. I did the sums, they made my stomach churn.

As the government announced