Blog Post Seventeen
9th July
So what a day. Not only did we see a huge, shining light at the end of the tunnel for the business with leisure reopening, my osteopath reopened so I can now move slightly less like an arthritic crab. This in itself was enough to make me smile.
But also, I was offered a job! A job I thought I had totally screwed the interview for. Back to the world of health and social care but in a role that blends the business skills I have learnt.
So I will now be working as a business change lead with e-learning development for NWIS (NHS Wales Informatics Service). It’s such an interesting area of work, and one that combines my business change and project management skills with tutoring and ability to develop e-learning resources.
I am so excited to start, though really quite sad to leave the Innovations Team at the Seren Field Hospital - we have achieved so much in such a short time and have so enjoyed working with everyone.
12 weeks ago tomorrow the business was in trouble to the point I was talking about administration procedures, and I learnt that I had to pause the job I was training for with Netflix. Today I am getting back to something that resembles stability for the next few months at least. Have no worries - Sabre is still going and you will see me out and about and I will be managing and developing the business, but others will do the day to day work instead of me - I’m too old now to be lifting trampolines all day every day!!
And finally, tonight I was brought to tears by a teenager who told me we were now a family. Something I never thought I would have. Yes, a strange arrangement with many challenges, but one I have really come to value in the last few weeks.
I am under no impression that it isn’t going to be hard work - Sabre is three years behind where it was, I now need to take an altered role in it and I am starting a new job in the strangest of times. My life will not be going back to a “new normal”, or anything close to what was normal. Close family deaths, redundancies, failed business plans (not just sabre) and health issues mean I cannot go back to where I was earlier in the year. But for the first time I am not so scared as to what tomorrow could bring and I feel like some of the weight has been lifted, at least for now.
So excellent news from the government albeit tempered by the hope that we can keep infection rates down. I try not to post on my personal account about the business (I leave that to others to update via the business account as they are way better at it than me) but maybe today is a time to reflect.
My thoughts at this point: we have a long way to go, but I am so proud that as a business we have made it through the worst. No one expects to lose all their work overnight, yet we managed to keep all our staff in work as much as possible, pay all the bills and come out the other side with no grants or business rates reduction to assist us. We also managed to adapt our equipment and skills to make PPE and provide supply chain services for the NHS.
We have come so far: 12 weeks ago I was working with legal and business advisors about how to put the business into administration when faced with the reality of being financially unviable within days. Thankfully those plans didn’t need to be actioned.
As a business in the highly competitive world of leisure, we have proved how resilient we are and I am so proud of all our staff and directors for the work they have done to get us to this point. It has been incredibly hard work and I have no doubt that that aspect will not ease up for a long time to come, but there is now light at the end of the tunnel which really hasn’t been there for the last 12 weeks.
Now to plan for the possibility of another wave, but I am so much more positive as we at least have warning and time.
Shielding continues, uncertainty is still very much a theme, but today has been just a day to remember for all the right reasons. X x x
uly 9, 2020, 05:46 PM
3 mile warm up, 3 mile tempo, 2 miles cool down
TimeDistanceElevation1h 39m8.04 mi231.95 ft