Burhill Team News November / December 2021
Colin Mayes Chief Executive Dear Colleague, As we enter the last trading month of the year, I am delighted to report that overall, the company is in great health, which frankly when we started the year, I am surprised we have all managed the whole Pandemic in such a positive way. The 3 months of closure that our golf business suffered from January to March seems a distant memory now, but, as I I’m sure you will agree, the whole experience in those dark winter months was a pretty scary situation not really knowing when our business would re-open and how we would find trading conditions / business levels when we did. Many will also recall that our indoor Adventure Leisure business didn’t reopen until the middle of May, a closure period of nearly 5 months. All of this was a huge hit on the business and together with poor results in 2020 meant that our shareholders really had to support the business. Thankfully the whole business responded very positively along with all the great teams of people we managed to retain. The summer has been very buoyant for all aspect of our business, and we have managed to trade well since we re-opened, assisted by a very unusual situation that very few people were able to leave the country due the travel restriction which gave the UK hospitality
& leisure sector a really bumper trading period. In the last few months, we have seen business starting to get back to more normalised trading. November has been pretty much close to our original budget plans helped by the very mild weather, albeit food and beverage business is still slower than usual, particularly due to the lack of functions and parties. December is also going to follow a similar trend with food and beverage trading well below what we would normally expect. We are finding that many of our larger function clients are not holding their normal team Christmas parties this year, which is understandable given the current Covid infection rates that seem to be stubbornly high albeit mainly affecting youngsters of school age. We expect December to be down on our budget but overall, we are hoping that the total company result for 2021 will be in line with our original expectations when we resumed trading back in March which is good news for us all and will allow us to continue to invest and develop further. Despite all the Covid issues throughout the year I am delighted that we have still managed to grow our company. We have developed a new business that further expands our family centred activities with two new Ninja Warrior sites in Sheffield and Southampton, both of which have exceeded