AOB: SUCCESS STORY
PEOPLE POWER With 75% of the workforce struck down with winter flu, December posed some huge challenges for the team at Simoda. However, despite the odds faced, MD Daniel Bumby describes how a skeleton staff rallied to make it their best performing month of the year. 68 unLTDBUSINESS.COM
Firstly, a belated happy New Year to everyone out there! Let’s hope 2023 is good to you all. In this latest article for unLTD, I wanted to talk you through my last few weeks of 2022, explaining why I would like to forget December but can’t. I will start at the back-end of November. Everything from a Simoda point of view was looking good, the forecast was on point and the challenges we were facing were more bumps in the road than scaling Everest. However, from a personal point of view, it was a stressful time for me and my wife as my father in law Malcolm was in hospital undergoing stem cell treatment. We needed some time away but struggled to find it, and with Malcolm
in hospital we couldn’t do it. However, he insisted we take a break, he wouldn’t take no for an answer, so for the fist time since starting the business, me and my wife booked a week away in sunny Tenerife – somewhere we have been lots of times and really enjoy. During our time away, Malcolm took a turn for the worse and was moved onto the ICU at the Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield. We came home early, but unfortunately we lost Malcolm on the 4th December. He was a great bloke and will be sadly missed by everyone who knew him. I spent the next five days comforting the family after this awful news, until Friday 9th when we had our Simoda Christmas party. We didn’t have a full complement of staff because a few