Hi everyone,

Difficult times for us all

I would recommend anyone able to, to claim their business grants now. My local council has paid me out for the two properties/businesses I have. One we own the property and the other we rent but usually pay the rates (but currently get small business rates relief for both).

Our landlord for the rented property has very kindly offered to waive one months rent when I explained our situation (we closed from 1st April) even though we had some work including Taxi testing as our staff were very concerned about catching the virus and I have a duty of care to them.

All my staff are furloughed and have just submitted the first claim for wages on Monday when the new website went live.

I have contacted all my service suppliers to see what they can do. Workwear & dust mats supplier won't charge us for rental whilst we're closed. An IT company I use to look after web & SEO stuff cut their charge by a two thirds. Waste collections have stopped. I took the time to reassess my advertising and have reduced that significantly with BT, Thomson Local but Yell are a bit more difficult. We were out of contract with BT for phone & internet, so opted for some new deals with them and again made a useful saving whilst increasing two standard ADSL connections to Fibre.

Hopefully we will have enough money in the bank to pay our fixed overheads for 3 months but I hope we can partly reopen sooner than that. I can probably make some further savings if need be but certainly don't want to borrow any money.

Time will tell. In the mean time hope you all stay safe and well.

Regards

Sean