Fighting Against Adversity!

06 December 2010, 21:44 pm
Speciality Bites by Paul Hargreaves

Sometimes it seems as if everything is against you

That’s certainly the way it has felt for me for the past two or three weeks, and one of the reasons this blog hasn’t appeared for a while. It seems as if we have become the target of an organised gang of criminals that are roaming around the Oxfordshire and Berkshire area stealing catalytic converters from vans.

They can get them off the van in a couple of minutes and sell them to scrap metal dealers for £100 due to the precious metal within them. Cost for us to replace = £1,600. We have had a total of nine vans affected and two claims from the insurance company. That was not the main inconvenience though – getting deliveries out to customers is difficult without any transport! And just when we had got back to a semblance of normality, the snow hit and the vans were out stuck on the M25.

It seems like this bad weather is going to be a constant feature of our winters. It has a devastating effect on our businesses, so we must start planning ways to continue without our bottom line being affected too much.

This can be done by having a ‘snow policy’ for employees, setting up those who can work at home to do so, getting snow chains and tyres for our vehicles, or even buying salt to de-ice our car parks. The latter is one thing I did actually do the week before the snow; I bought a ton of salt from some enterprising guy who came round just at the right time!

It does seem, though, that when adversity hits, it separates the ‘sheep from the goats’ as far as your employees are concerned. There are those that pull together to try and make a bad situation better, fight their way through the snow to get to work and put in the extra hours.

On the other hand there are those that would prefer to rigidly stick to their hours, moan about the workload and go on about why they can’t get the job done. Those types are often the ones that always seem to be stuck at home when it snows and make as much effort as my local primary school teachers to get to work (i.e. not much!).

OK, we’ve only three weeks to go until Christmas – let’s pull out all the stops and make some money!

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