The Jolly Hog during Covid

There has never been a time like this before for our business, and there may never be one again; so I thought I would share some of the experiences we have faced as a small business trying to survive this Covid-19 era.

Pre-lockdown

Like everyone else in the UK, we were hearing rumblings of this pandemic early in 2020 but didn’t really consider that it would ultimately have an effect on us, and on our small family business. How wrong we were.

It seems mad to say it now, but the first time I started to take this seriously was when my cousin, who is based in Florence, started sharing what life was like in Italy with a lockdown impending. Even then, I didn’t think it would affect us too much. Again, how wrong I was.

In the first week of March, I was in Bath, in the process of opening our new take-away concept, Jolly Hog: On the Trot’, at Bath Spa train station. We had our regular weekly meeting with our Finance Director booked in, so there I was, sat in a coffee shop with our FD, Stu, and one of my business partners and brother, Olly. What was supposed to be a routine weekly catch up turned into a session of what-ifs! ‘What if cases really rise in the UK?’ ‘What if we end up having to go into a lockdown?’ ‘What if we have to shut down some of the businesses?’

We operate in 3 different industries at The Jolly Hog – 1) Supermarkets (Retail), 2) Concessions (Mobile events and fixed kiosks) & 3) A Restaurant called Pigsty. Our immediate focus went to whether there would be cancellations of some of our upcoming larger events – primarily Cheltenham Festival, which is a huge week for our Concessions business.

Next on our minds was our kiosk at Bath Spa train station which we were due to be finally opening on the 12th March, after having worked for over 12 months to secure the site, get the correct planning and tick all the other complicated check boxes involved with opening a food kiosk (or any new business).

Next to discuss was our Bristol harbourside restaurant, Pigsty. It is an incredibly seasonal location where you have to smash the summer sales to sustain the business, so the prospect of being closed from April to July was a very scary one.

Going back to that coffee shop meeting with our FD Stu, we all left not knowing what was going to happen next in terms of a lockdown. We did a cashflow forecast with little information we had, trying to see what a worst case scenario would look like. The document was named ‘Covid Cashflow’ – a name which still fills me full of dread. We removed all expected income from our outdoor events, kiosks & Pigsty, up until the end of Sept 2020, leaving us with a ￡600k hole in our turnover for the year - a totally devastating thought for our small family business.

It looked like our losses were going to be enormous, a scary realisation which I’m sure was shared by most businesses in those few days before any government support packages had been mentioned. There was a point after that meeting where I had serious concerns about the future of our company. What were we going to say to our team? How were we going to look after everybody with these huge losses that had come out of nowhere?

Lockdown

At the time, it seemed mad that such a big event like Cheltenham was going to be cancelled, but in hindsight, it’s completely mad that it went ahead. I had symptoms of COVID the week after Cheltenham, like I’m sure many others did. Cheltenham turned out to be the last event we have catered at in 2020 and we’re pretty sure there will be no others in this calendar year.

At Pigsty, prior to Boris locking down pubs & restaurants, we deliberated over having a takeaway and Deliveroo only business. We quickly decided it was safer for staff, and wiser financially, to close temporarily whilst we assessed the situation. On top of this, the rates that Deliveroo charge small businesses are insane, and not sustainable without a fully operating restaurant. We shut Pigsty on 19th March and I’ll never forget that day. It was Olly’s birthday (probably the worst he’s ever had) and we were walking through Wapping Wharf, a place normally buzzing on a Thursday lunchtime, now transformed into a ghost town. We met with our Ops manager, Tom, and the restaurant team and explained that we were going to close for a short time. The next day Boris announced all restaurants were going to shut.

We then had to look at the new kiosk at Bath. That 12 months of work turned into 12 days of trade before we shut it on the 24th  of March. There was a period where we genuinely thought that we would never open it again, after working so hard to get it open and investing a lot of capital into it. It was heart-breaking.

At the same time as lockdown started, we were also moving out of our old office. We quickly got the office team in to collect their things, then myself and my 2 brothers moved over to an old dairy barn where we store our events equipment. There is a small office there, meaning we were fortunate enough to have somewhere to gather our thoughts and start making plans during this crazy time, without paying rent anywhere else.

The first thing we needed to ensure was the welfare of our staff. It sounds cheesy I know, but they are our most important asset, and we had no idea what was coming in terms of infection and outbreak, or how long we were going to be closed for. We told all the office team to work from home and all our operational staff to stay home until we knew a bit more. At that point, we heard murmurings of some Government help with regards to salaries and possibly a grant, but like all other companies, we had no idea what these were going to be and who’d they’d be available to. There was no way we could afford to pay everyone’s wages with hardly any income coming in, so we agreed to pay staff in full for March and then for those doing reduced work to go down to 50% in April until we knew more. Luckily the Furlough Scheme got announced shortly after and we were able to get cover for all our staff. It was a huge relief, both for our staff and us. As 3 owners of the business, myself, Olly & Josh decided to take a pay cut and then use that money to help contribute towards topping up those Furloughed staff. It felt like the right thing to do to help staff, but also to help the business financially.

Once we had our staff sorted, we then proceeded to work out how we were going to manage the only operating business left – Retail. We needed a base to work from as myself and Olly have 3 young kids each and it’s bloody carnage at home! Luckily the old dairy barn had enough space for us 3 to all work safely, being so remote. It was really back to the old school Jolly Hog days of 3 fat lads working in a rusty old barn, doing literally anything & everything to make it work.

Olly enjoying the pop-up office.

Josh (the youngest brother) runs the Concessions business, meaning he had all of his day to day work wiped out overnight. He took on the project of sorting the barn out so that it could become Jolly Hog HQ, and he started working with our marketing team, Katy & Chess, taking on our new project of direct to consumer ‘Breakfast Boxes’. These were something we had wanted to launch way before, but lockdown enabled us to pick up projects like this that had been on the back-burner for a while and use them to mitigate the crisis.

Olly ploughed on managing our retail business with myself, Katy & Chess.  Luckily for us, the only place where the public could spend their money during lockdown was in the supermarkets, making retail extremely busy. We had been working on getting our sausages and bacon into new retailers (Tesco/ Co-op/ Waitrose) for the best part of 12 months, as well as launching our new products – pulled pork, ribs & scotch eggs. With all of these due to launch in April and May, we were extremely worried that some of them wouldn’t land due to COVID. It was a very stressful time with everything else shut down, making it really difficult to communicate a new product successfully when we couldn’t meet with retailers. Thankfully, virtually everything got listed on time which was a huge relief. We then saw a spike in retail sales when everyone was going mad, panic buying in the supermarkets. For a time there were concerns over our supply chain as the supermarkets were over run. We had real issues with the supply of our BBQ Rib product due to reduced capacity in butchery plants, but luckily our core business of sausages & bacon were secure enough and selling well.

We really noticed a change in what consumers were buying. Our sausages and bacon were getting panic bought by customers right up there with bog roll & flour! Our black treacle gammon made a come back – the first time gammon has been fashionable since WWII.

Thankfully for us, the lost sales from our events, kiosks & restaurant were getting covered by the uplift in supermarket sales. It really taught me the value of having a diverse business, which I will certainly never forget. Ultimately, we were really proud that we managed to launch new products and into new retailers in such a difficult time.

Me buying one of our first packs on our launch weekend in Tesco.

I took on the job of managing all the change within the business and ‘the new ways of working’. Our HR Manager Hannah helped me work through the detail of furlough, which was a word I didn’t even know before Covid. With everyone either furloughed or working from home, we needed to think about how we could keep the team engaged in what was a very uncertain time. I worked with our FD, Stu, to ensure we had financial stability through government schemes and through working closely with our relationship manager Chris @ HSBC, having a weekly zoom. HSBC, to be fair, were very responsive and helped get us through the sticky part at the beginning.

We quickly launched a weekly Monday morning zoom call for all senior team members to give a lockdown update every week. Our Concessions ops manager, Johny, started running virtual zoom workouts every morning for those that wanted to join – it was genuinely one of the highlights of lockdown and a great way to keep the team engaged. I’ve been really proud of how the whole Jolly Hog team have reacted to all the change, it’s not been easy.

Our ops supervisor Beth then organised weekly virtual yoga sessions through one of our Concessions employees, Karen. Again, this was another great way to keep that contact whilst we couldn’t see each other, although myself, Olly & Josh are probably some of the worst yoga clients Karen has ever seen!

Doing some good

Alongside managing the team & the business, we really wanted to do something good with our existing resources. Back in early March I spoke to my mate Tom, an anaesthetist and also in management at our local NHS Southmead hospital. He mentioned how difficult things were at the hospital with this impending virus about to hit them. Southmead has a very close place in our hearts, with all 3 of us brothers being born there, our children being born there and multiple friends and family have received life-saving treatment there.

We had lots of left-over Concessions and restaurant stock so I offered to drop off 50 free bacon rolls one Friday to Tom & his team, but the cheeky bugger asked for 200! We ended up taking our airstream catering trailer, Miss Piggy, down to the hospital and I can honestly say it was one of the most unforgettable things I have ever done. We spent the day handing out bacon rolls and speaking to all the key workers, who were just the best people working in the toughest of environments. With all of the panic setting in across the country, I was in awe that all of the NHS staff were just really relaxed and positive about the situation – just cracking on with their jobs. We ended up staying all day and gave out 500 bacon rolls. The highlight of the day was when I spoke to a man called Ian who worked in Domestics (cleaning). I asked him what he did in the hospital and he casually told me that he’d been deep cleaning COVID wards all morning, as that was their top priority. He was an older chap, probably not earning a big wage and there he was just casually telling me how he cleans Covid off the walls and floors all day, whilst most of the country is safe at home. What a hero! He was so chuffed to get a free bacon roll, because ‘he’d never received anything free at the NHS in his life’. He was extremely thankful and I just said you haven’t got a clue mate – we’re the ones who should be thanking you, and that’s why we’re here today.

After that chat with Ian, us 3 brothers decided we needed to do a lot more to help, so we decided we would go back every Friday. This quickly turned into going back 3 times a week, with the help of 3 of our Jolly Hog team members, Johny, Beth & Hannah. We’d quickly used up our leftover stock, but we didn’t want to stop helping out at Southmead as we could see it was really making a difference for the staff, so we ordered more stock in. This was all before the clap for NHS started, but when that kicked off and people saw what we’d been doing, we had a huge influx of people who wanted to help. It was amazing. We had cash donations from companies like Sainsburys, Systech, First Class Comms, CPC Foods & Info-SaaS to help contribute towards stock. Our friends @Hobbs House bakery offered to give us all the bread rolls for free, an incredibly generous gesture. We had drinks and vegan products donated (we’d cater for all!), donuts from Harry @Kinetic Kitchen, beers from Giles @Wild Beer and PPE from Lee @Mobius.

Doctors at NHS Southmead enjoying our bacon and sausage baps

One of the most memorable donations we had was right at the start when we realised our old diesel generator had broken and we couldn’t power the catering trailer without it. Chess put an SOS on Twitter and a chap called Ryan from @Falcon power generation got in touch and said he could lend us a generator for the first session. We arranged to meet him at 6 am at the hospital on the first day. When we met him there we asked where he had come from, thinking it would be somewhere local in the South West. He had driven down from Manchester and had left his house at 1 am! He then stayed with us all day until we’d given out all the food before towing his generator back to Manchester. A truly amazing gesture! He called when he found out we were continuing at Southmead and said we could have the generator for the foreseeable future.

My mother in law Sheila and her friends then started baking cookies & cakes each week for us to hand out. I reckon they baked over 1000 in the end! Truly unbelievable! Our friend Ben @The Growth House started dishing out our bacon & sausage baps to the key workers in Wokingham – driving around everywhere ensuring people were getting fed. It was truly a special time of people and businesses coming together to do the right thing for the people that were looking after us.

After 10 weeks, things were starting to get back to normal a bit for the hospital so we decided to draw the catering to a close for the time being – plus we needed to get our other businesses functioning again. On top of this, having 3 fat lads in a tight, hot catering trailer, listening to Meatloaf essentials on repeat, was starting to get difficult! We ended up dishing out over 21,000 free bacon and sausage baps, something we’re extremely proud of, and thankful to all of those people who helped us along the way. We marked the 20,000th customer with a 2 metre long hot dog served in a specially baked roll by Hobbs House to a nurse. She didn’t know what to do with it!

Off the back of this work, we then decided to continue our legacy with Southmead hospital so we worked with Sarah Harrison @Southmead Charity to launch our Jolly Good Eggs where 5p of each scotch egg sold in Sainsburys & Tesco would go to the charity. These donations have been supporting the amazing work done by the Discover Project, which is researching the after-effects of Covid-19. Before the pandemic, we didn’t have much of a charity structure, so I’m really pleased we’ve now got a strong focus for our Jolly Good Deeds going forward.

Josh also started giving some of our leftover stock to the @Square Food Foundation who, during lockdown, have been making meals for vulnerable families in Bristol and those normally depending on Free School Meals. We got to see first-hand what they do when we went down to the kitchen for a day of cooking & delivering. They are doing some fantastic work.

Although there has been tremendous loss for people during this pandemic, I have really seen the best sides of a lot of truly lovely people. I hope this is a legacy of Covid.

Life after Covid

Who knows what life is going to be like for anyone after Covid. I know it will never be the same for us. It’s certainly taught us to look after your people, to have diversity in your business and to do a little bit of good if you can.

Over and Out

Max