Greetings and thankyou for joining us at the beginning of our journey. We have been trading for a little over 5 months now and a lot has happened in that time.
Green and Simple was established by Laura, determined to provide a high quality, green cleaning service that is kind to the home and the environment. It wasn't long before her service gained popularity and with that, came high demand, only to be faced with the issue of how she could possibly meet this demand.
It was at this point that I joined the venture. After having a year long career break on health grounds, this was the perfect opportunity for me to get back into work. Laura and I had worked together countless times during our travels and as a wife and husband team I was (fairly) confident that this dynamic would again be successful. We had after all survived heated exchanges with gardening tools whilst landscaping in Australia, so being in separate areas of a house in England would be comparably safe.
As I joined, the business was beginning to grow at a steady and manageable pace and with that we began to look at other avenues to explore, one such avenue being to take on additional staff, with the intention of being as ethical employer as possible.
Then the third lockdown happened..
During the first lockdown, we hunkered down and began a number of personal projects, using the time to explore ideas and in that time, Green and Simple was conceptualised. As soon as the first lockdown concluded, Laura began trading and the rest is history. During the second lockdown we were still trading, albeit with a more cautious attitude, keeping an ear to the ground with regard to the number of local infections.
The second lockdown passed us by with relative ease and we managed to enjoy the festive period regardless of the sombre tone across the country. Once the new year had kicked in we began planning our return to work, although this time we both felt extremely uneasy. Everywhere we looked, the news was unanimously damning of the spread of infection across the country, amplified this time by the new variants that had surfaced. Looking deeper into it, the local infections in Lewes, once a bastion of low infection reporting, was now showing a very troubling spike in new cases.
We are still legally allowed to continue working but given the nature of our work and with the sudden increase in infections, we felt a responsibility to our customers (some of whom are shielding) to reduce the risk to them at this crucial time.
It was a decision we did not take lightly as the financial implications for us aren't great and certain customers really do need our service but their health and wellbeing is much more important to us than profit.
So as Laura and I hunker down once again, now is the time for us once more to pursue other means of growth for Green and Simple, such as this blog and other exciting ideas in the pipeline. Whilst this is a time for creativity and innovation, it is also a time for optimism, yet again keeping an eye on the number of cases, waiting for those numbers to come down, giving us and our customers the confidence and safety to continue our hard work.