2020, What a year!

31st December 2020

2020 – What an interesting year!

 

Each year, in January, we take a look back at the previous 12 months and celebrate our achievements and those of our wonderful tenants.  This year will be no different but I guess the word ‘achievements’ can be related to simply surviving what must have been the most difficult year in the Mill’s modern history.

 

We started the year on a very strong footing.  Our occupancy rate was 99% with only one small unit available for new occupiers or expansion.  This meant that there was a waiting list for our larger rooms so when Sent Into Space won a large contract and were forced to leave us for their own unit on the Advance Manufacturing park we were able to offer their unit out straight away.  This helped them significantly by releasing them from their notice period early and allowing Knowledge Now the opportunity to move into the Mill, for the second time.  Their previous time here was so successful that they had also expanded beyond the unit sizes we were able to provide and had left us on good terms.  Separating the organisation into smaller parts meant that the core business returned to us with new projects and plans.

 

In February the small development area vacated by Sent Into Space was taken up by Byte IT to use as a webcast venue for their evening news and current affairs production to the Azerbaijani community in the UK. 

 

In March we reached the wonderful milestone of 100% occupancy when Timberplay expended their suite of offices with us and took the last available unit.  Used as a server room and storage area, this meant that they could recruit more staff for their expanding partner businesses.

 

The rest of 2020 was completely overtaken by the Coronavirus pandemic, starting with the first lockdown in March.   The Government announced that for the time being, organisations should close their offices and ask their staff to start working from home.

 

This led to a very busy time for the Reception team, helping all our tenants to set up remote working opportunities.  We found ourselves with a host of new tasks, and it became obvious that we needed to keep Reception open, not just for the safety and security of the building but to support our homeworkers so that they had no need to travel into the city centre for minor reasons.  We reduced the staff numbers in Reception from a team of 4 to just one person per day.  Our car park attendant and resident maintenance worker also reduced his working pattern to just 3 days per week.  Reception staff would spend their day sorting and forwarding mail, answering and forwarding phone calls for those that could not do it themselves and even watering plants.

 

Reception had been a thriving hub of activity at the beginning of the year but by April it was nearly silent with the odd phone call from our occupiers asking for us to help them out with bits and bobs, like rebooting routers when homeworking stalled, and scanning and emailing that flurry of letters from HMRC with activation codes for HMRC online for furlough claims.

 

Some of the occupiers were not able to work from home and so we had a little bit of company, TLC Homecare provide home care workers and so they had significant large deliveries of PPE on a daily basis, and other tenants had a few individuals that could not work from home for various reasons.

 

We also said goodbye and bon voyage to one of our long standing friends Des Conway who had always planned to emigrate to the USA.  This had been years in the making and a little thing like a global pandemic wasn’t going to stop him and so off he went, in April.  We also saw the closure of Eden Brown Synergy who had unfortunately made all their staff redundant back in October but not actually closed the office until now.

 

We also had the terribly sad news of the death of Mike Bower.  Mike’s vision back in the 1980s of converting this once derelict ruin into a beautiful thriving hub of commercial enterprise was brought to reality by 1990 by him and the team from Sheffield Co-operative Development Group.  2020 was the 30^th anniversary of the opening of the Mill and we had planned a year of celebrations before the opportunities were taken away from us.   As soon as circumstances allow we will be revisiting that plan and celebrating the achievements of Mike at the same time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Strangely the pandemic gave us a rare opportunity to take on some work that would have been significantly disruptive with such a full and active building.  Our long-term maintenance schedule had highlighted that the smoke sensors around the building would benefit from being replaced.  This would require building scaffolding at the top of all the staircases, one at a time.  Closing off part of a fire escape is always problematic bit this was greatly eased by having only a few workers in the building.  We were able to keep the workers safe from potential transmission whilst still getting this essential maintenance done.

 

Something we were not expecting so early on was the flurry of new businesses setting up from home, wanting to use our Virtual Office services.   Accommodation Address Service was the most popular with 13 new clients for either Mail Collection or Mail Forwarding, Telephone Answering was also popular.  We have introduced a new service this year, Virtual PA, offering a host of general secretarial duties on an hourly basis.   From simply managing your email inbox and sorting the genuine emails from the junk to meeting organisation and order booking and delivering.  We have already allocated one full time member of staff to our new Virtual PA clients and will need to add to that cohort soon.

 

Late Spring and early Summer saw more good news for us, with Imperial Health expanding to a larger office to allow for greater social distancing for the staff returning to the office and Prometheus Blinds taking to decision to move from a Virtual Office to one of our starter offices.

 

Mattressonline decided to move their office to Aizlewood’s Mill as easing of restrictions was announced later in the Summer.  They took one of the offices vacated by Liberata HR when their head office decided to permanently close their Sheffield base and all staff were sent to work from home on a permanent basis.

 

We also welcomed Circulate Digital for just a short stay here whilst they find themselves a more permanent home.

 

We have made quite a few changes to the layout of Reception to allow for greater staff safety in the office.  We have moved all the visitor seating so that there is a 2m gap between individuals with the exception of the sofa which can be used by families waiting for group appointments.  There are also sturdy screens on the Reception desk and an attractive barrier to deter anyone from entering the Reception staff work area.  Our workstations have been positioned so that we face away from each other.  All the changes we have made with keeping a warm and welcoming environment in mind whilst keeping ourselves and all users of Aizlewood’s Mill safe during these times of concern.

 

As we reached the end of 2020 we saw the departure of another small number of Licencees that have made the move to permanent home working but still maintained occupancy levels of a remarkable 87%.  We look forward to a new start in 2021 with two new organisations lined up to move in in January and quite a few expansions on the horizon too.

 

All in all it’s been a very interesting year, hard times have been endured but the future is bright for Aizlewood’s Mill.

 

 

 

 

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