Leoch Battery UK

Returning to Business

01/07/2020

The world of business has changed beyond all belief in the last few months. At Leoch, we’ve been continually adapting to establish some degree of business continuity, in line with Government advice and with the safety of our staff and customers foremost in our planning.

Flexible working practices aren’t necessarily straightforward in a distribution business. However, we’re a robust business and fortunate to be in a position where we’ve been able to be adaptive, with people working from home and remotely logging in to the office network so that the disruption has been largely minimised. Strong support from our Leoch parent company has been vital to this.

Slowly, as the restrictions are now beginning to lift, our people are coming back into the office including operational, finance and marketing staff. With safety in mind, we’re limiting the total number of people in at any one time. Our three warehouses are open with open spaces and a small team to allow for social distancing. A pop-up stand at the entrance of our Battery Store retail outlet has proven to be a successful system and will be continued, as required. So, we’re learning as we go, and strengthening our processes and systems to become more flexible.

We’re seeing some positive signs of recovery in some of our key business sectors which is encouraging. Although the leisure sector is still slow as boaters, boat builders, and caravan/motorhome owners and manufacturers have missed out on a significant chunk of their peak spring/summer season already, we’re hearing that people are keen to get out and make the most of the good (and even bad!) weather, and the time that they have to get outdoors for the rest of the year.

In the industrial sector, maintenance and servicing of floor cleaning equipment is not deemed essential yet so although the regular service levels are not there yet, we’re confident that they will come back.

Perhaps most encouragingly for us, as a business, is that our June sales levels were back to those of pre-Covid-19 with June being the biggest month of the year so far, even higher than this time last year! Not only are these figures very good for staff morale in these challenging times but it’s good to know that people are coming back, perhaps sooner than we thought.