Coronavirus Myths 🚀

I want to fight back, I want to help you fight back and I want to help everybody in the world of hospitality be proactive. There's something that you're going to hear me say a lot about October to come in weeks and months is proactive over reactive. What do I mean by this? Well, I believe that hospitality owners, business owners in general have just been stuck in their reactive modes, waiting for bookings to come, waiting for that email or waiting for that phone to ping to say there's been a new booking. I want everybody to start looking for bookings, start being thinking creativity. This episode I am chatting to Simon Saw Simon talks about containment. He talks about busting myths. He's talking about opportunities that are going to arise on the back of us. And he's going to give you some bad news, but he's also going to share some good news.

Thanks, Mark. Evening all. My name's Simon, so I'm the chief executive for Jersey Hospitality association, currently representing just over 200 hospitality businesses in Jersey.

Because obviously, like I say, you're on the front line with this. You're dealing with it on a daily basis. There's cases that are there. You're talking to high level people about this. Let's just go over a couple of the myths that you want to share because we chatted about this off air and I think this is really important. Yeah, just when you're ready, just go.

Through it talking about the myths. So we've got a number of things. Number one, I think is understanding about coronavirus. A number of health experts will come out. I would advise people to be careful about what they read on social media. One of the things we've seen, a lot of people were very concerned about Italy and the differences Italy had compared to other places in the world. It should be noted Italy as one of the oldest demographics, the biggest elderly population out there. It's why they've seen such a big impact. They also have multiple generation homes, which means that the elderly are very much in contact with people who could be caring and not presenting symptoms.

Let's go into opportunities because this whole podcast, this whole series that I'm planning on this, talking about what we can do, is all about proactive, over reactive. So it's all going to be about proactive steps that we can take and not being reactive. Because if there is anything that we can guarantee that is going to happen over the course of the next weeks and months is that there are going to be quiet times.

I think people need to start taking a very realistic look As I said, we know the sort of timescale we're talking about. If you've got a business where it's just yourselves, so skip to the opportunities because there are going to be plenty there. If you have a number of staff, if you are looking at ways that you can cover off rent, etc, etc, if you have multiple staff in particular, we need to take some very, very realistic lookings of what we're doing here. If you have multiple staff, can you afford to keep them on? If you've got no business coming in, if you've got some liquid asset and you can afford to ride that storm, bearing in mind that unemployment is going to be shooting up, holding on to good quality starters always going to be a key part of your business, I'd highly recommend trying to find a way.