2021 – End of year review

Chris Gibson, Managing Director of GGM Groundscare gives a review of what can only be described as another tough but successful year! As we approach the end of 2021 where many of us have finally seen a sense of normality back into our general day to day operations, what have we dealt with? and what have we to look forward to in 2022?

What a year! With the first part of the year seeing us in a national lockdown, it was unclear just how the year would play out. The whole team has had to adapt to the new normal of procedures & guidelines which have enabled us to continue doing what we do best, selling machinery and supporting our valued customers.

One the greatest challenges we faced this year was the availability of machines from the manufacturers, as they struggled to maintain supply because of the pandemic resulting in unexpected delays. Hopefully we didn’t let any of our customers down as I know the team worked exceedingly hard to deliver customers machines as they became available. Having been busy supplying new equipment our used machinery offer has expanded and whilst it varies from time to time depending on what’s available, we always aim to keep a good range of quality used equipment available for our customers on the website.

We remain committed to keeping our customers machinery operating, enabling them to meet their business needs and one of our key strengths has always been our advice and aftercare support. Whether through technical advice, urgent spare parts, or maintenance we pull out all the stops to keep customers operations ticking along and any downtime to an absolute minimum. With this in mind we have recently introduced our Service Agreement which provides customers with not only a cost effective servicing solution with different payment options but also peace of mind.

Whilst factors will continue to be out of our control during times as strange as these, customer service certainly isn’t one of them. To measure this, as you may have seen, we created our first online customer satisfaction survey and we are very grateful for everyone who took the time to fill these out as they were incredibly important to us to be able to continually improve our customer service.

We got some incredible feedback from you all, a massive 95% of you said that you would recommend us, 94% said that they felt we took the time to understand their needs and 75% of you rated us as excellent in our friendliness and professionalism.

What we’re doing to improve as a company

Looking forward, we’re aware of the uncertainty of future pandemics, however, we are determined to keep evolving our customer service and creating an even better experience for all our customers. To do this we’re investing in bringing on more team members and developing our current team with more training to support all our customers in 2022.

We have already made a start to this by adding some more great people to the team, during the year Andy Woolley joined as our new Area Sales Manager for the Yorkshire region, bringing years of experience and a keen eye for detail. Andy is just one of several promising new appointments from across the business who joined us throughout the year.

As a business we decided that we wanted to begin to reduce our impact on the environment, which has led to several initiatives over the past two years. We have installed LED lighting and solar panels on our depot roof, increased the number of electric vehicles in the company fleet and increased awareness around recycling and introduced protocols to decrease the amount of waste we produce.

Our next target is to help all our customers do the same, we plan on doing this by working with our machinery suppliers to increase our offering of e-powered and ultimately autonomous commercial machinery. We have already made a great start by partnering with Swiss company, Ronovatec at The Etihad Campus of Manchester City FC, where there seemed a real appetite amongst the Premier League Groundsmen present to think about innovative machinery and how this might change the way they undertake their roles.

We expect next year for the demand for battery (electric) powered commercial and robotic machines to continue to increase and as battery technology improves, we’ll just have to hope we’ve sufficient stock to cope.

I’m delighted to announce we also rounded of the year with some industry recognition, I was awarded the Service Dealer Leadership of the year award, which I was very proud to win as it recognised what a fantastic team I’m proud to work with and our very own Diane Cowell was a finalist in the Star of the Dealership award.

I was over the moon for Diane as her contribution to the company throughout the last 12 months and the pandemic has been brilliant! I wish there were awards for every member of the team as none of our success and what we do to support our customers is possible without them.

This year has undoubtedly brought its challenges and has involved a lot of hard work by every member of our team to achieve the results we have. I’m sure 2022 will be another year that will keep us on our toes but one thing for sure is we will do everything we can to continue to help and support our customers.

I would like to thank all our customers for your continued support this year and to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!