Cube Corner – August 20

Welcome to the August edition of Cube Corner. This month has seen an opening up of bars, restaurants and coffee shops which has brought a buzz back to the City, the number of people out has grown considerably which is a real bonus for our local cafe scene, and also helps when for arranging client meeting venues. Hopefully this can be continued throughout the summer.

The Eat Out to Help Out scheme, certainly seems to be assisting with getting people back into Brighton and with the new protocols in place at the establishments it will only help with customer confidence.

July has been really busy with appointments for my Cube Clients, people are a lot more confident with face to face meetings, which is so important for when businesses are connecting for the first time, lots of great work has been achieved on Teams and Zoom but it has been really good to get out with clients to meet in person.

One of the first venues I visited after re-opening of course was Gars as soon as it opened. I met with Paul and Lisa Ollerton who recently sold their Viisana company to Meyado Private Wealth Management. Paul, Lisa and the team all stay in situ which is great, this also gives them access to a new stream of products such as mortgages, pensions and estate planning, if you did wish to meet with Paul and Lisa please let me know and we can set up a meet.

I am delighted to add 2 more clients to Cube, MCR Media, Max Robinson who I am sure many of you will know, MCR are based in Burgess Hill and also have offices in Hove and a London base. They cover most aspects for print, large and small format, signage and vehicle graphics. I am assisting Max with Business Development and Lead Generation and I am looking forward to getting started with Max this month.

City Utilities is a fairly new business, which as the name suggests is an alternative to the big suppliers. During the past couple of months many businesses are trying to find effective cost savings and this is an area City Utilities can help. I will be working with Steve Darby and Malcolm Jacobs to assist with the growth of their Sussex customer base.

The team at Rivervale have had a strong July across the business, the leasing team have been busy with a mix of pent up demand favourable terms from the manufacturers and with most of the European factories now approaching full production the back-log of vehicles from March, April and May now coming through. There has been a spike in enquiries for electric vehicles with strong discounts and the benefit of zero company car tax attracting new clients to this sector. We had 2 of the sales team jump into the new electric BMW I3’s this week and the reports are really positive.

I also had further meetings  on the electric vehicle fleet concept with Richard Ball at Floral Image and Julian Drage at Inspired Gardens to talk through suitability for their businesses.

Andy Tugwell at the team at TSS hosted a ‘Return to the Office Post-Covid ‘ workshop for my Cube Clients at their Training Centre in Portslade to discuss the requirements  and protocols to ensure all Air Conditioning, Heating and Water Units have the necessary checks prior to staff returning to work. Thanks to Phil Bristow – Nsure,  Bruce Hayter – Rix and Kay, Stuart Noakes – Carpenter Box, Gar Hine Cheung – Gars and Sam Thomas – Sussex Business Times for attending.

The weather for golf has of course been incredible. I was lucky enough to play at Pyecombe and spend a great morning with Andy Tugwell at TSS and Stuart Noakes from Carpenter Box and meet up with Andy Belton previously of Vines BMW to play up at Mannings Heath last week. The company was great and the golf was average, as per usual.

I hope you all have a productive month.

Dodge