This month had a near single focus; organise and host two events to celebrate Grapevine‘s first anniversary as an employee owned business, with just a few weeks notice. Against the odds, we welcomed 60 guests to our home at 19-25 Nuffield Road on Wednesday this week.
Since we made the transition to employee ownership in March last year each major activity has rolled straight into the next, in terms of both finding our feet with the new structure and publicising our change of circumstances to the wider community. We’d just wrapped on our end of financial year celebrations in February when I hit the ground running on what an acknowledgement of our EO anniversary might look like.
I was inspired by the work Emma Perkins had done back in December for Blue Sky Financial Planning’s 1st year of employee ownership (read Emma’s story here) and encouraged by Salad‘s recent initiatives to bring together EO businesses in the Dorset and nearby areas.
My past experience with event planning has always proven that there’s never a good time (or enough time) when setting a date. Our official anniversary date is 10th March, this year that fell on Mother’s Day. The Friday before the Sunday was International Women’s Day. It just made sense to buy ourselves some time and work to a date nearer March’s end.
“Has it really been a year already?” Christophe Stourton asked when I began to send invites. Technically, yes. We didn’t get around to announcing the news until June 2023 though, so opting for a date later in March probably worked in the respect of getting a little bit closer to people’s perception of how long it’s been also.
I proposed the idea of having a lunchtime and evening session to maximise the potential for everyone we invited to be able to attend. This seemed like a great, logical idea. It was only as we got closer to the date that it dawned on me, this was two whole events we were hosting, not one. Once the first wrapped at 2pm, the tables turned again and I was glad to have another chance to do it all over as the initial adrenaline ran off.
It took a bit of heavy lifting, in some cases literally, to pull off these events at our office. We’re not especially well set up for this (the Nuffield can feel like a desert island sometimes), nor are we well oiled. Our last in-person seminar event was pre-pandemic and the only time I (or anyone with longer tenure at Grapevine) can remember us hosting for so many guests was 20 years ago in 2004 when we first moved in.
Every warm welcome, every congratulation and every kind word made all the work that went into making this happen worthwhile, a hundred times over. I was quite overwhelmed by the level of support shown by contacts from the local community, who have fast become friends. Thank you!!
Liam Toms 