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We're Shropshire Chamber Business Awards 2022 Covid Response winners!
15 Jun 2022
by Kirsty Smallman

Five days on from winning the Covid Response Award at the Shropshire Chamber Business Awards 2022 and the team members feel like they have just recovered from the celebrations! Some members partied harder than others! (We won’t mention any names!)


Obviously it was the first time the award has been given out and we hope it will be the last - for obvious reasons!


We were shortlisted for two awards - Covid Response and Best Small Business - and as the children of one of our directors attend Bright Star Boxing we were so pleased to see them scoop the Best Small Business accolade. Their work is remarkable and is not only changing lives but saving lives too.


So why was the Covid Response Award so important to J&PR? (If we could share it with every amazing business in Shropshire we would!)


With event management, tourism and hospitality being such large income streams for our business and the event season just kicking off as the first lockdown happened, we lost a significant part of our turnover overnight. Now that wasn’t in the forecast!


Shows and event managers realised their events wouldn’t be taking place but they still needed that all important communication to take place - immediately! We worked so hard and saw many late nights and early mornings, and some nights we remained at our computers knowing home-schooling would need to take place in just a few hours!


We agreed we wouldn’t hold any of our fabulous clients to contract. We wanted our clients to survive as much as J&PR and that they did - and of course returned to us as soon as they could.


We had an apprentice who had just started with us and as we faced the difficulty of being able to manage Sophie remotely, the easy option would have been to let her go. No way could we do that to someone starting out in their career and Sophie became the only one on her digital marketing apprenticeship course to keep her job.


Our packed programme of face to face training courses came to a standstill and the swift move to virtual training needed to happen. This resulted in Kirsty seeing her face on the computer screen for many hours every day and saw contracts come in for internal and external social media training for companies from Scotland to Cornwall and many places in between. With Rhea using many social media platforms to broaden the reach, our Two Hour Takeover training sessions took team J&PR to Canada and New York - virtually of course!


New opportunities arose as retailers closed their doors and needed to make the shift to online sales but needed our helping hand. When they could reopen their doors we were proud to be involved in a high street project to promote the amazing businesses across Telford and Wrekin.


We stayed present. We stayed positive. We planned for the future. (We will admit we weren’t sure what the future looked like!)


After paying rent for nearly 12 months whilst the office doors were closed, we lost our offices as the building was put on the market and despite many businesses deciding remote working full-time was right for them, our staff unanimously voted for a return to an office. We found our perfect home at the perfect time and started the renovation.


We were ready to open our doors - complete with a brand new digital training room, kitted out by our client Chrisbeon - to our returning clients, existing clients who we were so proud to represent throughout the tough times and our new clients too.


We are so proud to work with many businesses across Shropshire and it was fantastic to share the room with them on Friday.


Not forgetting our amazing team - we couldn’t have got through the pandemic without them and couldn’t have won the award without them. From website copywriting, press releases, blogs, social media updates, unsociable out of hours working, video creation, digital training, proposals and so much more - they did it all! “Thank you” will never be enough!


So roll on next year! We will see you there! Don’t forget if you didn’t enter this year and would like to enter in 2023, or would like to enter other awards, then drop us a line to find out more about our award entry writing services