Taking care of clients is what we’re about. From completing personal and business to-do lists, to managing their accounts – I’m so proud of the Hour Hands team who successfully delivers all this and so much more.

During 2020, we moved offices and took on an apprentice alongside supporting so many fantastic businesses and individuals. Read on to discover a little of what we achieved and read my personal thanks to our clients, the team and our families.

Meet Christine

Christine leads the team ensuring that it’s a happy ship! You can be confident that Christine will deliver every job on time, without fuss, and with total commitment to a successful outcome.

Thanks to our amazing clients

We work with so many amazing clients and I’m always impressed by their versatility, commitment and extraordinary capacity to search out ways to grow their business. Here are just a few highlights from 2020.

Hertfordshire-based company, WUKA, is going from strength to strength and we’re so proud to be just a small part of the growth of this fantastic business.

Our new client, Hello Flexibles, has introduced us to the world of fruit, veg and pitta bread packaging. A steep learning curve but this team is a true pleasure to work with.

Our long standing clients continue to keep us busy and grateful to be part of their future. We support:

• My Word Communications with bookkeeping and selling books online.
• My Mustard with data & number crunching. The monthly calls with the title Numbers & Wine remain some of our favourite diary commitments! Big shout out to June Cory.
• Helping The Good Play Guide to get the ecommerce site to speak to the accounting system.
• Supporting ENJO UK with their marketing has been busy and so much fun.

Supporting each other and our clients

As ever, the Hour Hands team has been truly remarkable and have not lost their humour throughout 2020. Monday morning team zoom calls, when our littlest team members join for a little chat really started the week on a bright note.

I am lucky to belong to two amazing groups, Platinum Point and Peer2Peer Boards. Whenever things are looking gloomy these people have always managed to cheer me up, give me solid advice and suggestions, and many friendships have been formed.

I also have to thank my husband Ted and my friend and IT expert, Paul Songalia, for their support and reminder to not take myself too seriously. 2020 saw me breaking not one but two printers whilst trying to print see-through address labels. It was the wrong printer for this work and I melted the sheets causing lots of head shaking and astonishment.

My Hour Hands to do list

Completing the Hour Hands to-do list has been important this year too, enabling us to grow and better support our clients.

Hour Hands started the year moving into a brand new, shiny, warm office enjoying the extra space and the company of IT business, Twin Systems, who offer us fantastic tech advice and support. It wasn’t long before we found ourselves working from home because of the pandemic, juggling our business commitments and home life, whilst homeschooling 9 children aged between 4-15 years between us. After some trial and error, we’ve worked out how to manage this successfully. Our kids ask .. “are you on a call ..?” before coming into our home offices – although we welcome children and animals to our internal zoom calls!

The end of the year saw another goal achieved – taking on an apprentice! Melissa joined the team only 4 days before the start of the 2nd Lockdown and I’ve had many sleepless nights worrying if we can do this – but we did! I hope more companies will consider offering apprenticeships to help our young people forge a career. We were lucky to have Melissa on board and enjoyed the learning we all did together.

We have grown through this pandemic in business, team spirit, humour and work-life balance. I miss the office and hope to be back there soon yet I know that wherever we are based, we can support many more business owners with their own juggling in 2020.

If you’d like to learn more about how the Hour Hands team can help you, your family or your business, do reach out to us. No request is too big, too obscure or too ‘mainstream’. We’re here to help.