At Wight Event Toilets, events such as weddings and festivals are central to our ongoing success and cash flow. So you can imagine our concern as the nation was thrust into lockdown in March 2020, and every single event was cancelled, without exception.
In usual times, our main source of income is providing luxury toilet hire facilities to weddings, and of course it has not been possible to have a ‘normal’ wedding for a long time now – even outside of lockdown, thanks to guest numbers being restricted to 30. We’ve still been able to service the smaller weddings and events, restrictions permitting, but that has still obviously given us limited options.
This could have meant the end of our business, with lots of jobs lost and surplus equipment to store and/or find something else to do with. However, we were adamant that we did not want the Coronavirus pandemic to defeat us, so we decided to take a creative approach. Thanks to that decision we have managed to successfully ride the waves of the pandemic ever since – and we’re proud to still be in business today!
So, how did we do it?
While many event hire companies were sadly forced into taking the very difficult decision to permanently close their doors, we decided to take a different course of action. We started to think about how we could diversify our offer, and looked at other options away from traditional weddings, events and festivals. It became clear to us that the more we looked, the more opportunities we could find to find new clients who were still able to use our toilet hire services.
At the same time, the NHS was under increasing pressure to respond to the many challenges that the pandemic was throwing at them. So, we were able to provide temporary but luxury loo hire and sanitation stations to hard-working hospital staff around the country. We were also able to offer the same to commercial entities who were needing more temporary facilities.
We are lucky to have been able to expand the business despite the obvious setbacks of the past year or so, and the growth we’ve seen has taken our trailer fleet to almost 30, despite minimal work in our usual areas of business such as weddings and events.
While this decision to diversify has no doubt strengthened our resolve and enabled us to carry on trading, we are still looking forward to getting back to servicing the events industry as it starts to recover from the huge blows that the pandemic has dealt it. If you have a wedding or event coming up, get in touch to find out more about our luxury toilet hire services.
