Steering a hospitality business through the pandemic | Nicole Sadd

Nicole Sadd, CEO at Rothamsted Enterprises has had a career in hospitality from hotels, to venues, to boats – she has been there and everywhere! One of her biggest challenges has been steering the ‘ship’ of an events and conference business through a pandemic. Nicole takes us on a journey and shares the highs and the lows. She talks about the excitement and rush of the first few months of lockdown to get all their ‘ducks in a row’, ready for a July 2021 re-opening. She contrasts that with the struggle for ‘us people in events’ who often live for looking after people, when that did not happen. She talks about her own self-reflection and needing to slow down, which wasn’t something she was used to. Her sleep suffered as she dealt with the realities of cash flow. However, she protected her team, knowing that people did not need to know all the challenges she was seeing. She is a leader who really wants to know how her team are doing--not at a superficial level but beyond that. She’s keen on regular check-ins so that people feel they can share and create an environment of safety so that people are more open with what they are struggling with, as well as what’s working. Her passion now is to create a great culture, a great place to work as they rebuild the business further. She wants people to have more fun at work as well as innovate and bring fresh thinking.