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Coombe and Sharpe Landscaping looked to David Allen for their accounting and payroll expertise.
Based at Lillyhall in Workington, we spoke to Helen, the office manager, to discuss business and the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic.
We have been working with David Allen for three years now, I can safely say that working with Amy Johnston and her team at Workington has made a huge difference to our business. The team are always on hand to offer advice and guidance and they have helped us successfully apply for and receive two European funding grants.
We were looking for a local accountant who employed local people and David Allen do just that. We use David Allen’s accounting services; they produce Management Accounts on a periodic basis to allow us to plan for our business. We also use their payroll services. Specific thanks to Amy Johnston and Irene Crowther for all their hard work and perseverance with us!
We have three parts to our business; a high-end landscape gardening service where we install driveways, paving, decking and all other hard landscaping services, we provide property maintenance services to local housing associations and we recently opened a building merchants.
We are a multi stranded company that is always professional, and we take pride in our workmanship. We employ a dedicated team who are well trained and operate safely. We focus on training our workforce and expanding each individual’s skills-set to ensure that together, we can adapt to changes in the industry and bring new skills required onboard quickly.
The Coronavirus pandemic meant that we had to close our office for several weeks, during that time we worked hard to diversify our business which led to the opening of the building merchants part of our business.
Amy and her team helped us receive a £10,000 small business grant from the local council. They also helped us furlough our workforce until we were able to reopen and provided advice on our VAT payment.
Our plans for the future are to expand our building merchants’ side of the business, we have employed a Yard Manager and have rented a new area of land which will assist us with this expansion.
We hope to continue to work closely with our David Allen colleagues to submit another funding application and to continue to operate legally and professionally as we have been doing thus far.
After successfully negotiating the struggles that the pandemic has had on the economy, my secret hobby for dealing with the stresses of running a successful business is writing children’s story books. One day I hope to publish these. Watch this space!
To find out more about Coombe and Sharpe Ltd, click here.
