Each month we’d like to share what we’re up to at SK Chase.

In January:

Although Christmas feels like a distant memory now, we have all been reflecting on this time to see if there is anything we can do better.

It’s our busiest time of year (around 30% of our clients’ yearly gift voucher sales are made in December) and so much planning goes into ensuring everything runs smoothly during this peak period.  We’re all over the moon that we enjoyed such successful time – both in a commercial sense, and culturally too – our team enjoying their work over Christmas, not getting stressed out and having fun! If you look back at our facebook page over December, you’ll see we had lots of it!

We hope all our clients enjoyed a successful Christmas too – and that people who gave and received gift vouchers from all the lovely hotels and resorts we work were delighted with their gifts.  And we’re going to make it even easier to buy gift vouchers in the future!

We’ve embarked upon a new System Rebuild Project, which involves making improvements to our gift voucher application, as well as introducing new features and services – over the course of the next 12 months.

This will make our system more intuitive, streamlined and easy to use for our clients and their customers buying gift vouchers.

Steph (MD) has been devoting some time to sharing the Save / Spend framework with the team.  We went into implementation with this as a business at the start of our new financial year (November) and some of us are now taking the learning into a personal space, which is great.  The framework enables us to pro-actively manage our money.

Kate and Jan have been settling into new roles and tasks. Kate as head of Risk & Compliance and Jan had an overview of the Legal Function with one of the founders, Kaye and is looking forward to getting more involved in this function and helping to breathe some new life into it over the next few months.

And on a personal note:

• Kaye had a 10 minute conversation in Italian with a courier company on the phone  – a BIG milestone for someone learning Italian.
• Ben is working his way through a ‘Flexibility for Martial Arts’ book and the idea is to come up with a series of 15 minute stretching workouts.
• Catharine is looking forward to The Mighty Deerstalker (a night time off road adventure race) in March!
• Jen is heading to New York in 6 weeks and is enjoying reading guide books and planning her adventure.
• Kate has been the driving range with her fiancée (part of her personal challenge to learn to play golf). She didn’t have a great success rate at hitting the balls (mostly thin air) but Kevin is actually a good teacher and was very patient.
• Steph has been learning about Chakras and how they affect our mind/body/spirit/emotions and has started to practice Jai breathing which is helping her connect with herself and tune into her intuition.
• Jan’s hallway is now complete – and she loves it – a career in interior design beckons.
• Dani is on holiday…
• And me – I’ve just started a ‘retro’ fitness class which involves exercising with a hula hoop while dancing to Wham! Now where are my legwarmers…?  🙂