The PHHPA Team!
As you are probably aware the Park Home and Holiday Park Association is new. We are a start-up. If you have a business or some other enterprise that you have started, then you may relate to our story.
The PHHPA Ltd was founded on the 24th of May 2021. At this point all we had was a mission to support the park home and holiday park industry, its operators, and suppliers.
We needed a website, a directory, a magazine, training programmes, staff, social media outreach, an awards programme… you name it!
Three months on and we have a website, we have run our first training webinar and you are reading our first magazine. We have achieved this with the help of some wonderful, hardworking, and often hard-pressed staff.
We have made our fair share of mistakes, such as creating a .com before realising that we needed a .org and calling Bradley Chapman our Managing Director before realising that associations have Director General. But we learn from our mistakes. Every mistake is a lesson. It is how we grow and make better decisions for the future.
Our website has had glitches and our magazine has had numerous design changes. We have also created other websites: the Bliss Group which are basically added bonuses for our members. These were created by our web developer John, learning new tools, and working to exacting standards.
So fast forward and you will dash past the building of our social media by Deimante. The creation of our YouTube
videos, many of them by creative Charmine. And our magazine which has mostly been the work of myself and our creative team including Demi who has also been planning our events.
Stop here and you will find us in the midst of promotion. We have been seen on ITV’s Undercover Big Boss and we are promoting our first webinar Why is the UK Park Industry Booming?. Our PA is off sick as is our member services manager.
I am also off with something that makes me feel drunk, dizzy, and sick, but without any of the joy of getting drunk and Deimante gets pinged!
She has been in direct contact with a friend who has had a positive test. She has to leave taking her computer to work from home. She takes a PCR test but is unable to come in again until she has had a negative test.
This is just at a point where we are ankle deep in both social media and magazine work. Needless to say, that there was quite a bit of firefighting as working remotely means that it is much harder to bounce ideas off of each other.
Thankfully, I was able to return the next day, but our social media manager would not be back for another two days.
Having finally received a negative test she headed in on the train. I cannot tell you how joyful I was to be driving to the station to pick her up. It wasn’t exactly the pingdemic that many companies have experienced but it certainly impacted us.
The truth is that for any new enterprise, in our case an association, but for you it might be a new park or setting up a new business, the first few months take a tremendous amount of effort. If you look on it like a plane taking off, then it is like taxiing up to the runway.
Each setback is like the air traffic controllers keep holding you. Finally, they say you can leave, and you push the control leaving forward as far as it will go. The plane makes an immense amount of noise, and you can feel it juddering until finally it begins to edge forward.
We were gradually speeding up as we stove forward, there were some big judders and we finally felt ourselves lift. Now we just need to get to cruising altitude! But with our mission in mind, we can only grow and get better.
