I am sure I can say with a degree of certainty that for many of us, our annual routines generally follow something of a familiar pattern - mine certainly do. We take five weeks’ vacation (if we are lucky) perhaps, many of us celebrate special holidays and birthdays with loved ones in our extended families, we routinely engage in sporting and other leisure activities and hobbies, hop on and off planes at will, and we relax


with friends and colleagues at the end of our working days with a beer of glass of wine. Well that’s how it used to be!


2020 has challenged and changed all that. No-one saw COVID-19 on the horizon until it was too late and the world has been caught unprepared. That world and existence we knew evaporated in an instant as many of us were locked down for


weeks as the worst pandemic since Spanish flu a century ago took hold. At the time of writing, the UK is back in lockdown again for four weeks, France is totally locked down, Germany the same, Sweden is reviewing its policy due to a worrying spike and so it goes on. The pandemic has had a profound effect and will leave lasting effects and, for some, painful memories. On the downside, good, well established businesses in the marine world have already gone bankrupt and others will follow sadly. But there has been a positive side too for some, IIMS included. Many yacht and small craft marine surveyors around the globe have never been busier - they tell me - and have been literally rushed off their feet working seven days a week to meet demand as the public has gone boat buying crazy. In some cases, people are buying boats unseen based on the surveyor’s report. What a conundrum and unexpected development! It has helped that many authorities around the world declared and recognised marine surveyors and ship inspectors as frontline or key workers too.


GENERAL OVERVIEW


And what of IIMS in all this chaos and disruption? I have never managed a business through a pandemic; indeed, few will have done and it has certainly presented a number of key challenges which have never appeared in any strategy plan or risk assessment I have been involved with. Similarly, there is no guidebook written that explains on page 37 how to deal with COVID-19, so I have had to make it up as I have gone along with the help and unstinting support of my colleagues. The feeling and depth of uncertainty and fear at the start was intense and hard to fathom in late February. Daily UK government and international briefings got gloomier and the number of infections and deaths in the UK and elsewhere rose rapidly. Although the direction of travel was quickly becoming apparent, I did not for one moment think governments around the world would choose to impose total shutdowns because of what it would do to their respective economies. How wrong was I?


We discussed things internally as a team and considered the possibility of having to work from home. That would have been impossible to do a couple of years’ ago, but our recent move to a cloud-based solution using Office 365, OneDrive and SharePoint, thus becoming paperless made it manageable. Foremost in the back of my mind was we must do all we could to


The Report • December 2020 • Issue 94 | 37


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116