Sarah Dunning - Chair at Westmorland

Yeah,

definitely.

And any sort of reflections? On that time, anything you learned early on that is kind of still rung true to today?

Well, we made loads

of mistakes.

And in many ways, we were very unprepared.

You know, we were a much smaller business back then and had a much lighter management team and there weren't that many of us.

And So it was very much all hands to the pump.

And in many ways, you only learn by doing.

So we got, you know, something's right.

And we probably, if we were rerunning it, would have done lots of things differently as well.

But, you know, it's the only way you learn, isn't it? So we did it.

And actually, I think we have two lovely businesses in Cairn Lodge and Gloucester Services today.

And we had time after opening to... to sort of bed it down and level things out and stabilise it.

And, you know, once we'd done that, we were then able to kind of grow the management team and get more experience in.

And we got a new CEO in.

I was CEO up until then.

And I think I certainly felt that it would be really good to get a CEO in who had experience experience of running businesses in different parts of the country and sort of bit more multi-site experience.

So lots of change came with it, which was really exciting.

Yeah,

brilliant.

And if there was sort of, you know, maybe one thing that sort of really helped in that journey,

maybe the people, what do you think it would be? It's always the team effort, always the team effort.

And I think what's really nice sort of through that transition, you know, a lot of the people that made it happen then are still with us now.

You know, Lawrence, you know, my kind of partner in crime in the business now, he's actually retired now, but he's a non-executive director now.