A review of a peach of a meeting

We had our management team get-together yesterday. It’s the first time we’d all been together in one room, and there was no real benefit to that if I’m honest. The whole thing could have been done via Zoom or Teams and would have been just as beneficial and productive. Maybe more so, because we wouldn’t all have had to take an afternoon off.
Anyway, Gavin was very happy with how the whole thing went and seemed to take delight in casting his owner’s eyes out over the room full of personalities that he has assembled to run his Empire for him.
And Empire might be the right word to use, because he made a big speech about the possibility of expanding the company over the next few weeks. I thought the whole point of him bringing me in was to give him more time to spend with his family, but it seems the novelty must have worn off because he is now spending all the extra time he has travelling around East Anglia looking at other sites he might want to buy. He has his eye on a number of seaside hotels that are currently unused and going to ruin and therefore available quite cheaply.
One of the other people in the room spoke to me later and said “Don’t worry – he does this sometimes. Gets all excited about the idea of branching out and then realising later it’s impossible. Give him a month and he’ll be on about something else.”
I hope that’s true. I like his set-up as it is now, and I’d hate to see it endangered by him trying to make it bigger when it’s not ready for it. But then – what the Hell do I know? I did physics, not economics, and maybe right now is exactly the right time to be buying up more holiday properties. God knows the ones we have are fully booked for months on end, and it’s not exactly certain that foreign travel will open up fully any time in the near future. There’s also a bunch of people looking to simplify their lives post-Covid and not have so much responsibility and not spend so much time in the rat-race, so maybe Gavin can pick the pockets of the ones who own hotels and get himself a bargain by persuading them to enjoy an early retirement….
Anyway, my main conclusion from the meeting was that we didn’t do anything we were supposed to do. It was planned as a ‘finalising the management structure’ agenda and we ended up losing the whole three hours to pipe dreams.

RC 26-6-21