As Her Majesty comes to terms with the loss of her beloved husband, The Duke of Edinburgh, most of us can stand back (love them or hate them), and see that their record breaking 73-year marriage has been a fine example of a successful partnership. Rumours suggest it wasn’t all red roses and chocolates, but they seemed to have understood each other, committed to the task in hand and learned to appreciate and rely on the best aspects of their individual characters and values. Something to celebrate?
Today is the Glorious 12th - not the start of the grouse season that Phillip so loved - but a hugely important day for most of the population of this country. Everything feels brighter and lighter, with a sense of renewal as things start to open-up. We can entertain positive thoughts and dreams as we move towards a more normal world and way of living, and hopefully begin to live life to the full again. Let’s hope happy days are here again!
At All Bright, Jo Dolan (my business partner) and I have been lucky. Despite the pandemic, business has been OK and we adapted pretty quickly to a new way of working; which has now become our norm. It’s been a bit squeaky at times, but we’ve knuckled down and committed to getting to ‘the other side’ and it really feels like we’ve finally come ashore in reasonable condition. We’ve learned a lot about what we’re really good at, what we love to do, who we like to work with and how we like to do business. We’ve truly relied on each other – as business colleagues, and also as friends. The fact is, over and above Covid, we’ve run the gauntlet of a whole range of challenges – as have many people in this country – but ours has included the impact of redundancy, a new way of working, break-ups, illness and death of a parent, a child with special needs, a parent with dementia, personal illness and a harassment case. This has all happened in the background, whilst we’ve ploughed on with work - barely missing a beat in delivering our business commitments. Blimey!!
That’s not to say there hasn’t been drama and emotion in the background, and sometimes when we chat now we’re in awe and wonder at how we’ve got through it all. I do believe our 20-year relationship as business colleagues and friends before we set-up All Bright really helped, but we are very proud of ourselves for getting through it. I think we feel much stronger as individuals, more certain of our purpose, clearer about how and where we fit, and what we are doing as a business. And just like Her Maj and the DofE, we know that partnership has been at the very core of it all - which really got me thinking about what partnership means to us?
I’m not going to try and write some mind-sparkling prose about it, but I will thank the wonderful JoDo; for her incredible talents, her courage, her strength, her love of the new and all things tech, her support, her downright straightforwardness, her great sense of humour and for being such an all-out lovely person. We’ve managed to do a lot in the past 15-months and it’s been a hell of a ride, but I wouldn’t have wanted to do it with anyone but you, so here’s to the next 15!!!
See our wordle that sums up the meaning of partnership to me and Jo; and we’d love to hear yours too? - Debra Nightingale
