2020 continues to be a year which, on balance, will be best confined to the annals of history!

The employment picture is becoming increasingly worrying with more redundancies on the high street this week, with John Lewis, Boots and Burger King all declaring closures yesterday. The question now is will Chancellor's Rishi Sunak's plan for jobs and half price Nandos, have a positive affect on business confidence?

You can read the take of our SME Digest editor, Adam Bernstein, in another of our special features today. Once again an easily digestible article from Adam, he analyses Wednesday's announcements and considers how they might impact on small businesses.

Adam is very fair to the government, pointing out that they are trying their best, but stressing, ". . there has to be recognition that there is a limit to what they can do, no matter how unpalatable that is."

Which is of course the hard truth. Businesses will suffer. Many are doing so already.  Also, very sadly, not all will survive.

With the nature of this virus paying no heed to borders, this is of course a worldwide problem. Companies around the world are struggling at the moment. You may have already read the news today that Briggs & Stratton in the U.S has a crunch week coming up. This Wednesday, July 15th, according to this article in local news source the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, is " . .critical in its efforts to stave off bankruptcy".

The report makes for tough reading. The Covid-19 impact is cited by a Briggs spokesperson in the piece as being "substantial" to their current issues - but the writer of the piece also points out that the company "has been battered by not only Covid-19 but also foreign competition and the loss of large customers in the outdoor power equipment business."

Hopefully something positive will happen for Briggs & Stratton, its workers and its customers this week. It'll be great to hear a fuller story from their side regarding how they intend to move forward as a company once they are less constrained by the legalities surrounding their current financial situation.

But I don't want to be all doom and gloom! And going from recent conversations we've had with both manufacturers and dealers, I don't think we necessarily have to be.

Of course we must be realistic, admitting that times are undeniably tough, with both manufacturers and dealers facing a frankly unique set of circumstances. But via our recent conversations and in research I've been conducting for an upcoming article for the magazine, we've heard one particular phrase crop-up on quite a number of occasions.

Cautious optimism.

We've been told about the recent surge in demand for certain products. We've also been told about the nervousness of what might come next, following the mass redundancies across society.

However, as we've heard many times over the years by dealers and manufacturers alike, the prevailing social, economic and political situation only ever has a limited effect on the business levels in our sector. It is of course always the weather which dominates a good or bad season.

Even amidst an unprecedented global pandemic, the conversations we've been conducting almost inevitably turned to the weather conditions. Too wet, too hot, too dry. These issues began to once again take precedence. In terms of how much outdoor powered machinery is sold and serviced, rain and sun has the upper hand over Covid-19 it seems.

So how do you feel? Does cautiously optimistic apply to you and your business? Are you fearful? Bullish? Somewhere in between?

We're running a short survey of our dealer readers today to, excuse the pun, take the temperature. If you could spare a few moments to let us know how your business confidence is feeling currently, it would be most appreciated. 

We'll publish the results and a selection of your comments in the next issue of Service Dealer magazine.