We’re thrilled here at Happity to win the Tenacious Team award from Employment Hero!
It’s an award given to teams who have overcome challenges together in the past two years. To recognise how hard they have worked – pulling together as a team to overcome adversity.
We all know how hard the past couple of years has been for small businesses. This makes winning this award mean even more to us.
Our tenacious team pulling together through covid
In March 2020 all our lives changed overnight. And almost overnight we had to put a new plan in place to save our business. And the thousands of small businesses we work with at Happity.
We helped our class providers get 32,000 classes online at the start of the pandemic. Many over the first weekend! We quickly made changes to our site to enable online classes. We trained providers in Zoom. And together we set up a vital support of online classes for all the new parents bringing up a baby during the pandemic.
Dealing with tears over Tiers
As we went through the pandemic and things slowly opened back up – things changed again. Whenever there was a new announcement about what was allowed/not allowed at each point it was often really hard to interpret what it meant for class leaders and how they could run their classes. Remember the complicated Tiers system? And the rule of 6 with strange exceptions and weird rules about singing?
The parent & child sector fell through the gaps in covid guidance. Classes struggled to reopen with the rest of the economy as local councils mistakenly closed legal operations and threatened fines.
Sara became an expert in deciphering government rules. And in translating them so that our class providers knew what it meant for them.
Happity became the go-to for class providers seeking help with reopening. As well as the DfE’s go-to consultant on writing appropriate covid guidance for the sector.
Emily played an integral role petitioning Government to enable parent and child classes to return safely. This resulted in changing legislation, getting on to the Spring 2021 Roadmap, and being nominated for Petitions Campaigner of the year alongside Marcus Rashford!
Behind them both – as they worked so tirelessly – there was a small but tenacious team here at Happity beavering away to keep everything afloat.
Post-covid and we’re getting bigger and better
Once lockdowns were lifted and life was back to normal it would have been easy to have a big sigh of relief and take it easy for a while. But this past 12 months has been our busiest ever.
We ran a hugely successful crowdfunding campaign. We raised funds to enable us to expand more rapidly to help more parents and providers, quickly.
Over the last year a staggering 1 million parents have used Happity to find baby & toddler classes near them.
We’ve grown from a team of 6 to a team of over 20.
And we’re expanding across the UK.
Pre-covid we were just in central London. Over the past year we have expanded across Greater London, and launched in Birmingham and Bristol (as well as growing organically in other UK locations). We have huge plans to grow across the UK in the next 6-12 months. So if Happity is not in your area yet – keep your eyes peeled as we hope it will be very soon!
Here’s to our Tenacious Team
We’re thrilled to win the Tenacious Team award. We have an amazing and passionate team who really care. About our mission and our values. And making Happity bigger and better. To connect more and more parents through baby classes.
Thank you too to our wonderful community of class providers. We can’t do any of this without you. And so we raise a glass to you too as we celebrate this win!
You might also like:
Happity is one of the top 100 inspirational businesses of 2022
0 Comments