From the delightful setting of a former little tea room on the corner of Jamestown Road, Guy Gold has been cracking backs and serving superior coffee for the last three years. His clever combo of café out front, osteopathy practice out back, has been popular with residents and office workers alike, but both businesses are of a type to be severely challenged by COVID. However as Guy tells us, he chose to sail forth through the storm rather than to sink.

How has COVID affected your business?
“As primary healthcare practitioners, we were never actually told to close the practice, but I discussed it with my colleague Anna, who made such a compelling argument for the general health of the nation, that it was clear there really was no other option. We communicated this with our patients and began to offer online consultations, which went surprisingly well. My colleagues were amazing, rallying to the cry of video calls while I focused on battening down the hatches and reducing costs.
There are many different hats I need to wear here. As an employer, I have a duty of care to my five coffee shop staff, and wanted to avoid making anyone redundant. Similarly I have a duty of care to my osteopathic patients and the associates in my practice. I’m also a leaseholder, so had considerations around the building, and all the while I needed to make sure the business remained financially viable.
It became helpful to think of it like commanding a ship. I was preparing to sail across a very stormy sea, and I wanted to make sure the boat, and all the different staff members within it, would survive the voyage ahead – that nobody was lost overboard.”

What’s your current offering?
“There have been three main phases of all this for us, which I’ve
defined as survival, repair and recovery. During the survival phase, I always had my eye on how we’d return as soon as we could, so I wrote a 32-page safeguarding document as an expression of due diligence specifically undertaken for this practice. It’s vital we lead by example. So all the staff have done 10 hours of training, there’s been a huge amount of research. We opened again in nlate May for one-to-one treatments, with online triage forms, wearing full PPE, running temperature checks on arrival and deep cleaning between every patient. I’ve done unbelievable amounts of scrubbing – I feel half man, half sanitiser!
It’s important though – a lot of our patients are actually key workers; surgeons, doctors and nurses who have been on the front line. Our duty is to protect them, but also their families and children, and the wider community, too. We had to behave as if we were being exposed to someone who had COVID every time.
We did two weeks of osteopathy before we also opened to serve coffee again by the side door. There was definitely local demand for it, and we wanted to offer a sense of resolve during difficult times. Usually around 80% of our customers are from the offices, so we’re not seeing them at the moment, but plenty of people are working from home and pop out for coffee, so we went for it.”