An independent hotelier who completed a £1 million investment in the year before Covid closed her down, has told how she survived the pandemic as the area’s business resilience was praised.
Heather Dutton is the managing director and owner of Stallingborough Grange, the 42-bed rural location on the outskirts of Grimsby.
Once her family home, and convenient for both South Bank industry and as a rural retreat, 2019 saw the completion of the 250-seat Buttercross Suite, creating a wedding and function venue in a new chapter for the business. But within a year she had pivoted to pizza deliveries and serving up doorstep Sunday lunches to keep the business afloat.
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She was host of and guest speaker at the annual celebration event for Investment Hub NEL, the unique signposting and business support service sponsored by the local authority.
Help has been at hand since 2016, and Stallingborough Grange has reached out for assistance with growth and, now, plotting survival.
“Stallingborough Grange is very special to me because it is my family home,” Heather said. “My parents bought the original building in 1971 and over the years renovated the property. My Mum was quite an astute lady, had a light bulb moment, and realised there was a need for accommodation, and turned the house into a three-bedroom hotel with restaurant. 30 years later we have now grown to a 42 bedroom hotel, with a very successful restaurant, bar and flagship function room.”
Heather’s parents Patricia and Gordon Feeney were behind the early regional central heating installation company Micron, but home comforts were sparse in March 2020 when the world as we knew it imploded. All the hard yards done to secure weddings for a new venue, helping pay early instalments off, turned to cancellation chaos as Covid struck - with many ceremonies only just being held now.
“When Covid struck the business had to be closed down completely, and there was just that fear of how we were still going to pay the bills that kept coming with no income,” she recalled, with worries for the 35 staff. ”Investment Hub NEL was fantastic - to talk to, to listen and to give advice. The grants the government were offering, we couldn’t get initially, but a few months later we were helped though that process and got that, which saw us on the road to recovery.
“I never thought we would be doing pizza delivery, but Just Eat was fantastic for us. My daughter set it up and at one point we had three delivery drivers doing Sunday dinners, pizzas and ‘Stallingborough KFC’. It got us through those two years, we managed to have a drip of income coming into the business, which helped keep us on our feet. Now we are here. We’ve done 100 weddings, a lot of those backlog from Covid, we’re just doing our last then straight into the party season.”
Funding of a different kind had led to the initial call. Heather recalled a ‘magical’ introduction back in 2016. “We were looking to build the function room and struggling to get the investment together, having difficult talks with banks, and Ian (Girdley - part of the small Investment Hub NEL team) appeared like a fairy godmother, talked us through negotiations and secured some funding and investment to build this magnificent building.”
And is Investment Hub still on call? Well, yes. A grant was recently secured to help with superfast broadband and it has just signed off on solar panels to help ease the impact of higher energy prices.
Projects worth £13m pass through unique service in past year
Updating on the latest progress for the team, Anthony Winn, chair of Investment Hub NEL, said: “Businesses here are so resilient, we see determination, great innovation, a desire to succeed despite what is thrown at them.
“Official ONS figures show business success rates in North East Lincolnshire are higher than the national average, and higher than most of the regional neighbours. There must be a reason for that.
“From personal experience, from businesses we see day-in day-out, there is this determination. I have worked in different regions in my banking days, and always in this area I have found businesses stronger, more profitable, with more meat on the bone, and management that keeps going whatever. There’s also another thing that helps locally, our business support assets in North East Lincolnshire. It is higher than most other regions, and recently NEL won national awards with the FSB at the Local Government Awards. That’s a big thing. I’d like to congratulate all the people within the council for winning the award, for working in collaboration to help businesses, with us and E-Factor.”
Investment Hub NEL helped 85 clients, making 224 introductions and assisting with projects valued at £13 million in the past year. Over the last six years that figure is at £44.5 million, with 1,328 jobs created as a result.
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