Are you ready for the Christmas break?
These days when I take the dog to the park in the mornings it’s still dark. Neither of us is keen to go out. But on the plus side, the dogs have cheerful LED lights and collars that flash gaily in the darkness, and I love the party atmosphere.
And that’s how I’m feeling looking back on the year – it’s been tough living through the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, but here at Dovetail there’s been much to celebrate.
We’ve expanded our client base, adding new companies and new teams within existing client companies. We landed our first European business in a number of years, engaging key opinion leaders in Italy and Greece.
We developed and implemented a comprehensive clinical engagement programme for a client, following a major acquisition in a new therapy area.
We added a new patient insight service to our portfolio. The programme gained major insights, shining a light on a significant gap between the reality for patients and the assumptions made by healthcare professionals.
In September we won our second Communiqué award, the inaugural award for Agility and Flexibility, for our work on the IBD COVID-19 patient risk tool. I couldn’t be prouder of Dovetail’s role in this project with our longstanding client the IBD Registry.
And we’ve grown our revenue significantly when we’d planned to maintain the status quo.
So how have we achieved such good results?
By focusing on the basics. At the start of the first lockdown, we agreed two priorities that have served us really well since:
- Look after ourselves and our nearest and dearest
- Enjoy doing good work for our clients
It’s the oxygen mask principle: fit your own mask before helping other people with theirs. If we’re not looking after ourselves, we’re less able to deliver for our clients.
A key element is bringing in the right resources to help – we boosted our capacity with executive assistants Katie Parker and Sofia Barella, associate Sue Spencer and finance director John Wall.
We benefitted from ongoing mentoring from Anna Korving and digital marketing expertise from Vicki Jakes.
It’s that looking after your nearest dearest.
It’s a privilege to work in healthcare and we appreciate it every day.
A huge thank you to all our customers and community – we feel lucky to work with you!
It’s not long till we pass the winter solstice and the days start getting longer again. Before we know it, the dogs in the park won’t need their light-up collars.