When We Look Back - An Open Letter
It can be incredibly hard at times to move forward. To just keep going, let alone grow. Add in the uncertainty a global pandemic brings, and many of us have become stuck. With spring comes growth and with it plenty of talk about growth. Now that we have the benefit of hindsight, our team has been reflecting on what kept us motivated over the past year.
We narrowed it down to 3 things:
Be proactive, not reactive
1. We had kept our long term vision at the fore, long before COVID-19 hit. Having a small business is a juggling act. Lucky for us, we got quite practiced at keeping one eye on the now, one eye on the soon to be, and a third one on the future. When our “now” blew up, we immediately transitioned to working on what should have been coming next so we could keep our dreams for the future in sight. It wasn’t easy or comfortable, but it kept us moving forward, learning, and developing – individually, and as a team.
Have Key Performance Indicators (but be flexible)
2. We chose to change our KPI’s. As an event rental business, we couldn’t go virtual, implement curbside pick up, or sell online. Our entire business model depended on people gathering together, and that was now prohibited. So we had to ask ourselves, IF our only revenue stream has dried up completely and we can’t use sales as a metric for the foreseeable future, how would we measure success? And how would that new KPI serve us when the stream filled up again? There were a lot of long conversations and we landed on 2 metrics: keep our entire team employed, and fully bake our culture into every part of the business. We know that for many organizations, furloughing staff was the only option. We seriously weighed this option against the alternative. In the end, and with compromise on both sides, we realized that our small but mighty team needed to stay together, and we were all committed to seeing that through. And that commitment really fed into the second goal. For this team, our vision, our collective values are a part of everything we do. We had a very robust culture in 2019. Now it’s 2021, and we’ve walked through the desert and back again. Diversity, balance, innovation, and growth is so embedded in our relationships, client interactions, strategy, and operations. And we couldn’t be prouder of that.
Keep taking steps, even when the path is hidden.
3. We were kind to ourselves and to each other. None of us have ever pivoted a business during a pandemic before. So now more than ever, failure was a-okay. Once the pressure to perform like we did pre covid was removed, we became even more encouraged to keep moving forward. Some of the steps we took were small. Wrong.
Unbalanced. Or caused us to stumble. And that was ok. More than ok, it was freeing, and fed into creative bursts that led to greater innovation. There were many times when even when the path was hidden, we still kept taking those steps. And sometimes, when there wasn’t a path at all, we created our own.
This is by no means an emergency plan for businesses. It’s a reflection on learnings that will serve us long after the pandemic has resolved itself. No one wants to have gone through what we’ve all been through. But we that think by sharing what we’ve learned, and listening to what you’ve learned, we are all going to come out of this wiser and more evolved.
We’d love it if you shared your learnings with us as well.
Team SOS