In March 2020, I put out an offer to my subscriber list and some of our alumni with a simple offer: if you or your business have been affected by COVID-19, and you’d like someone to talk to, please let me know.
No charge, no expectations, I’d love to help wherever I can.

The response has been humbling and inspiring – so many great people who are committed to building something that’s good for the world.
The shutdowns have hit people hard: lost contracts, lost jobs, lost income, lost sleep.
Amongst all of that, I’ve seen incredible resilience: people taking the time to go back to their mission and vision, drafting new business models, improving their financial literacy, adding new customers and creating new plans for the future.

It’s taken a while for themes to emerge from all these sessions, but here are some of the insights and conversations that I’ve found to be interesting…

Staying afloat is a remarkable achievement
Decisions made by government department and societies as a whole have frozen certain industries, transformed others and tripled the sales of a rare few.
It’s one thing to operate a business well, but if your customers are suddenly outlawed from shopping with you or have greatly reduced budgets, then you suddenly have a crisis as well.
If you can find a way to remain trading, you’re doing a tremendous job.
There is no expectation that you need to walk away from 2020 with a cute story about “Corona was the best thing that could have happened to my business”.
You’re in this business because it matters to you, all we hope is that you are able to stick around.

Customers find a way to fuel their top priorities
An interesting quirk about people and their budgets – they almost always find a way to fund their top priorities.
If a company can become a customer’s favourite, then these purchases will probably be the last thing that gets cut out.
We’ve seen this with some of our clients whose orders have remained steady during lockdown – Tapioca Delight in Port Moresby had a surge of birthday cake orders amidst all the stay-at-home orders.
While families might not have been able to visit the special birthday person, they’ve been sure to arrange something special.
We’ve seen this in our own spending patterns – I’ll go out of my way to get great takeaway coffee, but would never think to shop with the businesses near our former office.
We’ve switched to shopping online, but only from brands we really love.
This sounds obvious, and I guess it is, but it’s a reminder that being “good enough” isn’t good enough when customers need to cut costs.
It’s dangerous to rely on a captive audience, and more lucrative in the long term to delight customers rather than just serving them.

Responding to the quarantine market is clever, but limited
We all saw the articles that came out in March/April about the entrepreneurial companies that pivoted to serve the lockdown market.
Gin distilleries making hand sanitizer, restaurants switching to takeaway, Uber delivering parcels, entertainers monetizing live streams, etc.
I like their attitude, although it’s not a formula everyone can follow.
When all the cafes in your town shut, opening your café for takeaway coffee can be a smart move.
But if everyone tries it, the pool of customers is divided and everyone loses.
I love the energy in redesigning a business model that serves the new world, but please don’t assume it’s going to be possible or straightforward.
You don’t need to add guilt and insecurity to the growing list of headaches.

Preserving your staff can outweigh the need to break even
On the topic of cafes, one founder told me that he’s reopened his café knowing that he’ll make a small loss each day, in order to retain his team.
They usually do a roaring trade, and part of their success comes from having genuinely great staff in both front and back of house.
Shutting the doors might be better for their cash position, but it would mean saying goodbye to some of their most valuable assets, and in the end the choice became obvious.

The old productivity metrics no longer matter
We’ve spent decades using the same measurements from output; time spent in the office, time spent in front of your boss/your team, narrowly beating last year’s performance, meetings per day, number of social media posts, etc.
Then all of a sudden we’re all working from home, isolated in a physical and mental sense.
There is no expectation that our productivity will match or exceed what we used to do.
There are pros and cons to remote work, but the sudden shift was bound to take a toll on our productivity.
We’re likely to be doing less, or if not, doing the same tasks but with less enthusiasm and joy.
What’s interesting is that since everyone else is going through the same experience, nobody is judging your drop in efficiency.
You have time to breathe, time to regroup, time to reset your goals and expectations.

Zoom fills a gap, but people do business with people
I like Zoom, a lot more than I liked Skype, but it is fatiguing.
For 1-2 hours a day it’s effective, but after that it starts to become a chore.
Since many of us are grateful to have an ongoing income, a chore is still pretty good, but I get nervous when I hear people talk about conducting all future meetings via video.
What we’ve observed is that Zoom works in the presence of trust; when you’re talking to old friends it’s straightforward.
Strangers though, are a different story.
People do business with people, and they do business with people they like.
Zoom lets us exchange information, but often without the same emotion and empathy that you get from being in the same room.
For coaching it’s great, but not for full-day workshops or times when we ask founders to be vulnerable with a group.

Better video calls are a facilitation challenge, not a tech challenge
I recently recorded a guest lecture for a marketing class.
I’d spoken to this same program twice before, so I had a fair idea about what worked – lots of stories, photos and diagrams.
I recorded myself on Zoom for 41 minutes; it produced a 93MB file and a pretty hollow feeling.
Here’s what I found interesting: all the videoconferencing advice out there is about the 93MB file, or the benefits from switching to Microsoft Teams.
Not about how to make it a satisfying process, not about how to inspire or be more memorable.
I see videocalls as a facilitation challenge, one that isn’t solved by software.
Instead it requires a lot of time, research and attention – redesigning the way we teach and create a welcoming learning environment.

New product ideas aren’t good or bad, they’re “Yes if...”
One entrepreneur asked me “Do you think my new product idea sounds good?”
It’s a common question and it comes from a good place, but I feel like it invites misleading responses.
Firstly, my opinion on your products doesn’t matter unless I resemble your customers.
Secondly, very few ideas are entirely good or entirely bad, it depends on whether they’re actually desirable, feasible and viable.
So my answer is likely to be “Yes if…”
Yes if it intrigues a suitably large pool of customers.
Yes if you’re able to find the right assets and resources.
Yes if it makes a margin.
The wonderful thing about all of these is they’re based on data and evidence, not opinions and guesses, and that means they can be tested.

This is a great time for small businesses to rethink their preferred nouns and verbs
I love Austin Kleon’s ideas around being the noun vs doing the verb, and recently wrote a post on this topic.
People often fixate on what noun they want to be, rather than what verbs they like to do each week, and it can lead to procrastination, underperformance, resentment and sadness.
e.g. I want to be a musician vs I want to write and record lots of songs.
I want to be a creative director vs I love running feedback sessions.
I want to be a CEO vs I love doing what a CEO does.

I’ve spoken with a number of founders and freelancers who aren’t thrilled with how their customers see them; people either come in with the wrong expectations or no expectations.
If you’re pivoting your business, it might be worth thinking about what verbs you enjoy and what nouns you want to be known for.
There are no strict rules around terms like Facilitator, Photographer, Consultant, Creative Director, Manager, Speaker, Community Leader or Salesperson.
The important thing is that people understand that you’re great at doing the verbs that sit behind those nouns.
And if you want them to think that, you’re going to have to start telling them.
It’s going to feel like self-promotion, but it might help position you as a trusted professional in a new field.

A clear web presence is no longer an advantage, it’s a minimum requirement
Several of the founders I’ve coached have been suddenly motivated to fix or re-create their websites and online presence.
They can no longer lean on their shopfronts or their in-person meetings; all of their first impressions in 2020 are coming via Google or a link.
If you aren’t taking your website seriously, you won’t be taken seriously.

Small improvements have disproportionately high impacts on your ranking and your conversion rates, and it’s cheaper than re-doing your fitout.

Setting up camp while building your new house
My colleague Annie Smits has a great analogy for the overwhelming change facing our business model:
“It’s like our house burned down.
And now we’re outside in shock, and we’re camping.
We’re going to be camping for a while, so let’s get the campsite working, but we’re also starting to dream together about what our new house should look like.”
I love this visual – the old model is gone, and we need a temporary plan for the near future along with a longer term plan for how we want to live.
Camping sucks – it’s hard and uncomfortable compared to your old familiar house.
But also, a good campsite keeps you alive and cheerful during some rough days and nights.
Right now it feels exhausting – spending so much energy setting up a new interim business model while also planning how to rebuild a house, but I’m yet to see an easy way out.
Most of all, it gets us out of our old comfortable habits and makes us question why we do what we do each day, and that might not be such a bad thing in the longer term.

Companies are being rewarded/punished for the cultures they’ve built
A strong team culture is a valuable asset – requiring deliberate attention and maintenance in exchange for multiplying the performance of each team member.
You can’t create culture quickly, and you can’t fake it; if the founders don’t buy in with their actions, their words are worthless.
Lockdown has put a strain on every team, and the good cultures are revealing their value.
Zoom meetings work when people trust each other, vulnerable conversations occur when people feel that they can be honest, and team members feel comfortable working from home when they know that their contribution is seen and valued.
For businesses with unhealthy cultures, this season is likely to erode the bonds between contributors and see their top staff begin to look elsewhere for work once “normality” resumes.
Vice versa, I’m working with several leaders whose teams are becoming even closer this year, with a genuine sense of camaraderie as everyone pulls together. 

When you do things right, people won’t know that you’ve done anything at all
One enterprise is having issues with customers arguing about prices.
More specifically, the customers have seen the results this business has created (they genuinely change lives), but they don’t understand why it costs so much to sign up.
My belief is that the entrepreneurs are making their results look easy, as if each project was obvious and always bound to work out this way.

The price of their elegance is that people undervalue their contribution – like one of Picasso’s famous line drawings.
Mark McCormack said:
It always reminds me of the story about the woman who approached Picasso in a restaurant, asked him to scribble something on a napkin, and said she would be happy to pay whatever he felt it was worth.
Picasso complied and then said, “That will be $10,000.”
“But you did that in thirty seconds,” the astonished woman replied.
“No,” Picasso said.
“It has taken me forty years to do that.”

If customers don’t understand your talent, they’re unlikely to pay a premium for something you’ve designed.
Perhaps they need to explore the alternatives for themselves, to see how far they can get on their own before they judge your value against your price.

Social enterprises can’t pour from an empty cup
I know a lot of social entrepreneurs who are leaders in their community, and I know that they’re currently swept off their feet.
The exhaustion comes from a good place – they’ve seen that if they don’t intervene is a situation, then nobody else will.
The challenge here is that “you cannot pour from an empty cup”, or as they say on planes “secure your own oxygen mask before assisting others”.
I wish I had a formula for the exact moment when you need to step back or say “no”, but the truth is I don’t.
Every circumstance is different, but perhaps the principle of treating yourself the way you’d treat your friends can help – if you wouldn’t tell them to go hungry, why say it to yourself?

The right time to build relationships with philanthropists was 18 months ago
There are a lot of people scrambling for grant applications right now – it’s always a bit chaotic but now there’s less money in the pot and more groups in need of assistance.
Here’s the bit that people don’t like to hear:
A lot of philanthropy is based on relationships – giving money to groups that the funders know and trust.
It is very hard to know and trust someone you haven’t heard of before.
Ideally, you would have wanted to be building that familiarity and credibility over an extended period of time.
Therefore, the right time to start was 18 months ago.
As they say, the second best time is now.
It means lowering your expectations for immediate funding (but please still submit your proposal), and making a conscious decision to create bonds with future funders over the next 18 months.
It means creating a Case For Support – a short document that acts like a brochure about your work and your impact, and periodically providing updates to prospective funders with no expectation of a grant any time soon.
Trust takes time, and it can be quickly erased by a desperate attempt to twist a philanthropists arm.

The right time to start experimenting with new business models was 18 months ago
The same principle applies for pivoting.
The best time to start dreaming and scheming about new business models was 18 months ago, the second best time is today.
Instead of regret, I suggest committing to a spirit of proactive innovation; to never become complacent again.
In the back of your mind and in your strategy meetings, start thinking about new customers, new products and services, new partners, new value propositions, new channels to market, new pricing structures, new uses for your talents.
Rushing the process is likely to lead to failure – it takes patience to explore lots of ideas, not just the first one to pop into your head.
It takes time and restraint to run impartial tests, where you don’t bias the result and give yourself a false positive.
It takes humility to talk to customers and genuinely listen when they reveal that they aren’t in love with your new idea.
I highly recommend starting this process, but please don’t try and shortcut every learning opportunity.

The balance of Cash Cows, Small Margins and Loss Leaders has become even more important
I often talk about the three main types of product and service: Cash Cows, Small Margins and Loss Leaders.
All of them are great, but in proportion.
Cash Cows keep your bank account strong, Small Margins keep you busy, Loss Leaders build your skills and your reputation.
That said, I am seeing a common trend of flustered entrepreneurs filling their plates with Loss Leaders and a few Small Margins.
They’re busy but they’re going backwards, so they are at risk of ending the year with a huge debt and some serious fatigue.
The hard part about this balance is the decision to say “no” to a low value project, even when there’s nothing else on your schedule.
The problem is that Cash Cows very rarely appear out of nowhere – you have to go looking for them, and they take a fair bit of time to milk.
Believe it or not, it might be more lucrative to take on less work and to focus your energy on finding one more Cash Cow.

The need for systemic change and the likelihood of systemic change are not the same thing
I see a lot of articles on news sites, LinkedIn and Instagram with bold quotes about “we’re not going back to the old normal” and “This permanently changes everything” and “we’re going to overhaul the system”.
I want these to be true, I want to agree with them.
All impact comes from behaviour change – someone doing something different.
That’s what’s missing for me, and why it’s hard to draw comfort from the noise.
Who has to change?
What exact behaviours are the problem?
What do better behaviours look like?
How do we design interventions that make the old behaviours unpleasant or the new behaviours more appealing?
This approach might be more helpful than trying to characterize people and organisations as good or evil, because those same people are still going to be around in the future.
Their behaviour is what’s up for grabs.

The moment of trust vs where to put your paywall
Several enterprises have been struggling with signing up new customers, despite having a great product that genuinely works.
This is an interesting sales challenge that a lot of people face: at what point does someone start to trust you, and where should you put your paywall?
A paywall is the point at which a prospective customer has to hand over their money, and they’re unlikely to do so until they understand and trust how the company can make their life better.
When you think about your Customer Journey, when is the lightbulb moment where your customers says “Ah, this is perfect for me!” and when are they asked to make a purchase decision?
Again there are no fixed rules here, it depends on your industry and your customer.
Is there a benefit to moving the paywall further back, in order to show your product’s strengths?
The risk is that customers take the sample and leave – would that be outweighed by the increased conversion rate?

I am in constant awe of the strength and resilience shown by all the people I work with.
Part Two is on the way…