The COVID Comeback

The COVID Comeback

As things settle down I want to share what the team at Radically has been through during the COVID Lockdown period to encourage other small to medium businesses who have, or are, going through through similar challenges. As many know, this is my first venture into being the CEO for a business, and I am thankful to have many people around me that have provided wisdom and guidance, as well as a great team of people and a co-founder who journeys with me everyday. 

The Backdrop

Coming into 2020, we have always known that one of our challenges after securing and delivering a significant project as a young business was how we would transition into future work. As a consulting firm, it is always humbling to be asked to support large enterprise changes. This opportunity came up in our first year, and along with it the risk of having a month or two where up to 70% of our team working on were working on one engagement. We managed to mitigate a lot of the risk by having enough cash reserves to go out and find new opportunities, as well as having confidence in constantly delivering good outcomes, knowing good delivery is the foundation to winning new work. We were confident with where we were positioned and with what was ahead...or so we thought.

Lockdown

I remember in December my wife sharing with me the latest statistics around COVID. "This looks worrying, it has spread in China and now other parts of the world". Coming from a medical background, she was a lot more well-versed in these kind of things. I naively brushed off the warnings, thinking that the common flu has more impact, and that this would go away.

How wrong I was!

Fast forward to March this year, and everything happened so suddenly. I remember looking at what was happening around the world, and trying to predict what the impact on NZ would be. As the nation moved into Lockdown, our ability to meet new clients and to build our pipeline was almost non-existent. We did manage to have one or two interesting meetings, however the first two weeks saw most organisations and people busy focusing on themselves and their teams.  We just didn't feel it was right to bombard the market with self-serving messages, as this would be counter to our values, and wasn’t something we wanted future clients to feel was representative of us in the long run. Instead we took time to:

●       Look after our team

●       Personally reach out to people we have worked with to show care

●       Create and share IP and tools for remote working

We focused on what we could do to help, rather than what was best for us - the mentality we had was that we were all in it together as a nation, and we wanted to play our role in our team of 5 million.

Difficult Decisions

The culture at Radically is a core part of what makes working together special. We wanted to make sure that when we were faced with tough situations, we doubled down on the values and beliefs that make us stronger. As things progressed I looked at how different leaders and organisations reacted to COVID, and tried to translate that to our business too. We were very fortunate at the time to still be working really closely with Vodafone, and I remember hearing Jason Paris (CEO), in an interview sharing that his advice to other businesses was to make the tough calls early (thanks JP). We decided that was a wise stance, and as early as the first week of Lockdown, knew we already had tough discussions ahead of us about what the Radically that survived COVID would look like, and what that meant for us.

The way in which we did this was not behind closed doors. Instead we gathered all the different types of data - financial, sales, income, expenses etc. and presented it to the team. It was surprising how many of the team all came to the same conclusion, and together we all acknowledged that we would need to be a smaller sized business to get through this safely. There were some decisions that I still had to make as a leader, like how many roles we would need to reduce by, what criteria we would select, but as a principle we tried our best to make the process open and safe.

It was very difficult to say goodbye to colleagues, and personally as a leader and founder, losing people is one of the last things that I wanted to do. However, it was amazing that every one of the team, even those impacted, knew why we had to do it, and genuinely hoped that we would do well post COVID. It's a really humbling feeling that despite having to deliver bad news, my wonderful colleagues were more concerned with how I was doing personally.

Voluntary pay cut

As a team we explored different options of how we could keep jobs, and one of the things we ended up doing was taking a voluntary pay reduction. We had worked out an amount every month we needed to save, and it roughly equated to a 10% reduction across the board. This was already including the fact that our leaders in the team voluntarily took a 15% reduction at the start of COVID, and the co-founders, Ed and I, taking 20%.

What amazed me was that the team came back with a recommendation that we give people the decision to choose between 0% and 20% how much they each wanted to contribute, as different people had different financial situations to manage. After we decided that this was the way forward as a team, each person then came back to me individually with what worked best for them. We had people take 10 or 15%, with a few opting for 20%. Goes without saying that it was a very humbling experience which highlighted all being in this together, and something that I will remember as a milestone for us as a team culturally.

New normal

One of my lessons early on leading a consulting firm is that demand is cyclical. You can almost guarantee that you will experience seasons of drought, and seasons of intense demand. During and immediately after Lockdown, it felt like a drought. We had prepared for 3 months of non-billable work as a worst case scenario given the uncertainty around how the NZ recovery would look like coming out of Lockdown. The first glimmer of hope we had was signing up a new client right after Lockdown in the health sector. This was something which we had been working on in the sales process since January, and just happened to get approval during Lockdown.

As we kicked off that project, people started to reach out as they themselves got back on their feet. We managed to re-engage with another client who we had been working with prior to Lockdown, and suddenly two months out we now find ourselves kicking off engagements with 4 new clients all in the same week.

At the start of July I let the team know that we were able to go back to normal salaries, and that we will look to repay what sacrifice was made, and hopefully top it up with a bonus if we achieve our financial targets. It's my experience that when you start the journey of entrepreneurship, you act out of wanting to achieve a vision and a mission. As you start growing, nothing can describe when others believe in that vision you dreamed of too, and want to also personally sacrifice to help achieve that vision. We want people who sacrificed in the hard times, to also share in success as we grow out of this together.

I am sure that there will still be many challenges ahead, but for now Radically has established our new normal. We're extremely thankful to be partnering with the clients we have at the moment, and its because you chose to work with us that we can continue to do the work we do each day. We also know there are other companies out there who are still in the process of acclimatising to their new normal, and are still in the process of recovering .  We hope that our experience will encourage you to hang in there, stay true to your values, and make wise decisions to come out stronger as a result.