One Year: Together, but Apart

Amps-

It may be hard to believe, but today marks one year since I sent the below email mandating that our entire workforce start working from home. With that in mind, we wanted to acknowledge this milestone, that quite honestly, we didn’t see coming a year ago.

 My note said we’d be home AT LEAST 8 days. I hope everyone “bet the over.” In all seriousness, I include the original note to show how little we knew a year ago of the journey we were about to embark upon together - but apart.  

 Together, but apart: some of us lost loved ones; some of us nursed loved ones back to health; some of us were sick ourselves; some of us dropped food off to friends and family who needed help, or just a pick me up; some of us have largely managed through this past year alone; some of us simultaneously became teachers to our children while also being full-time employees working through an economic downturn; some of us had parents who needed assistance; some of us had Zoom holidays with loved ones, some of us had drive-by birthday parades for our children to give them the slightest sense of celebration and normalcy despite their surroundings feeling anything but those things. The list goes on.

Those were the really hard things. But some great things happened this year, too.  

 Together, but apart: Some of us spent more time with our children in the past year than we ever have before; some of us did TONS of home improvement projects; some of us traveled (masked up) and had time with family we would not have otherwise had; some of us had friendships rekindled from a distance because we had some time and space to breathe; some of us hiked more and spent more time outdoors than we ever have; some of us cooked more and baked more; some of us focused on our health.

 Importantly, all of us learned something new, big or small, that we hadn’t known before. 

 And, let’s be honest. TV content this past year was Off. The. Charts. Schitt’s Creek, Tiger King, The Queen’s Gambit, Bridgerton……The list goes on. 

 The truth is, a year ago today, we had no idea what was in store for us.

 Team, we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Vaccination rates are increasing by the day, and hospitalization rates are trending downward. Fingers crossed, with every passing month, the light will get a bit brighter and the end of the tunnel a bit closer. 

 I wanted to send this note not just to acknowledge this day, but to celebrate each of you by saying thank you for stepping up on the hardest days over the past year. Getting through this year took a lot of energy-particularly mental and emotional energy- no matter what your situation was. Thank you for being patient as we gave updates that didn’t have full information because, frankly, there was no such thing as “full information” most of the time. We did our best to make the best of the most challenging of situations, and I believe we are coming out of this year of remote working operating more cohesively than we ever have; even though we are still physically apart.

We have grown our business, grown our partnerships with our agency and direct clients, evolved our partnerships with our MVPD owners and partners, made our operations more efficient, further built our external reputation in the market place with virtual events and press, grew our addressable footprint, expanded data partnerships, all the while our finance and HR teams did not miss a beat; all of this in the most difficult year in modern history. And we did this while building a platform to drive the future of TV planning, buying and measurement.

 We hit our budget in 2020 and are charting well to Q1 targets in 2021. We received the AdAge’s “Best Places to Work” award-during a pandemic when we weren’t actually in the workplace, and an Emmy! Simply extraordinary, and it is because of each of your efforts. In our Town Hall, I asked everyone to focus on that which we could control, make the extra call, the extra email every day-and, you clearly heard me- every single one of our achievements this past year are a result of each of you doing the one extra thing to help us move forward. And for that, I am so proud of and so grateful to our team.

 One of my favorite quotes comes from the book Alice In Wonderland. Alice is asked about her adventures, and she says “It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.” Every experience you have in life changes who you are as a person-some slightly and some much more meaningfully- which means you are always evolving, moving forward differently with those experiences as a part of who you are. I think it’s safe to say this year has changed all of us with more momentum than ‘normal life’ might have. It’s almost impossible to not look at almost everything through a different lens than we did a year ago. Despite the challenges of the past year, my hope is that you look back with a feeling of personal-and AMP!- pride. I hope that you recognize today that you are so much stronger and <more> resilient than you might have thought yourself to be a year ago. And I hope that you celebrate the personal and professional growth you’ve experienced this past year.

 Please move forward knowing you are coming out of what will probably be one of the hardest years any one of us will experience recognizing-and embracing- the superpowers of strength and resilience you never realized you had until this past year.

 Thank you for all you have done and continue to do each day to make Ampersand a special company doing incredible work for our clients and partners -- and continuously-- moving TV forward.

 With gratitude, 

Nicolle