Running a business in a crisis. My week last week.

As we went through the mess that was ‘last week’ I started keeping a few notes of what happened each day. At some point this time in our lives will be a) the subject of multiple MBA theses and b) the time that a certain generation will say “Do you remember where you were when the Coronavirus outbreak happened. In the same way, I say that for when Princess Diana died and 9/11 happened.

This write up was partly cathartic and partly aimed to be of use to anyone else who needs it as we move forward through these unprecedented times.

It is also a reflection on the decisions we make when we cannot see around the corner on the train track, let alone the train wreck that was coming down the line.

A MONTH AGO

Go back a month and I was booking tickets for a round-the-world trip in October to speak at an event in Queenstown, NZ organised by Simon Tupman and to see family in Sydney and North Island, NZ. That’s ￡1,500 of wasted cash! I suspect.

TWO WEEKS AGO

Only two weeks ago I was buying a new MacBook Air for one of my team burning ￡1,500 of cash

LAST WEEKEND

And even ￡15 on a pair of Liverpool slippers for one of my team last weekend!

So let’s go back to early March.

2 MARCH

We had the first client cancel a face-to-face meeting due to the Coronavirus situation.

5 MARCH

We made sure all team members were taking laptops & chargers home every night and that they got Slack installed on their phones (most did already_.

My Technical Director, Andy Osborne and I were fairly relaxed about ‘working from home’ as on any given day anything between 2 and 10 employees were already working ‘remotely’ i.e. not in the office so we knew our systems would work.

We emphasised diligent hand washing routines in the office.

11 MARCH

I asked all staff about their upcoming holidays and where they were going so we could collectively make a sensible decision about whether they should go or not.

Let one of my team go skiing to France which was lucky as they closed the resort on the last day of her short break.

12 MARCH

Made two employees self-isolate as they had ‘virus-like’ symptoms. Turns out they only had colds

Cancelled our participation in events like LegalEx and our own Symphony Legal Spring Conference.

Put a stop to all people making ‘jokes’ about the situation as some of our team were starting to get really sensitive/worried about things.

13 MARCH

It had been a long week so we shut up shop at 4:30pm. I thought the usual suspects would hang around for a glass of prosecco. There were four of us rather than the usual 10.

MONDAY 16 MARCH

We had an anti-bacterial clean of the office on the Sunday afternoon and cancelled all face-to-face meetings for the next two weeks

Updated our business plan that not only reduced our profit but showed a loss equivalent to 20% of our turnover. We modelled that all our four figure retainer contracts got cancelled and we would not sell ANYTHING new to existing customers or pick up any new customers FOR THE WHOLE YEAR. We called this the Doomsday scenario.

But I knew already this was not a forecasting exercise. Never has the expression that every business owner knows been more true :-

• Turnover is vanity
• Profit is sanity
• Cash is reality

I delivered fizzy drinks to one of our team who was self-isolating as the children had none.

TUESDAY 17 MARCH

Slept for three hours and then pulled three job offers for new team members who were supposed to be starting in the next few weeks.

We started our 09:15 Huddle calls via conference call. Today’s message was ‘steady as she goes’.

Then the calls started coming in :-

• Lost a ￡3,000 per month retainer
• Lost a ￡4,000 per month retainer

Sent 32 people to work from home fully sorted with Linphone FOSS softphone (a week later we know it’s far from perfect, but it will do for the time being).

Asked everyone for a photo of their workspace at home to ensure that I was fulfilling my Duty of Care as an employer as best I could.

Spent all day working on our cashflow model and took c. ￡10,000 of monthly costs out of the business in one day by reducing our expenses.

Instigated Tues & Thurs evening conference calls with our Crisis Team.

Did a quick supermarket shop and delivered it to one of our team members who was self-isolating. Would have helped if they’d realised yesterday they needed food as well as fizzy drinks ;-) 

WEDNESDAY 18 MARCH

Slept for four hours.

Either lost or anticipated the loss of ￡10,000 of monthly retainers

Pivoted our Sales/Account Management into Debt Collectors speaking to all our customers ‘making sure you have a copy of that outstanding invoice(s)’. Allowing us to chase a bit harder next week and not have the excuse of ‘I don’t have the invoice’.

Felt much better when I got this email from one of the three people we pulled job offers from, it was the first tear I was to shed last week, but not the last.

Dan Hodges delivered office chairs to a couple of team members who’s home working setup was just not up to scratch.

18 MARCH

Slept for five hours. Better.

The 9:15 call was along the lines of “I can definitely pay you for March, 90% sure for April, no idea for May”. There were tears and people were unsettled but our open culture dictated that the team should hear how bad it might be as early as possible. No point in lying and saying “It will all be OK” as it might not be!

One of the things we say in the business is that “It’s OK to complain that you do not like things, but not OK to say that you ‘did not know’”.

The Crisis Team spent a lot of time checking in with their teams making sure no-one was having any wobbles

Spent all day working on cashflow and client communications.

Got a ￡33,000 HMRC PAYE bill deferred for a month and an invitation to then move it to instalments. It only took Vaida Zibaite, our Finance Manager an hour and fifteen minutes in the queue to get through. The agreement only took five minutes!

Email communications to clients. The tone of voice was ‘business as usual’ (in terms of operations) but really NOT usual when it comes to everything going on around us.

Saw the team REALLY pulling together in terms of communications and productivity.

19 MARCH

Slept for five hours

Told the team that I would take no money for April & May. And that another senior person in the business will take no money for three months if needs be.

Found out about my garage being broken into. A friend called me. Turns out my wife already knew as a neighbour called her and in her infinite wisdom decided it was not something I needed to know about mid-morning on a Thursday.

Email comms to clients “Double-down or pull out? Marketing in a Crisis!”. That does not mean that you need to double your spend, but that if you do not pull out, when others do, in effect you are doubling your spend and its effectiveness. Offered customers a Zoom meeting on Friday to talk about this and got 20 people booked on quite quickly.

Received a tender document from a law firm for a new website…who’d have thought!

One client increased their SEO spend by 58% (only a couple of hundred pounds to us), but some welcome good news.

Met Handelsbanken (our bankers) for 90 minutes who seemed pretty impressed with our cashflow forecasting and approach to our finances. Asked for their ‘support’ but they said it would be next week before they could firm the level of support we were asking for.

20 MARCH

Slept 5.5 hours and felt much calmer, not quite sure why. On the surface, it’s still a sh*tstorm!

Made ￡3,000 from website updates for customers re. their approaches/services to/for COVID-19.

Agreed to adjusted hours for team members who are parents once we knew the schools/nurseries were going to close.

Hosted a Zoom webinar for nearly 40 clients at lunchtime for everyone to compare notes, shoot the breeze. There is a recording available if you would like the link, let me know.

Our Wellbeing Team all spoke in a conference call at the end of the day very movingly about what was going on and our approach to it. It made a number of people in the team cry/well up, including me.

For the first time ever told all employees they needed to ‘do some work’ over the weekend and told everyone to install and test Zoom with me over the weekend. The hidden (or not so hidden) message here was so I could ‘speak’ to everyone at some point over the weekend and make sure they were OK.

Listened to the Chancellor’s statement in the office on Friday. Qualified good news regarding deferment of VAT payments and the furloughing of employees with 80% of salaries covered up to ￡2,500.

SUNDAY 22 MARCH

I hosted a Zoom call for 25 other agency owners explaining how we had dealt with last week and how we used our cashflow model to take some very quick decisions on cashflow planning.

One of my team proofread this for me and suggested it sounded like 'part one' of a mini-series. Watch this space!

Photo by Colin Watts on Unsplash