Use Your Expertise to Serve the World....

As a small business owner the past few weeks have been a total roller-coaster. We walked into March with a huge pipeline, I was interviewing for more staff for Genie, we were viewing bigger offices and many candidates were awaiting offers.

....for most of the roles to dropout or be delayed due to the current crisis.

That was not even the worst of it, we saw huge redundancies, salary cuts and general fear in everyone. The latter was the worst for me, I am really empathetic and feel everything.

One thing we immediately did was keep our cool and quickly think of how we could diversify and make sure all the team remained busy. There is nothing worse than a sales professional not being busy, with the added anxiety of everything going on it was a recipe for disaster. I took my team to self isolate early on, kept them productive, amused them no end with my silly humor and placed them in the sun.

We are living creatures you strip it all back its basic human needs time - water, oxygen, food, safety, health, friendship, employment... inevitably strength, respect etc.

As in Maslows hierarchy of needs:

I have a growth mindset and before all this I was so focused on growing, hiring, extending our reach, opening new businesses... we even were looking at an office to create a co-working space for our clients.

This time has taught me I have been distracted. Often too busy to even think, let alone really enjoy and be immersed in what I love the most... helping others. I am extremely detailed and know my industry inside out but would often get bogged down with admin, marketing, debt collecting you name it! This has all taught me that I can slow down and even with 60% less activity we can be extremely productive whilst spending half of our time serving others.

Some people may think we are lucky that we are still hiring, doing deals and have a lot of activity going on but if you do everything genuinely and with heart I truly believe the world will do what they can to lift you up. We have had no end of support in the form of appreciation, recommendations and a real community spirit in a time of difficulty. I will NEVER forget the clients/candidates/fellow business owners who looked out for us, and we will do what we can to do the same for them.

My advice to all businesses big and small is look into yourself on how you can serve others, this is not the time to be staring at the numbers and what could have been, this is the time to demonstrate your passion.

We closed March off still profitable, we also spoke to 300+ people who needed it the most and that was worth more than any amount of money in the bank.

WE are stronger because we have you.