Surprisingly, our team adapted to working from home pretty quickly. I’m grateful we have a great IT company that had already set us up with a VPN solution and a server we can tap into.

That decision to upgrade our technology happened about a year ago, and it was an unplanned expense, but I could feel in my gut that we needed better IT. Here we are a year later and I’m so grateful we were prepared!

The same goes with financial decisions I’ve made recently. In February, I attended a conference for digital agency owners, and every session was focused on growth – business development and marketing . . . except for one. The downer of the whole conference was the topic around preparing for recession. When I got back to town, I applied for more credit with my bank and it was approved right before the shit hit the fan. I was able to pull down my full line of credit to have in the accounts just in case.

Being able to look around corners is a crucial part of the job of a business owner, CEO, principle of an agency – whatever you want to call me. I rely heavily on a business coach, a business board, my clients, and my service providers to give me good advice. When I was growing up, I always felt like I wasn’t really good at anything specific, but I was good at learning a lot about a bunch of different things. That ability to curate information is now a skill I’m grateful for.

What’s the next corner to look around? It’s hard for me to say. I think we’ll have clients that pivot their services temporarily or permanently because industries they worked with changed dramatically – like real estate, manufacturing, or retail. I think we have to prepare for slow payments as stimulus money begins to run out. I think we may have to prepare for going back to work and then going back to working from home again. And then back and forth and back and forth.

Election years are usually down years for sales for service businesses typically. Owners and CEOs tend to tread cautiously until they see what the climate for the economy is going to be. But how do you predict what the rest of this year is going to be like? There are whole sectors of our economy that are shut down or at a standstill. And then there are our clients, the service-based businesses that are ramping up to help and trying to do more at this time. It seems like there’s no in-between for business right now, and everyone’s freaked out even if things are going well.

One thing we’ve come up with this week is a framework for pivoting services, marketing, and messaging during this time. You can download the free roadmap for this strategy here. We’re offering an in-person workshop with clients and new clients to help them with strategy at an affordable price. If this is something that interests you, please contact us.