Running the 2020 gauntlet: a small business tell-all
The year in numbers:
JAN: 1 new employee (welcome Kâté!)
FEB: #GiveLoveFeelGood 4.0 children’s book drive
MAR: 2,000+ books delivered to priority neighbourhood schools
2 new employees (welcome Taylor and Holly!)
1 maternity leave (we miss you Becky!)
1 new baby (welcome baby Benny!)
1 global pandemic
1 stay-at-home order
7 team members working from home
- 1 spotty VPN
- 13 new co-workers (5 partners, 2 teenagers, 4 cats, 1 dog, and 1 toddler)
1 big project cancelled
3 video conference platform accounts opened
1 maternity leave (we miss you Jill!)
APR: 1 new baby (welcome baby Clara!)
1 big project cancelled
MAY: 1 big project cancelled
JUNE: 2 Summit awards (yeah!)
1 Uptown Saint John COVID fit-up grant (thank you!)
- 12 bottles of hand sanitizer
- 2 bottles of spray bleach cleanser
- 2 packages of disposable masks
- 2 huge whiteboard walls to create desk separations
- 1 roll of green duct tape to mark off “Les Nessman” offices
7 employees return to the office (yeah!)
JULY: 1 new employee (welcome Liz!)
1 jump from Network Attached Storage (NAS) to cloud storage
AUG: 3 amazing students from UNB working on the #digitaldivide in Saint John
SEPT: 1 team-building afternoon at Woodchucks Axe Throwing (support local!)
OCT: 1 strategic planning process begins
1 new espresso machine (yeah!)
2 online international conferences (Adobe MAX and C2 Montreal)
NOV: 7 employees working from home (again)
DEC: 7 employees return to the office (yeah!)
10-year anniversary
1 new brand
1 new website
1 amazing Cask & Kettle Christmas team lunch (support local!)
5 office windows decorated
1 donation to #CBCHarbourLights (support local!)
This was our 2020, and I’m not going to lie: it was a lot. We are very grateful to have made it through, and we know many other businesses had it much harder than we did.
There are a couple of things I’d like to call out in our calendar that might not seem like significant items but were in fact big moments that drove insight and learning into how we can be better at what we do.
1) We went into lockdown with three new employees. We needed to work hard during our work-from-home period to onboard these team members, and then needed to do that again, once we got back to the office and our workload returned to near-normal. I am so grateful to our team for weathering that rollercoaster!
2) We went (even more) digital. Companies like ours are in a unique spot when it comes to data storage. We make big files, requiring lots of storage – but we don’t have unlimited financial means to pay for it.
Finding a cost-effective solution has been a challenge all the way along. Five years ago, we moved from a miscellany of external hard drives to Google Drive, but as our needs grew, the solution became less and less convenient. High costs, failures and troubles with syncing made us throw in the towel and move to a Network Attached Storage (a baby server) and VPN (for Internet access to the NAS) combo that we owned. This worked well for a couple of years, even with a slow VPN.
Enter 2020: we brought on our first remote employee and then faced a full-blown work-from-home order and realized pretty quickly that we had a problem. To my delight, in the intervening years, cloud storage companies had figured out how to offer a cost-effective non-syncing solution that was exactly what we needed. So, we made the jump back into the cloud. Truthfully, this one decision was the source of much of our 2020 efficiency gains and our improved resiliency overall.
3) Remote conferences are awesome.
(Sidebar: the worldwide events industry has been just decimated by the pandemic, and that is terrible. A zoom call will never replace the immersive learning and relationship-building of an in-person event.)
A true silver lining to the COVID-19 upheaval is the fact that virtual conferences tend to come with a much cheaper registration cost than their pre-pandemic in-person counterparts. Suddenly small businesses can afford to attend big name conferences…which we did.
4) We hired our first operations employee. Liz dove in immediately, tackling all the things that I’ve been doing off the side of my desk for the past 10 years. As you can imagine the to-do list is long. But what an investment. Liz’ efforts will mean the sophistication of our operations will match the sophistication of our work – and that gives us a platform from which we can grow.
5) Speaking of matching the sophistication of our work…our rebrand and new website are designed to do just that. We’ve spent 10 years with our heads down, producing great work for great clients, and we’ve fallen short in telling that story. So, the shoemaker made some great new shoes for her kids, FINALLY.
6) We launched a strategic planning exercise. Sure, we’ve done some thinking about this over the years, but this year, as we were rebranding and examining all of our processes, we started strategic planning in a really meaningful way. Looking into 2021 and onward as a pathway to a future we have actively chosen, which we will walk with intentional steps, is really exciting.
It has been a year, for sure. We realize 2021 is going to be challenging, but the light at the end of the tunnel means a lot, and we know we’re better equipped because of the journey.
Thanks for reading!
