The COVID-19 lockdown was a period of great fear and confusion for the Kiwis all across the country, especially for small business owners. As tourism and hospitality businesses shuttered up their stores, there was a general climate of uncertainty as everyone began preparing for the worst.
But adversity breeds resilience and resilience breeds opportunity. Many businesses fought on, adapting to the new operating environment while learning some important lessons along the way.
So last week, I reached out to some amazing businesses to get them to share some amazing and inspiring stories on how they rose to the challenge and beat the odds to preserve their continued survival.
The new recruit working from home
Scoring a new job at a ViAGO (a productivity consultancy firm) was an amazing achievement for Mei Anne Kong-Foo. What was less than amazing was having to go into lockdown within the first week of starting her new job! Fortunately for Mei-Anne, she worked for an amazing company who didn’t let their newest hire go due to COVID-19 and in fact went to great lengths to onboard her while coming up with new working arrangements during the lockdown.
Working from home had Mei Anne feeling a little bit ambivalent about the whole situation.
“To be honest, it’s 50-50. I like the convenience of not having to change into my best outfit, put on makeup and drive anywhere to reach my “office”. That’s all I need, really. Then, on the flipside, I miss interacting with people,”
Mei Anne
Working from home can feel a bit insular and not being able to read other people’s physical nuances and body language does hamper communication a little bit. She also added that working from home means you don’t really get to KNOW your colleagues and their various quirks.
Working from home also presented other challenges in the form of social media distractions and the constant pinging of notifications on her phone.
“I try to put my phone on silent mode and place it at the other end of my room, especially when I have to do any high-thinking work,”
Mei Anne
According to Mei Anne the best thing to do while practicing social distancing at home is to also be socially distant from your mobile phone – so that you can focus on high-thinking work!
As a content consultant for ViAGO, Mei Anne’s job is to get people to consume, share and act based on the content the company produces (sort of what I do here – but better!). When she first got the job, she expected to be meeting people face to face but due to the lockdown the options ‘Went out the window’ real quick.
She quickly adapted to collecting feedback online which was easier to record. However, she felt that online responses lacked candidness and she looks forward to organising some face to face sessions with clients soon!
Out of the physical world, but definitely still Instore
One of the craziest challenges that some businesses had to face was the temporary closure of their physical premises due to lockdown. This shook the way they did business and caused major disruptions to their ability to engage with customers.
Enter Instore.nz – an online application that helps businesses engage with customers online and communicate their revised opening hours and any social distancing requirements that customers need to observe while at their premises. Instore.nz is a great example of COVID-19 inspired business innovation.
Instore.nz is a start-up founded in October 2019 by Ben Fokkens and Doug Hawkins with its initial focus being an app that would function like a local, NZ based FourSquare (or something similar). That quickly changed when the lockdown dates were announced.
“I think we started pivoting before the lockdown but we just didn’t know it was pivoting at that time, maybe subconsciously we were wondering how all this would fit in whatever was going to happen with COVID 19,”
Doug
It was after a late night Zoom meeting with their developer, Jim that really made the Instore team think about changing their mind regarding the direction they wanted to build Instore.nz in.
Instore eventually would pivot overnight to become the app it is today. If your business is not on (in?) Instore yet, you really should jump on and sign up over here.
Ben and Doug have been receiving fantastic feedback from businesses as the timing seemed to be right with what they created and released.
“We’ve had businesses thanking us back in private messages and emails but also publically on their Facebook, sharing our Facebook page. Even Sarah Dowie the local National MP posted up her business page Thanking us,”
Doug
Because they served an emergent need within the community, Ben and Doug have garnered a pretty awesome following and have about 100+ businesses listed on Instore.nz. It really is a super useful tool for keeping customers up to date on your business’s operating hours and any useful information RE: restrictions and social distancing measures.
As their young business grows, Ben and Doug have some big plans for the future. They still plan to keep the interactive map business trading status free for any business/customer to use and benefit from.
In the coming months, they will look at ways to allow businesses to further engage with their customers.
“We are currently working on a social media platform for businesses to communicate their store/products story. It will be a subscription-based model built on top of the interactive map that we already have,”
Doug
There are also whispers of a plan to help domestic tourism operators leverage the interactive business map that Instore.nz has developed but in true entrepreneurial fashion, the Instore.nz team said they can’t give away too much details… yet! So stay tuned for more information!
Escaping business closure in COVID-19
The Escapist is a retail entertainment outlet owned by kiwi couple Pam and Geoff that specializes in escape room experiences and board games. When COVID-19 began sniffing around NZ shores, there was an immediately noticeable impact on their bottom line. As a business with a high amount of social contact, people were starting to avoid their premises at the very first sign of COVID-19 in NZ. So when lockdown was first announced, it came as relief to the Escapist team.
“My first reaction was probably relief, as we were in a bit of a limbo just before the lock down because our numbers were down and people have started to hunker down. We had already been making plans of what to do if we were to close the shop completely,”
Pam
The Escapist team quickly launched an online board game shop the Friday before lockdown was announced showing how well prepared they were to deal with challenges that COVID-19 would bring.
Their board game stocks were hauled back to the owners’ home and they kept on operating online all through lock down.
They hosted their first online escape room on Easter weekend, two weeks after lockdown. This proved to be a huge hit as their customers were keen on engaging in the same escape room experience they would get in person, but online. They did not waste time waiting for things to happen – they MADE things happen and capitalised on this new demand.
Dozens of new customers flocked to the online escape rooms looking for a way to ‘escape’ the monotony of lockdown life. Best of all, Escapist managed to make enough sales to stay afloat during lockdown!
Now that life is returning back to the ‘new’ normal, the physical escape rooms have re-opened. The online escape rooms are not as popular as before, but the Escapist team are still keeping the service and are committed to growing it in the future.
From the get-go the owners of Escapist prioritised their team’s welfare, which has contributed to their resilience during this challenging period. The reason why they, as a team are so resilient and cohesive is due to the strong bonds forged despite the lockdown.
“The fact that we are still ‘working’ over the lockdown certainly help us to cope better as we were still able to maintain a routine of some kind,”
Pam
But it wasn’t all easy. To cope with the changed operating environment, they had to reduce costs, upgrade their digital offerings, reduce their team’s working hours, review their stocking policies and so much more. Being a business owner is never easy but Pam and Geoff have done a damn fine job of keeping things running despite the circumstances.
“Our team has been very understanding about their slightly reduced hours, they know that Geoff and I would have jumped through lots of hoops of fire to ensure that the business and thus our livelihood remains intact,”
Pam
The team over at Escapist is a great example of why as a business owner, you should put your team first! Remember that your team IS your business!
As we move into the new normal, post-lockdown, the spectre of COVID-19 still remains. While life seems to slowly shift back to how it used to be, businesses in NZ have learned some very valuable lessons over this period.
Things won’t go back to the way they once were – this much is true. The businesses that have learned, adapted and capitalised on these changes will be the ones to succeed in the future.
Stay strong, stay sharp and most importantly,
Stay positive!