When we decided to build up our business partnership last year, we thought that getting started would be more or less business as usual. We all have quite a track record in terms of sucessful consulting and every partner is good at talking to interesting companies and very well connected in her / his special field of business.
Business as usual – that was mostly doing phonecalls, arranging business visits to introduce our concept, our of course bright shining personal competences and talking business afterwards.
A good concept needed a strategic change
So when we had developed our business-concept which enables companies to become attractive for potential employees and helps top applicants to find strong employers through intelligent digital HR-contentmarketing, the first thing we did was to create a company presentation which we could show decision makers.
Than came COVID 19 and the worldwide lockdown. And business as usual suddenly had become unusual.
Business is more concetrated
We had to change our presentation style, had to develop completely new didactics and had to change our ways of doing workshops or working out strategies. But I must say for us it is manageble. As a matter of fact, the situation also has a few advantages:
- People actually are at their desks (at home mostly) when I try to reach them
- They are in much more talkative and receptive mood
- Our presentations and discussions are much more focused and time efficient in digital meetings
- We do not drive for hours for business appointments (or even worse, stick in traffic jams) and can use the additional time for useful things such as expanding our network, getting to know phantastic new business tools, installing our VoIP-System, etc.
I had also accepted a call from the International School of Management to become a lecturer for organiszation and business development and, as you can imagine, here also everything changed. I gave the first lectures as attendance courses and then completely switched to online-tools. That as well did no harm to the content or the interaction.
We learned to use funding instruments to help our clients
Another good thing was that we had to deal with many funding instruments and now are sort of experts in this specific field. For our clients this is extremely attractive: they do not have to stop their developments due to a reduced cash flow and can look foward and develop new directions and strategies with our help and with a goverment funding of up to 100 percent.
Please do not get me wrong: Of course situation is extremely unpleasant and dangerous fort he whole industry. And, to be honest, we have also lost business we thought would be safe and are very glad to have a very lean organization without large overhead cost right now. Also from my personal point of view it is of course a lot more fun to present in front of an actually present audience than in front of my laptop. And I am not a recluse, I do miss social interaction a lot.
But in terms of intensive exchange, efficiency and effectiveness there are certainly some lessons we have learned and which we will save for the future.They will offer us the opportunties to respond quicker and to offer our services for even more attractive prices.
If you are interested to learn more or to discuss details with me, please contact me.
