COVID-19 Response Resources: What's Helped Us | Deksia

Hey everybody,

I just wanted to take a minute while we are all self-isolating here to talk about what DEKSIA did when the COVID -19 pandemic first came up.

Drawing on the experiences and the wisdom we learned going through the recession (of ‘08), we still weren’t prepared going into this.

There aren’t a whole lot of resources out there, or at least not a week ago, for such a situation.

Because it really is unprecedented, or at least hasn’t happened in our lifetimes.

I’m grateful for the privilege to speak with a lot of my business-owner clients and entrepreneurial friends, and associates in the Entrepreneur Organization over the last few days.

But I realized, there are a lot of people just trying to figure it out on their own.

I don’t think that’s necessary. We’re all going through the same thing at the same time.

We should be able to lean on each other a lot more.

I find that through my conversations, there are a lot of people working on similar things for a similar result. But they’re not working together or communicating very well on it, and we’re spending a lot of effort to do the same things.

DEKSIA’s First Response to COVID-19

One of the first things we did was to go online and look for helpful resources.

And we actually found a pretty good one.

The Covid 19 Rapid Response Checklist from Boston Consulting Group.

Note: BCG has updated their Response Checklist, which can be found here.

If you went through mine, you could see it’s all marked up with boxes checked.

It’s a relatively easy guide to follow, maybe not all applies to you, but I found a lot that applied to me.

Here’s one that stands out:

Communicating with Employees and Clients.

A lot of us are putting out messaging to keep everybody safe.

But what are we doing to keep our businesses safe?

What are we doing to keep our employees safe financially?

That was something I didn’t hear a lot about, but we implemented it for our team last week.

It’s gone over well, here is what we did.

Every morning with the team, we’ve communicated:

1. Current work; what we’ve sold, and where we need to be to reach our goals.
2. This is what has been affected negatively.
3. This is what’s been affected positively.
4. Here’s what YOU can do to affect it positively going into tomorrow.

1 day at a time essentially. And that’s worked out really well for us.

Again, can find the link to that document here.

One of the other things we had to do was figure out

How Can We Do Business While Working Remotely?

One of the other things we had to do was figure out how this was going to affect business operations.

How are we going to be able to do business?

How are we going to communicate, take care of our clients, or each other?

Being a marketing company, it wasn’t as difficult for us as some to adapt online.

But we did find some resources that we were not utilizing before.

Sneek.io

This allows us to see team members throughout the day. All at the same time, and it’s been working great!

Highfive

Great for video conferencing. We’ve actually been using Highfive video conferencing with clients and internally for years.

The team’s response:

“Communication is better than it was when we were sitting in the same office!”

So, there can be some upside to this and some tools and best business practices that we’ll be continuing even after this all turns back to normalcy of some level.

I just wanted to share some of those things that I’ve learned, I haven’t figured them all out yet, but I would love for you to share some of the best practices you’ve learned over the last few days.

What’s the best business tip you’ve got for us?

We’d love to hear from you.

Joshua Conran
Senior Partner