Business Continuity During the Covid-19 Pandemic
I know what you’re thinking: “Here we go, another letter from a CEO to promote his business and pretend he cares about his clients/customers...” Au contraire, mon petit chou-fleur.
The next few paragraphs outline our approach to keeping our business and our clients moving during the varying degrees of social distancing, lockdown and whatever follows. You won’t find phrases like: “unprecedented times”, “heavy heart”, “here for you” or other pithy terms that you may have read or heard elsewhere!
Hopefully, this is a reflection of our intention to be supportive without being insincere. If you know us, you’ll understand; if you don’t yet know us, please read on to get a feel for how we work.
The serious bit
With so much devastation and disruption across our beloved planet as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, we feel it is our responsibility to reassure you that our fantastic team is continuing to support, encourage and work our respective socks off for our beloved clients and partners as we did before the coronavirus hit.
Whilst those who’ve lost their lives or their loved ones remain in our thoughts, we are a pragmatic bunch and firmly believe that, where possible, life, and business, must go on.
Remote working
You may not be surprised to learn that, since Knapton Wright was set up in 2014, we have embraced and encouraged remote working; we are, after all, a product of the millennial demographic! We have the systems, processes, and most importantly, the mindset in place to ensure our quality of work remains at the highest standard and is conducted with security at the forefront of our minds.
Our team is actively encouraged to take a flexible approach to their working day - happy chickens lay more eggs, after all, which also means a much better outcome for our clients.
We are fortunate to be able to continue with a full-strength team but with three of us being parents, there will be occasions where we ask for your patience and understanding while our working days are disrupted, as we will be mindful of this for you.
Please don’t expect carefully laid out bookcases behind us on video calls and you may encounter the occasional small person interruption - view them as very early work experience participants, promoting from within is one of our values, after all!
Our values
As a family-run business, we are acutely aware of the challenges that our team and clients have faced since mid-March 2020, and will more than likely continue to face over the months ahead. You may or may not know some of the values we use to underpin everything we do: support, collaboration, mutual respect and your success being our success.
With these in mind, nothing has fundamentally changed in how we’re tackling life and business; however, we are simply not working in the same office as each other for the foreseeable future, which is such a shame, because it’s a great office, in a great place with great people. Working from home has its benefits, but we do miss being together, and we miss spending time with our clients. It’ll come again, in time.
Helping you through these challenging days
We have seen friends’ and connections’ businesses struggle in a heartbreaking fashion over the past year, so, whilst we are pleased we can continue to work as a team, we are also reminding you that we have resources that could help you through these challenging days.
From signposts to funding and free training resources to marketing ideas during the lockdown and beyond, we pride ourselves on being more than “just” a marketing agency - we will always be able to find something or someone to help you through the days, weeks, months or even years ahead - that might even be a (socially distant) drink at some point! Just give us a shout if you need our help.
This is a difficult period for our generations, but there is opportunity in there if you look hard enough. Please look after yourself, your family and your colleagues and we’ll get through this together. Rob recently made a note of a quote (but can’t remember where it came from - if you know, please tell us so we can attribute it!) that sums up our approach: “Let’s not get back to normal, let’s get back to better.” Or as Peter Crouch says on his podcast: “back stronger.”
Best wishes, the Knapton Wright team.
