COVID-19 and the Online World
It’s been a long few weeks. And full disclosure, they’ve been some of the worst for us and our business. We’ve had to process the fact that our partnership with our work, our business’s core values, and our day-to-day operations have been shaken up, maybe even permanently. All in the span of a few days.
Our business has always stood for sustainability, digital artisanship, and slow growth. It’s what we’re passionate about and we’ve worked very hard for over the years. But, a few weeks ago, we had to scale our business incredibly fast. And that meant having to make some very difficult decisions - ones that sometimes went against our core values and caused us to have mini breakdowns at our desks.
Of course, we understand that in many ways, we’re hugely lucky. At a time of immense turbulence for so many businesses, the mere fact that we’re growing is nothing short of incredible. We’ve also had to hire people to meet our demand, and we’re glad we can provide our new employees with job security and a sense of stability. But, this kind of quick scaling has never been what we’ve envisioned for our business, which was built on the idea of humane growth.
Our business was this beautiful, living, breathing, evolving experiment that the two of us were sharing with the world. And it feels a little bit like we lost control of that. The past few days, we’ve just focused on showing up, powering forward, and holding each other up through this.
Of course, we’re aware that we’re a couple of weeks behind on releasing new episodes, only because we felt that the episodes we had in queue were a bit insensitive for right now and because we’re still trying to process everything around us. Moving forward, we’ll be talking about some actionable strategies, tips, and industry trends we’ve been noticing to help stabilize your business and pivot if you need to. But today, we just felt like sharing a very real conversation between two business partners and friends.
Here’s a peek at what else you can expect:
Our anxieties about the structure of our business moving forward
How we had expected these circumstances, but never this soon
The intensity and scarcity of these times
The beautiful ways businesses are pivoting to help out
How to start new conversations about the future of our planet
Resources
This Week’s Joy + Hustle:
No joy and hustle this week, we’re holding space for ourselves to feel all the emotions we’re experiencing. Look forward to them resuming soon!
Know Your Numbers
In our business, we're big fans of financial literacy and accountability. Knowing your numbers is an essential aspect of building a successful business and inherent responsibility for any entrepreneur.
What you focus on grows, so pay attention to your money.
We use Bench for our bookkeeping. It's simple, elegant and saves us so many hours that would otherwise be spent neck-deep in receipts on the other side of a spreadsheet.
Each month our transactions are automatically imported into Bench and we get on-demand financial reports. We even enjoy opening up our profit and loss statement to review each month. When tax time comes around, we are up to date and ready to go. And this is what Financial Empowerment feels like.
Use this link to save 20% off your Bench Accounting plan for the first six months!
This podcast is brought to you by the Marvelous online teaching platform.
Marvelous is an easy-to-use platform that helps you build and sell your own courses memberships and live-streamed programs. Go from idea to open for business in just minutes. If you're looking for a simple, streamlined way to build and grow an online business. You can learn more at Marvelous.