{"id":1206,"date":"2020-11-25T16:28:12","date_gmt":"2020-11-25T21:28:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lyadova.design\/blog\/?p=1206"},"modified":"2020-11-26T09:40:52","modified_gmt":"2020-11-26T14:40:52","slug":"business-lessons-from-covid-so-far","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lyadova.design\/blog\/business-lessons-from-covid-so-far\/","title":{"rendered":"Business lessons from Covid (So far)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Oddbee is fully remote. It wasn\u2019t a conscious choice at first \u2014 it happened over time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oddbee<\/a><\/em> is a creative digital agency specialized on branding, websites and product design for tech startups. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the early days of the company, when I was working my way up from a freelancer to an agency, friends would sometimes refer their friends who were looking for work to me. Having lived in two countries and travelled a great deal, I naturally built a network that spanned 4 continents. Candidates would come from all over the place and I simply said yes to the best, no matter how remote. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

An introvert and an immigrant I know what it\u2019s like to spend days and nights chatting with family and friends overseas. In my 20\u2019s I studied, worked, partied, played Need for Speed and managed a long-distance relationship – all online. Working with a remote team didn\u2019t scare me, but it always felt that we were missing a personal connection.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

March 1. After a month-long offsite in Playa del Carmen, tanned, fit (from frequent workouts – thanks to my accountability partner and our amazing developer Yulia\ud83d\udc4b), tired (from intense work) but well-spirited (as in good spirits and equally good amounts on margaritas in my system) we arrived back in Toronto. I had ambitious plans to grow the team, got a few projects lined up and was generally looking forward to the new year to unfold. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On march 10 everything started to shut down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First came fear. Uncertainty was in the air, same as the pressure to move and make decisions fast. Three of our regular (and some of most cherished) clients got hit hard – one of them went out of business soon after. I checked my bank accounts to see how far we are from running out of cash and took a deep breath. Ever since then 2020 has been a marathon. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, almost a year into Covid I want to pause and reflect on this unusual journey. I\u2019m very grateful that our industry was mostly spared but this is not to say it was an easy ride.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s what I learned in 2020 (So far): <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Confidence in Remote.<\/strong> Before Covid I always felt like an outlier. The second question I\u2019d hear at every other business event (after \u201cHi, I\u2019m Kat, I run a design agency”) was – “where is your office”? I would start mumbling something like\u2026 Toronto, something Bali, something Russia\u2026 It sounded cooler than \u2019no office’ but nobody took us seriously in the end. I got a space at a hip downtown co-working place just to skip through this step.

First week of the lockdown – everybody \u2018moved’ into my office! The question whether to continue building the team remotely or getting a corner of a brick and mortar office  ceased to exist.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The more global the better<\/strong>. We hired two designers in the beginning of Covid. This time I was intentionally shopping in the global talent pool. The first position I posted got 400+ responses which seemed like an impossibly long list of resumes to go though\u2026 I would spend 5-10 seconds on every new email – find a link to the portfolio, click, check, sort. While most of them went to trash, there was an astounding number of great applications. I wouldn\u2019t have got as many options by hiring just in Toronto.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Closer as a team<\/strong>. I like to joke that the world went into a lockdown and shrunk to a 13″ rectangle of my screen. Suddenly there was no difference between chatting with a colleague from High Park and a friend from Tel Aviv. As distance lost its relevance, time was the only thing that kept us apart. Launching a new branding project in April we had a team call with Seoul, Kiev, Odessa, Simferopol and Toronto – 12 time zones – on board. Some 10 years ago I\u2019d think it sounded corporate as hell – in 2020 it\u2019s me describing my small distributed team. Besides the work in common, we\u2019ve also got a common enemy – the pandemic. Just like in war times it made our lifestyles, hopes and aspirations very similar. As countries were shutting the borders one after another, we were getting first-hand Covid updates at weekly stand-ups. Remember, how people really meant it when asking \u2018How are you?\u2019 those days?
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Limitations equal focus.<\/strong> As designers we like to say that we always work better with limitations (mind you, that doesn\u2019t apply to budgets) – they force us to think within specific boundaries and challenge us to come up with creative solutions. Drawing board aside, with no distractions I’ve developed a higher internal motivation to focus on work. Day in and day out, at roughly 9am I\u2019d come down to my desk and pull off a full productive day of work. Not having to go to in-person meetings also freed a ton of my time.

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Digital got (even more) real.<\/strong> The core of our portfolio is built of tech companies. Before Covid we were focused on branding and marketing websites – this year we shifted more to product. We were also able to get more digital-native clients (aka crypto\/blockchain) and continued building our design muscles in UX.
We got deeper into digital both by the nature of our projects and the kinds of companies we work with. Don\u2019t get me wrong, if a cool coffee shop comes to us for rebranding, we\u2019ll still do it – as long as they have ambitions to be the best in their category.

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

It takes a hive.<\/strong> Most of our business comes from referrals and repeating clients; a smaller but important share would normally fall onto the new business – connections made through networking (mostly offline). Going out, meeting people, making new friends, learning about what\u2019s happening out in the world used to be part of my business routine. With traditional offline channels cut off, attracting new leads got harder.

I attribute the fact of Oddbee staying busy through Covid to our network – all the wonderful people I\u2019ve accumulated over the years: design colleagues, creative directors, marketers, startup founders, product managers and many more. I\u2019ve been pushing pixels for literally half of my life, working in various capacities for design shops, agencies, large corporations and startups. When the outer world shuts down – your hive is what keeps you alive. 
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Tools matter.<\/strong> Our processes had to be refined under pressure. We finally adopted Slack as our main go-to office space (thanks to all the integrations) with Trello as the task manager, Zoom as a board room, Invision as our presentation board, Harvest for time tracking, Dropbox as a storage solution, Xero as our accounting department, and Google Docs, well\u2026 as docs.

From the outside our process may seem more corporate than agile, but in a good way. Because we only have 4-5hrs a day of reasonable time overlap, we have to make good use of it. Communication is crucial – everything we do (except for the smallest changes) needs to be documented on Trello or slack channels. We have regular team meetings and almost daily one-on-ones. Most calls are scheduled, very few ad-hoc, mostly short and always with permission. #millennialstyle<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019d say, Covid gave me a good kick in the butt. Although I like to see it as positive, I\u2019m genuinely looking forward to the pandemic to end. In 2021 I\u2019m hoping for more clients, interesting projects and growing the hive. Right now we are going through our own rebranding and building a new website which I\u2019ll be thrilled to share publicly early next year.  But frankly, the thing I’m looking forward to the most – is taking my grown team to another sunny off-site. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ps: Oh, I’ve also learned to make killer margaritas at home \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Oddbee is fully remote. It wasn\u2019t a conscious choice at first \u2014 it happened over time. Oddbee is a creative digital agency specialized on branding, websites and product design for tech startups. In the early days of the company, when I was working my way up from a freelancer to an agency, friends would sometimes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[39,15,35],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lyadova.design\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1206"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lyadova.design\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lyadova.design\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lyadova.design\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lyadova.design\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1206"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/lyadova.design\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1239,"href":"https:\/\/lyadova.design\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1206\/revisions\/1239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lyadova.design\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lyadova.design\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lyadova.design\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}