My Lockdown Year
With 65,000 employers availing of wage subsidies through 2020, Ireland’s enterprise economy has never been so challenged. A selection of business owners and managers relate how their firms coped, and what they learned from the experience
Amid the challenge of Covid-19, business owners and managers say how they coped and what they learned from the experience
RONAN HEALY Ronan Healy is founder and CEO of Catapult, a creative events agency established in Dublin in 1999.
We were working at the Geneva Car Show at the end of February 2020, when it was pulled two days before opening. In early March, we began to plan our pivot to virtual events. We had been live streaming events since 2010 and also had experience in producing large-scale virtual conferences, so we knew what we had to do to move our entire business to virtual.
By April, the entire team were working remotely. We built a greenscreen studio and two broadcast studios in our offices. We trained our staff, we created videos and content, we contacted our clients and the work started to slowly come in. We have grown our client base by over 50% in the last six months – something we would not have predicted in early April 2020.
Changing our entire business from 80% live events to totally online required a new set of skills, technology, training, understanding and internal processes. Ten weeks into the lockdown we were producing the largest ever virtual event for the United Nations – our team was phenomenal.
During the spring lockdown, spending all my time in my neighbourhood built a feeling of community with neighbours and local shopkeepers, which feels like a very positive ongoing legacy of the lockdown. The speed with which the government supports were initiated was impressive. Blanket supports were fine at the start of the pandemic, but now they need to be targeted towards those most impacted.
There will be no immediate change in 2021 for our business. Hybrid events – involving a mixture of virtual and live – will be the first stage, while live events will increase towards Q3 and Q4.
What has been incredible across Ireland’s events, arts and performance industry has been the ability of companies to adapt. The willingness to learn and innovate has been outstanding compared with the same industries in other countries that we are dealing with.
RONAN FARRELL Ronan Farrell is co-founder of WineLab, which provides wine on tap to restaurants and bars. The Kildare venture has pivoted to wine gift boxes and home deliveries.
Aside from July and August, pretty much our whole customer base has been shut since March 13. We reacted very quickly and created an online B2C platform that initially served to keep the lights on and has grown to be a central part of our business. We were forced to furlough staff in March and again in October. Knowing the impact this has had on our team and their lives has been the hardest part.
I enjoyed trying to get a new business model off the ground during lockdown. Ideating and developing our website rapidly reminded me that the startup phase is my favourite place in the business cycle. I also took up mountain biking, which has been brilliant for clearing my mind.
The Temporary Wage Subsidy Scheme was a massive help, but overall I don’t think the supports went far enough. If you look at the disproportionate effect of Covid-19 on hospitality, tourism, and the arts sectors, some further tailored supports there would have been welcome. The Covid Restrictions Support
Scheme doesn’t apply to service businesses that do not operate from a retail premises.
My abiding memory of 2020 will be of the solidarity and humanity that we saw and how we reacted together as a society.
ELAINE DOYLE Former YouTube executive Elaine Doyle is lead marketing manager with DoneDeal and Adverts.ie, owned by the online publisher Distilled SCH.
DoneDeal adapted fast to the lockdown. We enhanced our digital showroom experience with the introduction of online vehicle payments, combined with digital finance applications. Following the initial lockdown, we witnessed a surge in car buying as individuals moved away from public transport.
Nearly all of Ireland’s car dealers trade on DoneDeal. That’s a massive network of businesses who contribute to their local economies. When I ask our car dealerships about their 2020 experience, they say that you learn who drives your business when the chips are down.
In many ways, reacting to the pandemic’s impact on the business was no different to the challenges at YouTube: how to maintain velocity and identify the absolute imperatives.
Personally, how could I continue to read the cues that I would usually pick up in a meeting? I’m an enthusiast for in-the-moment feedback, and suddenly we were all situated remotely from each other.
To drive momentum, there were daily huddles. I think that leaders need to ‘signal and stick’ a lot more when working remotely. We work with incredibly smart people, so sometimes you need to just set the direction and check in at milestones.
I had been accepted into Oxford on a leadership programme and was looking forward to pottering about the campus. Instead, I did the course online. It wasn’t the same, of course, but I enjoyed feeling that academic part of my brain light up again.