Conscious Solutions: 2020 – a year in review
As we stepped into 2020 it was a year for ‘growth’. 2019 had been a ‘not muck it up’ year after the MBO at the start of the year. Now in 2020, we were ready to accelerate our marketing and seriously grow the business. We had also picked Cancer Research as our charity of the year just before the 2019 Christmas break, but goodness me, what a year to pick!
In January and February, we had two new team members join the business in each of those months. Bless them, they have all spent more time working at home this year than in the office!
March. Worst month EVER.
Let me get March out of the way first. It was awful. The worst month I can remember in my working lifetime, worse than anything in the 2008-09 recession.
I pulled three job offers for new team members who were going to be a core part of our growth.
On Wednesday 18 March when I had to tell the team “I can pay you for March, 90% sure for April, no idea for May”. There were tears, lots.
Then came the news of the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme which was an unprecedented intervention by a UK Government, but one I suspect we all look back on and feel was absolutely the right thing to do.
On Sunday 29 March I hand wrote 37 cards to our team members thanking them for all their efforts over the last few weeks. The next day our contract cancellations hit £40,000 per month, 18% of our typical monthly revenue! That evening our management team decided to furlough 17 members of the team. On Tuesday the cards started arriving and team members were messaging me to say thank you and I was calling them back telling them they were being put on Furlough Leave. Then it got worse, my best friend’s father died that evening.
On Wednesday morning in our daily 9am crisis call I lost it in front of my team, streams of tears.
You can read more about that and the first eight weeks of the COVID-19 crisis in terms of Conscious at:
Week 1 – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/running-business-crisis-my-week-last-david-gilroy/
Week 2 – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/running-business-crisis-week-2-david-gilroy/
Week 3 – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/running-business-crisis-week-3-david-gilroy/
Week 4 – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/running-business-crisis-week-4-david-gilroy/
Week 5 – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/running-business-crisis-week-5-david-gilroy/
Week 6 – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/running-business-crisis-week-6-david-gilroy/
Week 8 – https://www.conscious.co.uk/site/blog/technology-blog/running-business-crisis-week-8-david-gilroy
So here I sit on the afternoon of New Year’s Day polishing the notes I’ve been making over the last couple of weeks as I reflect on 2020. Some things were/are positive.
My stated mission back in March was to keep everyone in the team in a job. Which we did. We only parted company with two of the team. One got an offer he could not refuse and one needed to be on a different bus.
My management team were and continue to be great. Their role was to ‘keep the business running’ and leave me to ‘manage the crisis’ and it worked well.
The business adapted quickly to everyone working from home. Whereas each person adapted to working from home at different speeds and to different degrees. Almost certainly some will never want five-days a week in the office ever again AND everyone is going to want the flexibility to work from anywhere. The business has always had the mantra of:
“Work is a thing you do, not a place you go”
But I always had the feeling that not everyone in our team believed us when we said that. Also, the last 10 months have been much harder on the younger members of the team and the team members newest to the business. Sahra-Marie Tulloch put it as succinctly as anyone has when she said;
“How the hell does someone learn their job when they are new when they cannot learn by osmosis from listening to those around them?”
We spun up some great ‘entertainment marketing’ during Lockdown I. I mean, who was going to pay attention to ‘normal marketing’. These events included close-up magic (you OWE ME Pete Heat!), a Comedy Club, Variety Show and Drag Queen Bingo!
The business is now the proud owner of a 6m x 3m orange gazebo. We used this to ensure everyone would stay dry in case it rained as we did ‘catch-ups in the park’ over the early summer. It was great for the team to be able to get together in small groups and on two occasions to actually sit and relax in the sun.
Manda and I were supposed to go to China & Japan in April/May but cancelled that in favour of the USA….as if! And then there was a work/pleasure trip to Australia/New Zealand in October that never happened! So it was nice to have a week in North Devon playing golf and wandering around with Manda and the dog. But even that felt ‘odd’. Of course, it did as social distancing was still in place even though there was no lockdown or ‘tiering’ at that time.
As summer continued I couldn’t help feeling that the Eat Out To Help Out scheme might have contributed to the increase in COVID-19 cases that resulted in Lockdown II. A study at the University of Warwick published back in October supports that theory. https://london.eater.com/21541574/coronavirus-cases-england-eat-out-to-help-out-spike
And then, of course, the tiering system and Lockdown II arrived. We are all used to tripping out the phrase:
“It’s OK not to be OK”
But Lockdown II hit me personally far more than Lockdown I. Something to do with fight or flight mode? Or having had a taste of ‘not lockdown’ and then being in Tier 1 for a few months? Or is it that, as someone with an extroversion bias to my personality i.e. someone who takes energy from being around others, that a ‘lack of others’ probably hit me harder than I was expecting? Whatever it was, there was always someone to talk to, be it Manda, my friends in the business or my close friends outside of it. Certainly, my relationship with some of the team is much stronger now than before the pandemic.
In a similar vein, I’ve missed legal sector events this year, be it small intimate events with the two Mastermind Groups I run, dinners in London or large-scale events like the LawNet conference and heck, even our birthday party. But, Conscious turns 18 in 2021, so roll on November….it’s going to be a hell of a party!
We decided against any real Christmas Party this year, preferring to roll over the money into what is now known as the As Soon As We Can Party. So we have a couple of hours of quiz/games over Zoom and had sent everyone a small food/drink box from https://www.boxlocal.co.uk/. When I say ‘sent’ what I mean was that I drove 170 miles around Bristol delivering them to everyone’s home.
David’s Personalised Delivery!
Dan Hodges did the three team members who live ‘west of the Severn Estuary’ for me, otherwise, a 10-hour day would have been a 13-hour day. Very few people on the team knew I was doing the delivering as they were told it was going to be DPD. Which of course, stood for David’s Personalised Delivery 😉
One of my pleasures at the end of the year is presenting the Conscious Hero trophy. And it’s a proper ‘trophy’. The team nominate people to be considered, with reasons why and then the whole team vote for the winner. This year it was awarded to Liam Hegenbarth our Head of Development. Liam has been with us just over eight years and in that time has progressed to being a key member of the management team. Congrats Liam!
As it’s our year-end in December I’ve done some analysis of our client retention. Which has been nothing short of fantastic. 99% of customers we invoiced for their website in December 2019 we also invoiced in December 2020. Additionally, we added another nine new website customers, which, given the circumstances was an acceptable result.
66% increase in firms spending on PPC & SEO
Conversely for marketing services such as SEO & PPC, we saw a 66% increase in the number of firms spending money in this area. This resulted in only a 1% drop in revenue in this service line. This supports the theory that smart law firms kept spending on ‘digital’ throughout the pandemic.
So we finish the year just 10% down on revenue which if you had offered me that on Monday 16 March, I would have bitten your hand off!
On a personal level, the support I’ve had from Manda has been nothing short of phenomenal. Allowing me the time to focus on the business and team when I needed to and balancing that with focusing on her when I could.
Sporting wise, I got fed up with running, so got a bike in the autumn. I am now officially a MAMIL! And no, the bike is NOT orange! But most of my clothing and accessories are! And as soon as I got the bike I immediately enjoyed my running more, it’s all about having options I think. As for my golf? Let’s ignore that until the end of 2021 when I might have actually played a reasonable amount.
35 years of dinners and also of counting change. Ruined.
Also, two ‘events’ in my personal life did not happen this year. Since 1984 a group of friends who were all at college in Portsmouth at the same time, have had a meal together on the Saturday, before the Saturday, before Christmas. Every year for 35 years! But not this year. Such a shame as I do not get to see the Pompey Gang as often as I would like.
The other event is the ‘counting of the change bottle’ whilst watching SPOTY. Over 35 years ago I acquired a gallon whisky bottle from a pub I worked at in Portsmouth whilst at college. For the first few years, I used to collect a few coppers and low-value silver coins. One year, no clue when, I started collecting everything less than £1 that was in my pocket at the end of each day. That was the first year I started counting it up each year. It was about £150 or so. A few years later I started putting everything less than £1 that was in my pocket PLUS a £1 coin. That year we counted out nearly £500! And for the last 15 years or so I put everything that was in my pocket. Last year it totalled £1,100!
I opened by mentioning Cancer Research. Even in this strangest of years, we managed to raise £4,056 plus £681 of Gift Aid which gives us a target for 2021! And the fundraising started today with my first 5km run of January. I am doing RED January i.e. Run Every Day January. 5km every day for 31 days. I’m looking for 62 people from my LinkedIn network, two for each of the 31 days in January to sponsor me just £10 for my efforts. Donate via our fundraising page. Thank you in advance if you can help.
Here’s hoping I get to ‘see you’ (not on a camera) at some point this year!
