While it’s not easy to see a silver lining in a global pandemic, Geoguard Founder and CEO David Briggs says his firm was able to find some key opportunities amid the challenge. After a period of introspection, he says, “our business and our outlook are fundamentally different. We have finally created our nonprofit business to support initiatives in our community, and have delivered the benefits scheme upgrades we always wanted for our team.”
The following is an excerpt from What Did You Change?, contributed by Geoguard Founder and CEO David Briggs.
COVID has driven many changes, few of them positive. However, one thing that we did, and which I think many of our customers did in the first few weeks and months of the lockdown, was enter a period of thoughtfulness and introspection.
As our travel schedule disappeared and our horizons shrunk to our homes and the views from our windows, we questioned ourselves on what we needed to do to change to adapt. Not just in terms of business survival and success, but also regarding what really matters. How could we use this time to get off the usual “same old, same old hamster wheel” and instead make real progress toward our goals and values?
As COVID’s horrors moved on to those of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, we increasingly questioned ourselves and what we were doing. Were we doing enough, were we on the right track and were we doing enough of what really mattered?
As a result, as we move six months past lockdown, our business and our outlook are fundamentally different. We have finally created our nonprofit business to support initiatives in our community, and have delivered the benefits scheme upgrades we always wanted for our team — including maternity and paternity benefits that make a career and family mutually achievable for both genders.
Even our marketing and communications to customers has fundamentally turned itself inside-out to adapt. Gone are the travel and conference budgets (sorry, Money/2020, etc.). Our major focus was no longer about seeing everybody at trade shows, but instead how to best serve them as they work from home.
So, we sent them all a “Home & Away” care package, setting out all the new features we had designed for them along with a beautiful robe for “working from home” in style and comfort, as well as top-quality, comfortable masks to wear when out and about.
The number of customers who have tweeted and shared pictures of themselves modeling these robes has shown the success of the initiative, as something fun had finally come out of the “new normal.”
In terms of new business, the great opportunity for us has been to use this period of thoughtfulness to challenge the “blob” of inertia, and to encourage new customers to think again about the level of fraud and the “creaking” geo infrastructure that they are willing to tolerate — and to embrace the opportunity that modern geolocation represents for them and their customers.
It’s not easy to find positives from a global pandemic, but I think these changes will result in positive outcomes for a long time to come.