Most of us within our entrepreneurial community have been vaccinated and are cautiously optimistic that the worst is behind us. We’re peering out cautiously from our doorways. The weather is getting better, both literally and figuratively.
The pendulum is starting to swing back toward the center again, but it is clear that it is not returning to where it was pre-March 2020.
While we survived this Year-of-Our-Discomfort, it took some effort and adjustment. But we endured by doing what most successful entrepreneurs do—we pivoted. When smacked in the jowls with challenge, we invented new ways of doing old things and in doing so, also discovered new things along the way. Some turned out to be not-so-bad and others got us to say, “Why didn’t we do this long ago?”
Yes, during this epoch-of-house-arrest, I missed face-to-face meetings, office hours across a table with a white write-on board behind me. I missed the energy of people working in the same space. I missed attending a number of programs each week, chatting with old friends, and making new ones in the chance crossing-of-paths. I even missed eating pizza a few evenings in a row.
In doing things differently, we found we could conduct business fairly efficiently via ZOOM and phone. We did not spend an hour or so driving to meetings and spacing them apart so we could leave one to go to the next. We also discovered that geography was no longer an obstacle, and that six feet and twelve-thousand miles weren’t not all-that-different. That opened up connections with people on other continents and attendance to events, demos, programs, workshops no matter where they were held.
I reclaimed at least two-to-four hours each day because meetings come to me on my desktop. I have had more time to write. I still met a respectable number of new people. Without the intrusion of COVID, it is unlikely I would have founded this Roundtable, and chances are, the extraordinary number of connections, collaborations, referrals, leads, and friendships birthed here would never have occurred.
Frankly, 2020 and now into spring, this has been a pretty productive year.
I welcome the pendulum swinging back, but not all the way. I will probably still conduct a lot of meetings virtually. I will look at my work-world as global. Some of my workshops and masterclasses will return face-to-face, but many may remain web-based because it allowed me to add new content and will give people much more time to work on assignments. Our extraordinarily successful Entrepreneurial Roundtable will continue as a virtual offering to permit connections around the planet.
I am giving thought to those things I hope will not return to “normal.” I am grateful I stayed healthy and my friends stayed well. I am happy that the pivot gave us options I might never have considered and benefits we collectively would never have enjoyed.
What about you? What changes are you planning to keep just-the-way-they-are now?