That famous “what did you do during the war” question is now pretty much out of favour.  What you did in 2020 to survive COVID, and what you do 2021 is also a key question for this time, Jan 2021.

When the UK went into shutdown, we found our customers and projects quickly separated into three distinct groups.

1. Went into panic, could not operate under Covid restrictions and suspended trading
2. Looked at their business and re-invented their relationship with customers to continue providing their service
3. Saw the challenges and the opportunities and re-invented their business and opened up new customers, products and pathways to market.

I am the first to admit that many business are more suitable to this change than others, but the group that at first glance had no options have been the most interesting and rewarding to work with.

So, how did it change us. We are a technology business, so we just carried on right?

No.

• We had to change to assist and service people in groups 2 and 3.
• We gave customers access to many of the marketing ways and tools we had previously kept to ourselves or only prodived as bespoke.
• We have to deal on to many for delivery and found us also making more use of Zoom type interactions, webinars.
• Rather than a majority of customers being “local”, we know dealt with those around the world that best fit the products we decided to offer.
• We decided to generate products that would solve the problems of Covid, but that would also support these business when face-to-face was again possible and give us a sustainable business plan.
• We heavily invested in training and learned all those things we always wanted to but never gave the time
• We took advantage of the growing API culture to allow us to develop systems much faster by inegrating with other tools nad offload the development and delivery to these tools.
• We tried to take advantage of what already worked and was proven and then add our own value to the offering.

Many of the projects we built with customers in 2020 will become products and services on their own in 2021. We have some poweful software products to release over the next 6 months.