Launching a business during a pandemic … are you crazy!

After dedicating much of my work life to employee experience and working across multiple industries and consulting firms, I decided to try my hand at entrepreneurship.

As it turned out this decision coincided with the start of a global pandemic – brilliant timing, right?

I was encouraged early on when I read a Forbes article that stated only 20% of businesses fail in their first year mostly because of little need for their products, lack of capital or not having the right team. The scary part is that entrepreneurship falls off a cliff by year five when only 50% of businesses survive and even worse at the 10-year mark when only a third survive.

Don’t be discouraged … follow your vision!

For the past decade, I have been guided by a vision and have set goals that align with my purpose of helping leaders and organizations thrive through difficult change. My vision is a blueprint and I decided that I wanted to continue following this purpose.

I also want to work with like-minded people. The type of people who I would want to have dinner with. Enter NimblShift Partners Jeff Vathje and Sam Sidhu.

I worked with Jeff and Sam in past lives and we share similar values and a deep passion for creating great employee experiences. And, for the past 9 months, we have worked closely to develop a set of products and services that integrate our adjacent skills in total rewards, learning strategy, and change management.

We landed on what we think is a cool name … NimblShift Consulting.

Our vision at NimblShift is to help leaders and organizations optimize their investment in people. Our mission is to create community around this vision by sharing our experience and expertise and learning from others along our journey.

We felt it was appropriate that in our first blog we share our experience and lessons learned as we prepared NimblShift for launch while the COVID-19 global pandemic was underway.

Before getting into our lessons learned, we would like to thank Bart Wisniowski and Jason Lindstrom from Advisor Websites and Bucketlist Rewards for providing coaching and guidance. We learned so much from these seasoned entrepreneurs. Thank you!

Below are some of the lessons we learned from launching a business during a pandemic:

1. Allow your vision, values and principles to guide decisions

It is a good idea at the start of a business to establish a Vision and Core Values.

However, because we were working virtually, we also tacked on a set of Guiding Principles that we could turn to as we made important decisions.

Read NimblShift’s Vision and Values

Our Guiding Principles included (among others) respecting unique life situations, allowing for individual flexibility and level of commitment, striving for lean operations, and creating freedom to voice our opinions.

While we worked virtually during the pandemic, these principles helped with teamwork and decision-making and to shape a 3-year painted picture for the business. We jointly created a 3-year plan that was debated, modified and crafted through a virtual planning meeting.

Having these principles helped us to create an environment where we could each feel safe, where our team was comfortable to be ourselves, where we can voice opinions without fear of repercussion and where we are inspired to constantly learn from each other.

When this type of safety is missing, the risk of poor team performance and distrust increases, and this often results in lack of innovation, reduced performance, and an unproductive team.

2. Strive to be good enough and get on with it (perfection is the enemy of done)

Our team had a lot of healthy dialogue over how we would operate. As a startup with no revenue we needed a lean operation without overly bureaucratic or unnecessary investments.

We landed on a hybrid version of the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) that is outlined in the book Traction by Geno Wickman. EOS outlines 6 key components (Vision, Data, Process, Traction, Issues and People) and uses a weekly Vision Traction Organizer (V/TO) to monitor progress.

To implement EOS, we agreed on four key roles around Strategy, Operations, Finances and People and we are building processes around these roles and implementing them to support the business as needed.

For example, we decided to focus on marketing, promotions and people and to defer setting up performance dashboards or worrying about financials until we have enough revenue to warrant these investments.

We combined EOS with agile-inspired methods using four-week sprints to prioritize the work that was needed to build the foundations for the business, such as our Service Offerings and toolkits that we will need to be effective employee experience consultants.

3. Beware: there may be bruises from those battles

Starting up a business with partners is not easy. We had (and continue to have) plenty of lively debates over the structure of the partnership, how we would manage revenue and certain accountabilities. This was compounded by the pandemic and the need to work on the business virtually.

Google Workspace offers amazing tools that enable collaboration such as Google Meet, Chat, Drive and Jamboard. We leveraged these tools extensively to stay connected and aligned on decisions.

Our company has never had an in-person meeting.

Every four weeks we conducted a virtual sprint plan where we would ask ourselves “Do our current priorities make sense?” “Are they practical?” and, “Do we need them now?”

We would agree to sprint goals and activities that are based on each Partner’s capacity to contribute to the business and used an Asana Huddle Board to track progress on a weekly basis. 

For example, we heavily debated the need for hiring a lawyer to form our Partnership and to determine if NimblShift should incorporate or if we should form a Joint Partnership. This process helped us to land on using Ownr, an easy-to-use online system we used to incorporate NimblShift.

The takeaway is that you will have disagreements. They are inevitable. However, winning teams exit the other side of debates showing mutual respect and support for each other.

4. Listen closely … it’s client problems that matter most

We did not want NimblShift to be a “square peg looking for a round hole”. Our clients have important challenges that they need solved. We believe that good consultants diagnose and define the problems that matter most to their clients and then work together on co-designing practical solutions.

This can include changing business models impacted by digital disruption, people and business readiness for technology implementations, or enabling broad-based innovation programs to enhance digital or customer transformations. Our job is to diagnose the problem and bring leading practices and ideas to the table.

While we developed our products and services, we tested them beginning with the challenges our clients are facing in managing their workplace and the experience of their employees.

Employee experience consulting is a broad profession with tons of different methods and approaches to solving complex workplace problems. We found April Dunford’s book Obviously Awesome as a practical guide to clearly articulating our products and services so that they make sense to potential clients.

When asked, our 30-second elevator pitch includes the following:

“We are consultants focused on workplace management systems for small and medium-sized organizations that seek to grow their business. Our differentiator is integrated employee experience consulting across total rewards, learning and change. We add value by diagnosing gaps, prioritizing workplace issues and co-designing solutions to our clients most complex problems. We work with leaders who seek to achieve their business goals by creating a great workplace. We do this by optimizing investments in people to improve productivity, realize value, and to manage costs.”

We fully expect this elevator speech will evolve as we learn more from our clients and their challenges.

5. Three words … Learn, Learn, Learn

There is so much you need to know about running a business and one of the keys is to be constantly learning. While I have a background in change management and human resources, I needed to learn more about marketing, sales and finance.

Google is your friend!

We are fortunate to live in a world that is so connected with information on any topic available at your fingertips. I found amazing resources on running agile teams, design thinking and creating customer personas and journey maps online.

While there is no shortage of resources on the internet, my advice to those starting a business is to proactively and efficiently make time to learn new concepts that you are not familiar with.

There is a lot to learn and you have a lot on your plate so you must be efficient with the time you spend learning. One solution to be more efficient with time spent learning is to get a subscription to Audible and go for a daily walk while listening to a book. I will do a separate blog on some of the books I read over the past year.

Another great resource is LinkedIn Learning. I set aside two hours each week and took courses on marketing, Asana, blockchain, PowerBI, people analytics and more. You can find just about any topic on LinkedIn learning and the platform is effective and easy to navigate.

We also use HubSpot CRM to manage our contact list and I recently discovered HubSpot Academy which offers a bunch of free sales and marketing courses that integrate with the HubSpot CRM.

6. Make space to soak on ideas

Our final lesson is to give yourself some space. Entrepreneurs tend to be outgoing and take on a lot. As the saying goes, sometimes we bite off more than we can chew. Overworking yourself can be counterproductive and it’s important to take breaks throughout the day.

You can get into a routine of meditation and breath work, daily mid-day walks to get outside and then downtime with family during the evenings.

Wim Hof breathing each day with 5 minutes of meditation is a great way to recharge and remain focused. You can also try to get 10,000 steps each day which gets you outside for fresh air. You can use your walks and listen to an audiobook or podcast.

Contact NimblShift

If you are interested in learning more about NimblShift, fill out our Contact Form for a free 30-minute consultation. We are available for advice on managing employees and your workplace.

And, if you’re starting as business, we would be happy to share our lessons learned.

Thanks for the Support

We wanted to send a special thanks to our families, and friends.

Our spouses Renee Simons, Mindy Sidhu, and Rita Vathje.

Our network who provided input and advice: Nick Freeman, Lora Buscis, Paula Martin, Letty Cherry, Jon Hirst, Doug Junor, Jamie Wood, Andrea Cherkas, Steve Mossop, and Roger Kingkade.