Sonali Sokhal 29 May, 2024
February 2020, life was great!
After years of hard work, we were hitting
the big time, with high retainer clients and good names in the business. These
were national names. Yes, there was a virus in China, but it felt so far away
from our lives.
When March 2020 arrived. The WHO declared a National pandemic while we were conducting a massive media lunch for our client. But, it was just a virus right? Something you could keep at bay by washing your hands.
A week later!
We had lost half our clients in one fell
swoop. Offices had shut down, and I was in tears booking the last ticket out
for our Man Friday whose wife had just delivered a baby. We had some funds
saved up to tide us through for a few months, but what was next?
I sat worried at home, hooked on to the
television, and wondering where life was going to take us.
A month later, as I paid out salary
cheques, I wondered if I would have the resources to keep paying my team.
It was probably the lowest point in my
life, and in the life of so many other people. Businesses built across years
were collapsing as the lockdown, and fear spread like wildfire across the
world. It was a pause button no one had asked for, and no one had anticipated.
Yet, it was here. It was the worst thing that could have happened to any of us.
Yet, there was also a stubborn streak in
me. A streak that said, we need to soldier on. I recall thinking of the one or
two clients I had not reverted back to or regretted and wondering if I should
have reached out to them and signed them on. They were not lifestyle businesses
and were unaffected by the pandemic overall.
And then magically, the phone started
ringing again. In the world that was shut, the only way to maintain brand image
and reputation was through a sustained communications strategy. As the initial
panic died down, companies rallied around to fight against this scourge. It
gave us pride to support the clients who started the most amazing campaigns in
one of the darkest period humanity had faced. The prospect of work galvanised
the team and gave us all greater courage and impetus. Suddenly, we were out
there, pushing out the most brilliant campaigns to donate oxygen, vaccination
drives, and helping the underprivileged as everyone began to get together to
fight unitedly against this.
I remember reading about one of the
greatest giant global companies in the world, stopping their operation to make
perfume to make sanitiser instead and I realised that we all are larger than
our businesses. I recall a client of mine, who used his hotel premises to cook
food for the elderly, who felt vulnerable and alone. Even when his own business
had hit rock bottom. This gave me the personal courage to work around the
situation. We started speaking to clients whose businesses were still growing.
The D2C boom started, and all those new brands needed PR. Our team geared up to
the challenge and pivoted with new skill sets and techniques. At the end of the
year, we were a wholly different company, who had moved beyond lifestyle PR to
a booming corporate division.
These moments were the darkest of my life, but they also taught me that resilience is everything in entrepreneurship. While you have life, you have hope and slipping a few notches down, is not the end, but the chance to reroute and start again.
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