The One-Year Anniversary: Lessons My Company Learned in the Pandemic

Photos in this post by Jenn Bakos

  When all "non-essential" businesses were asked to close their doors in March of last year, I gulped at a decibal my neighbors could hear.

I can’t really explain all the emotions and thoughts that went through my head. On the one hand, I guiltily felt a little relief—I was overwhelmed, burnt out, and in desperate need of a break. Maybe this was actually a blessing in disguise, being asked to shut down for a while.

By the same seeing-the-positive token, I felt weirdly connected to everyone in the US who was watching the news and panicking a little but also banding together to make the most of a bad situation; like others, I was happy to do my part, even if that was just staying inside and ordering my groceries curbside.

But another part of me was doing a lot of math very fast. I had several lucrative, open projects with clients who still owed money that I’d been counting on before but was now not so sure I’d ever see. If the lockdown lasted more than a few weeks (oh, to know then what we know now), how long could AG survive?

This business is one of the most important things in my life. To some that may sound strange—but AG started as an idea, a dream… and it grew into the path to financial independence from corporate life, a career in creativity, a place among my peers, and respect that I could never, ever put a price tag on.

I was willing to fight as hard as it took to keep AG open, whatever that looked like.

FIRST LESSON: We’re All Essential

None of us saw a pandemic coming. It’s the stuff of dystopian movies and history textbooks. So none of us were truly prepared.

In my case, I didn’t think when I was setting up my business, “How can I pick a career path that will be seen as ‘essential’ in a state of emergency?” Instead, I created something that lit me up inside, something I knew would be of value to creative people with big aspirations in a world of free enterprise: photography on subscription.

But how essential is that sort of job next to hospital work, firefighting, trucking food and tools for survival cross-country, grocers who sell the wares that keep us alive?

I didn’t think offering Instagram photos was quite at the same level.

As it turned out, however, almost all my clients viewed me as essential. (One totally ghosted me and moved out of state, but she was definitely an exception.) Because I am positioned in the photography space as a commercial photographer, and suddenly all in-person businesses were being asked to pivot, there was actually a huge surge in demand for photos to market online versions of previously in-person offers:

Gyms offered online trainings where they’d never had them before;
brick-and-mortar shops opened their first e-commerce options;
coaches who previously worked 1:1 decided to try the one-to-many model of online courses;
and down the line it went.

Everyone needed photos to promote. Instagram posts, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, lead pages, sales pages, email blasts… I wasn’t the only photographer suddenly swamped with work. Some photographers, and other online marketers, had their best years yet.

I realized I needed to re-work my limiting beliefs about what was “essential.” We always think art and creativity will be the first things to go—which includes jobs like mine, where creating beauty and intrigue and telling story are literally the job description—but actually these are the things that connect us and give us hope. And if those things aren’t essential, what is life?

SECOND LESSON: There’s Always More Where That Came From

After it became apparent that the lockdown wasn’t going anywhere, I started listening to James Wedmore’s Mind Your Business podcast. James has coached some of my favorite business leaders and social media influencers, and even though his style is a little cheesy for my taste, I put my ego aside and started listening to what he had to say, because this guy literally creates millionaires.

One of the gems I picked up from him was this quote: “You have the ability to make money on demand.” Once I heard that, I started whispering it to myself on repeat.

Why? In the face of a global crisis, and in the face of all these small, so-called “non-essential” businesses being asked to close, a lot of people were suddenly scared of there being no money to keep their lives going. While this is a totally legitimate fear, the truth is, none of the money in the United States actually disappeared. It just changed its moving patterns.

We call it currency because money literally flows like a current. Like water, money never really goes away, but it does settle in different places over time.

And since the resource (money) is out there, when we don’t have it in our possession and it’s not coming to us the way we’re used to, the challenge becomes finding new and creative ways to get it.

Fortunately, unlike water, money isn’t something you should have to travel to get when there’s a drought; thanks to virtual money exchange (Venmo, PayPal, CashApp, online banking, e-commerce, and so on), with a bank account and access to WiFi, you have the ability to earn money from your living room.

In my case, I tried a few different things to keep my existing business going in case the usual well started to run dry:

I’d actually increased my reach on Pinterest over the last year to 1.2 million, so I taught a paid masterclass on using Pinterest for business, at $15 a ticket, and that paid several key bills for Matt and me that month.
I added a new subscription offering that went over like gangbusters.
I collaborated with other business owners in social media giveaways to expand our respective audiences so we’d have more people to market our existing offerings to. This wasn’t super successful, but you don’t know until you try!
I added payment plan options to one of my online courses to make it accessible to more people.
I upleveled my website to not only look more polished, but also direct traffic more efficiently so I could increase my online sales (they went up 800%!).

None of these things were part of my original business model or urgent business plan, but being resourceful under pressure is how to survive in any kind of crisis… and because I was willing to think outside the box, AG is still going strong!

THIRD LESSON: Now Is a Good Time to Invest in Yourself

While there are probably more ways to invest in yourself that don’t cost money than do cost money (I started doing yoga in the mornings, reduced my time on Instagram to 30 minutes a day for my mental health, and learned to play chess so I could spend more quality time with Matt doing things he enjoyed—and all of these things cost me $0), my story for this point was actually a fiscal investment.

I’d been wanting to upgrade my phone for at least two years when the lockdown started. The trouble was, my phone still worked just fine—it made calls no problem, texts always went through, the battery life was still fine. So to me it felt frivolous and wasteful to upgrade.

However, the reason I wanted to upgrade was that I wanted a better camera on my phone. I knew if I could take higher-quality photos on my phone, I would post to social media more often, and by extension, make quality connections with more people and get new leads and make more sales. Also with a better camera, I’d be able to record video more often, which would mean more live streams and more online courses where people could connect with me face-to-face. These things were not so frivolous, but they also weren’t urgent.

My beliefs about how frivolous/urgent this purchase was changed when lockdown was still going strong after four or five months. I still wanted to diversify my income/revenue streams because who knew how long the work I was getting would hold out? So I sat down with Matt and made my case, and we came to a spending cap for getting me a new phone, did a lot of research, and finally bought me a refurbished iPhone X with plenty of storage for $500. This was around Christmastime when we were trying really hard to focus on others, but I promised to make at least that amount back, with that phone, by the end of the year, so Matt agreed.

Not long after the phone arrived, I added mobile presets to my online catalog, added a new subscription offering to my service catalog, and launched an online course that had a mobile photography component—all because I had a new phone that made creating these quality offerings possible. When I did the math, I calculated $4000+ in sales that came in because we invested $500 strategically up front in a phone with a better camera that I could use for business. And it’s still making me money!

One of the biggest mistakes we as a people make when our economy is threatened is we stop investing in the things that will help us grow—in our relationships, mental health, and businesses. When this literally means we cease spending money, businesses stop making money, which means they can’t keep on their employees, who then can’t pay their bills, and so on. The ripples just keep going out.

There’s never an optimal time to invest in yourself, but it’s always a good time—even, and maybe especially, in economic crisis!

FOURTH LESSON: It’s All In Your Head

Alexis The Greek is a company I take with me wherever I go. It’s my knowledge of the digital CEO marketplace, it’s my skillset with a manual camera, it’s my business acumen, and it’s the natural manifestation of several of my biggest passions, including supporting small business and creating a more beautiful and enjoyable world to live in.

At the beginning of lockdown, I feared that AG might go under. I was afraid I might need to take a warehouse or factory job in order to maintain a decent living. I feared my clients would see me pouring coffee at a diner and whisper amongst themselves that her business must have failed, poor thing.

But on some level, a calm, quiet voice reminded me that Alexis The Greek is a location-independent company—just an idea, really—and I already have all the tools and skills to pick it back up at any point if I have to leave off for a while. And I love this business so much and it has changed my life so greatly that it will never really die unless I want it to.

So, so, so many people went through hardship in the recession of 2008. You can read story after story of individuals who had to pick themselves up by the bootstraps and figure out a new career because of the recession in Chris Guillebeau’s The $100 Startup. But that’s the thing; just because there were some huge setbacks didn’t mean the people who fell didn’t get back up. And so shall it be with this pandemic.

The concept of business survival doesn’t just apply to location-independent companies, either. I went on a business retreat a few years ago where I got to hear from Jennifer Kem, whose lingerie chain went bankrupt in 48 hours because of the economic downturn. This was a woman who thought she had it made—who could afford to buy a different designer purse for every day of the week, who was living her dream life in Hawaii, who thought she had nothing to worry about. The crash showed her how many holes there were in her business and financial plan… and she lost millions.

It would be so easy to think in that position that she’d lost everything, that all the hard work she’d put in building her brand was for nothing. But Kem didn’t think that; instead, she said, “If I could do it once, I can do it again, and this time I won’t make the same mistakes.” Within a couple years she had a different million-dollar empire, and it was protected against economic catastrophe.

Failure is only failure if you don’t learn from the worst times and use what you learned to fuel your future.

FIFTH AND FINAL LESSON: Let Go of Expectations

Expectations are the silent killer—of dreams, of businesses, of relationships, of self-respect and self-esteem, of diets and workout regimens, and many other parts of our mental, emotional, spiritual, physical, and financial lives.

Expectations mean we hinge our plans and hopes and reactions on a single outcome or idea we have in our minds: I will make a million dollars with this idea. Then when you only make $30K, you’re either in debt or disappointed… even though $30K is a lot of money! People would only buy this course if I could afford a proper videographer. Then when someone else launches the very course you had in your head, and they do it with iPhone videography, you’re indignant.

In a state of emergency, we were all asked to let go of our expectations for how 2020 was supposed to go. Some of us did, and some of us really didn’t.

In theory, my business should be getting more honed, more focused, over the years; my niche should be clearer, I should be able to weed out projects that don’t feel like a right fit with a wave of the hand, and I should be reducing my offers and going deeper with the ones that are left more often than I’m expanding my offers or going in new directions.

Overall over the last half-decade or so, that’s been the case; but in 2020, I deviated a bit in order to stay sustainable. For example, that Pinterest masterclass—I never wanted to be “The Pinterest Girl,” but since it was a skill I had that others wanted to learn, and the currents of money were changing, I gave it a shot—and I made money!

The other half of this lesson, though, is really about being open to possibility. I could have said to myself, “Well, this is the end of AG,” set that expectation in my mind as the only possible outcome, and then stopped putting heart into my work. But because I was open to multiple possibilities—that I might take on extra, unrelated work elsewhere, or that my business might do great things in the pandemic—I didn’t steer my company in a direction that could ultimately have been destructive.

What about you? What did you and your company learn in the pandemic? I’d love to hear your thoughts below! Then if you found this post inspirational, share it to your favorite social channel and spread the love!

HELLO! MY NAME IS ALEXIS.

Coffee lover, day dreamer, foodie, and creative. I believe in doing what you can with what you have where you are. I blog to help you do more with what you have. I hope you love it here!