Let’s talk about the ‘R’ word 😬

I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure I’ve ever known times quite like these. 

There’s no point listing everything negative going on in the UK / World right now as a) you know it all anyway and b) I’m not sure I’d have the room to fit it all into one email! 

Ultimately, there’s a recession likely looming and business-wise the mood feels eerily reminiscent of Feb / March 2020, ahead of the pandemic hitting these shores for the first time. 

So, if you’ll let me, I wanted to tell you a quick story about that time. 

When the first lockdown was announced, the following morning I received phone call after phone call from clients saying that they needed to stop all sales / marketing work immediately. 

As a result, we saw our retained revenue slashed by over 50% within the space of 24 hours.

It was brutal.

Eight years of unbelievably hard work in building a business, then half of it vanishing before my eyes. 

I’ll be honest with you, my first reaction was to panic and having spent the day stressed and worried, I sank into the sofa with a bottle of wine and pretended it wasn’t happening. It just felt like too much to take in. 

The next morning, I decided there were two options. 

I could continue pretending that it wasn’t happening, or I could tackle it head on with my team and come out of the other side stronger than ever. 

And so, wherever we could help clients with help and advice, we made ourselves available.

Where we had some spare time, we worked on our personal development, using the unexpected downtime to brush up on our skills, read some books and finally dive into that Udemy account gathering dust in my browser. 

And – crucially – we used this time to get on top of our own marketing. 

• We smartened up our website and fully optimised it for SEO. 
• We created new assets and case studies.
• We proactively reached out and asked clients for reviews. 
• We hosted a series of webinars over Zoom.
• We created a bunch of campaigns across Google and Facebook, ready to switch on when the time was right. 

(And by the way, we also did a bunch of this stuff for clients – one of which went on to sell over a million pounds worth of cars online thanks to the work we did in the build up and the subsequent campaign that we ran for them. True story.)

Our proactive and ‘can-do’ approach worked wonders for us and our clients, and the majority of the 50% that switched off were back with us within a few weeks too. 

What followed for us was year-on-year growth of 25% – something I definitely couldn’t see coming as I took that last gulp of Malbec on my sofa on that horrible night. 

But – I also saw a lot of businesses take option 1. 

They buried their heads in the sand. 

They couldn’t see their way through the fog. 

They neglected to think about the upturn. 

And there’s always an upturn. 

I started this business in 2011 – slap bang in the middle of a recession. 

My friends said I was mad (I had a steady job at the time) but I never looked back and I’m still working with most of my original clients now. 

We can look at this as an opportunity rather than a challenge if we tackle it in the right way, and we can come out of the situation stronger than ever, as we have done before and as we’ll do again. 

So let’s strike while the iron is hot and get the ball rolling today! 

Book a 30 minute, no-obligation call with me today and let’s chat through the options from there. 

You’ll come away with fresh ideas, a roadmap for digital success and all of the free help and advice you’ll need to get cracking. 

I promise you it will be half an hour well-spent – what have you got to lose? 

Cheers, 

Matt

PS – here’s that link again: https://meetings.hubspot.com/thebrightclick/30-minute-strategy-call-

PPS – we’re actually busier than ever right now and September is always a crazy month as everyone returns from their hols, so if you’re sitting on the fence, don’t wait too long 😊