It was the end of August 2020 and I’d had one hell of a summer. In March 2020 my marketing agency shrank by 25% in one week, when our clients in hospitality, events and travel were forced to close their doors during the pandemic. My team responded by pulling together in a big way. Together, we had spent the UK’s first lockdown not only building back to our pre-pandemic size, but growing by a further 20%.
In one of my favourite business books, ‘The Hard Thing About Hard Things’, Ben Horowitz introduces the concept of a wartime CEO compared to a peacetime CEO. The wartime CEO relishes rolling up their sleeves and figuring out how to thrive in a crisis. The peacetime CEO hates it. They want everything to go back to normal and stay that way.
Secretly, I had enjoyed the chaos. I loved hearing the team’s ideas of how we could pivot and watching them excitedly try them out. I loved having to be resourceful. I liked beating the odds, especially when they were stacked against businesses with clients like ours. I loved the celebration when we pulled it off....