💼 Working during a pandemic

That’s me in the red hat, chilling in Ha Noi in Northern Vietnam in March, 2020 just before COVID-19 popped off.

I’m a freelance slasher for a living. I write slash copy write slash develop communication strategies slash facilitate workshops slash dabble in UX slash write scripts. In January 2020, I left my cushy agency job and toddled off into the sunset like a baby learning to walk, optimistic about making it as a freelancer. I moved to Vietnam with my partner who had landed his dream job and had a few good months. I made some progress, cultivated some new projects and clients, started drawing together a group of reliable freelancers who I could outsource to, figured out a rhythm of caffeine intake that balanced energy and diarrhoea (not an easy feat with Vietnamese coffee). But in March and April, when governments around the world began closing borders due to COVID-19, it sounded like a death knell. A lot of my clients are in industries that rely on face-to-face interactions  - events, conferences, education, construction - to function as normal. And all of my clients with nice-to-have projects in the pipeline immediately sucked their projects back out of the pipeline and shoved them into savings accounts. People began battening down the hatches, shoring their finances against the oncoming economic tornado. All my retainers were paused, all enquiries dried up. I went through all my subscriptions and downgraded everything back to freemium (sad moment), made a budget, and vowed to start cooking instead of ordering take out. This period of uncertain lethargy lasted about a week and then something interesting happened.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, my various inboxes were full of enquiries. Retainer clients were back and asking for more hours than they had before. Projects that were killed were being reanimated. Business as usual was suspended but business as unusual was moving in fast. Ideas were flying and the ideas were fundamentally radical and different. Clients didn’t want to spend the next quarter and beyond counting pennies and surviving, they wanted to pivot, quickly, to new models of working online.

So we did pivot. For three frenzied months, I worked with new and old clients on projects that were ambitious, high-stakes, and terrifying. Some worked out. Some didn’t. In the aftermath, I’m trying to make sense of it all. These are some stories of what happens when you take a risk during a crisis.

🛠️ Building a digital conference in two weeks
🌶️ Spicing up an accountant’s brand during a pandemic