This year has been a very challenging year for most businesses. I will remember the week Covid-19 hit Finland and our business for many years to come. I was on holiday in Ruka with my family. Corona had started to advance slightly before our trip, which is why we decided to travel by car instead of using our pre-booked flights. If you ask my wife, the week was not much of a vacation due to the daily management meetings in which we were discussing the situation and preparing for the worst.
During the first two weeks, we lost around 250 000 € of sales, which can be considered as a relatively large amount of money given that we are still a rather small business.
At the time, I was worried that the situation would lead to layoff negotiations, which would have been the first time in Genero’s 10-year history. We made the decision to do almost whatever it takes to avoid that.
We promptly started to arrange weekly virtual coffee breaks among the whole crew, during which we shared updates on the situation to ensure total transparency.
We also started to brainstorm on ways to help our customers during these difficult times – especially considering that clients rely on sales leads acquired from expos. Furthermore, together with our clients, we began to discuss and consider ways of working via online meetings instead of face-to-face.
Naturally, we also started to aggressively look into new opportunities as well as new potential clients we could help.
After the first two weeks, we managed to increase our existing clients’ sales with such remarkable capacity that we were able to cover much more than we had lost.
I’m very proud of our teams and how they have been able to deliver exceptional results to our clients. We have received tons of positive feedback during this time. Several clients have revealed that they don’t know what they would have done without us throughout this difficult period. This type of feedback is highly rewarding and motivates us to perform and achieve even better results for our clients. Similarly, critical feedback is important for us in order to ensure constant improvement.
We have a saying, “Average results are not good enough”. This is something we continuously work on to achieve – it’s not easy but it’s definitely worth it.
Greetings from Stockholm!
We opened our office in Stockholm 1.2.2020. It is safe to say that there have been better times for entering a new market. Our Business Director, Edvin Årefors, and Country Manager & Lead Growth Hacker, Christopher Oksman, have worked extremely hard to establish our new office in Sweden. It hasn’t been easy, however we have succeeded to land new clients, whom we are helping in both Sweden and Norway. We also have more clients in the pipeline, which will kickoff after the summer holidays.
Furthermore, we have recruited a new Growth hacker, Robin Salomonsen, to our office in Sweden – welcome to the Genero Crew.
Our goal is to have a team of 5-6 persons at the Stockholm office by the end of this year.
I really hope that the Covid-19 pandemic hasn’t hit your business too hard. If you have any questions, concerns or thoughts you would like to share and further discuss, please feel free to reach out to me.
Now I want to wish you a sunny and wonderful summer! I hope you have time to relax and recharge for the autumn. We do not know what to expect from the fall, but one thing I do know is that we have to learn to love change. Change is constant and the world is changing faster than ever before.
I want to thank all our great clients. They are the reason we are still running and able to develop and improve. I always want to thank our awesome employees, who have worked hard for our clients and made all the great results possible.
Have a great and relaxing summer!
Best regards,
Sebastian Östman
