By Victoria Lewis-Stephens, MD, United Culture,

The way we work is about to change forever. We are in the middle of a global pandemic, an economic crisis like no other, and in truth we don’t know when things will get better… some might argue it’s not the perfect time to launch a new business!

The truth is we agonised for quite some time about whether we should hold off the launch of United Culture.

Anyone who has rebranded or started a new business will know that even being in a position to tell everyone what you have been up to is a culmination of weeks and months of hard work - agonising over positioning, branding, developing business plans, building the right team, and in our case winning clients. So, we made the decision to just to go for it.

Although we had most of the brand and business strategy in place before Covid-19 hit, the pandemic threw up a whole host of new challenges and considerations. We had to ask ourselves some difficult questions around whether our offer was still relevant in the current climate, and whether we would need to pivot our plan to survive.

We needed to consider if launching at a time where the media is quite rightly focused on Covid-19 related information and news was wise - not to mention did it feel right going ahead at all with everything going on. And we needed to think about how we would build a business when we can’t necessarily get in front of new clients.

Then there were the really practical financial considerations. Most small businesses live or die by their cash flow. We had to consider how we could navigate a really tough financial start, keep the right talent and continue to offer our clients exceptional service. With some of our forward-looking work on hold or cancelled in the early days of Covid-19, and in a climate where we knew some of the larger agency players are furloughing people and asking large numbers to take up to 35% pay cuts, could we really offer our team the financial stability they needed?

Against that backdrop, you might wonder whether we had hit a moment of insanity when we decided to press ahead.

The fact that all three founders are optimists has helped! I think right now more than ever we need a bit positivity to motivate us all. There were three core things that helped us to be confident about our future:

Our offer focuses on four key areas; culture change, strategy execution, employee experience and leadership engagement. In any crisis these are things businesses need to focus on.

Financially, we lost some work straight out of the gates. But we are a project-based business, with that comes ups and downs in terms of revenues.  We have a financial buffer and will need to use it. But we are taking a bet on ourselves.  We are lucky enough to have attracted some great talent to work with us – some of the best out there. And we work with some fantastic clients. Now is not the time to have a wobble.

But more importantly, what has driven us is our fundamental belief that to thrive we believe businesses need to focus on their people in order to build brand loyalty, drive growth and deliver for their shareholders. So, at a time when businesses are asking more from their people than ever before they are faced with frighteningly real financial challenges, they need to understand what will help them make a sudden shift from surviving to thriving.  And that is where we can help.

United Culture blurs the lines between Marketing, HR, PR and brand to truly engage employees, drive growth, and enable businesses to have more impact on the wider world.  To do this companies need to engage their employees and customers in an authentic way, and this is exactly what United Culture delivers for its clients.

For many agencies, as soon as this crisis hit projects were stopped and put on hold whilst companies took a step back to consider their own positions.  That puts enormous pressure on small businesses, and it’s no different for us. But knowing our offer is relevant and will help organisations recover and rebuild gives us great hope for the future.

Photo by Nicholas Santoianni on Unsplash