In March 2020, I felt good about my seventh year as CEO of a private equity-backed business. We experienced six recurring years of growth, and had our best year since 2013. We were on the brink of the best first quarter in my tenure. However, also during this time, my friends in Italy who were helping to plan my daughter’s May wedding warned me about an emerging illness referred to as “the coronavirus” (or Covid-19). As someone commuting from Plano, Texas to Manhattan to run Captivate, I had a bad feeling about the iconic city where people spent every moment within close proximity of one another.
I expected to be back the following week, but the virus was surging in NYC and across the Northeast. Other cities followed. This was unlike anything I’d ever seen and frightening on both a personal and professional level.
For seven years, we focused our business on being the leading office media company serving urban working professionals across over 30 markets in the U.S. and Canada. During that time, we discussed diversifying the business into urban residential, sports and other verticals where our content and method of delivery would add value. These discussions had always ended with the board advising us to maintain focus on the office and our success metrics continued to align with that effort.
As the virus escalated into a full-blown pandemic, and professionals who could work from home were encouraged to do so, we saw our daily audience slowly decline in major metropolitan areas where Captivate always thrived. It quickly became apparent all companies were heading into uncharted waters, regardless of size or previous success, and our business was no exception.
The new not-so-normal
Assuming revenues would drop, I needed to shift from managing an EBIDTA business to a cash business. I met with my management team and board to set expectations for what we needed to do to preserve the company for our investors and staff to thrive again. To say these decisions were difficult is an understatement. I endured many sleepless nights. There was a delicate balance needed between developing a roadmap to return the company to growth and preserving the culture and morale we worked so hard to build.
We also experienced our own Covid-19 scares among staff. We decided to implement a company-wide office shut down to avoid exposing any employees until we could reopen safely. We adapted to Microsoft Teams calls and seeing each other in an unfiltered home environment. You could see the stress and worry on people’s faces as they juggled their work from urban apartments, houses turned into impromptu classrooms for their children.
I missed the weekly commutes to the office and working with clients in person. But I was driving my wife crazy at home, taking over her personal space to work all hours of the day. My heart broke for my daughter as she was deciding to keep or postpone her May wedding date. This was not in our control. The only thing in our control personally and professionally was how we reacted.
Staying alive
We monitored our audience daily using Wi-Fi sensors. We were amazed to see that even in the darkest days, we had more than 2 million essential workers and senior managers reporting to the office trying to figure out how to keep their business alive—just like us. Some brands decided to maintain their advertising schedules to increase their share of voice.
We started thinking about how we could reach a similar audience at home, at play, in health care facilities and the best ways to do that with limited cash and a new timeline for the virus to pass. We began to have conversations with our real estate partners to determine how we could support their efforts to reopen their buildings safely. I leaned on trusted advisors to help me figure out the best business approach to not only survive Covid-19 but lay the foundation for a more prominent company in ways we could never imagine previously. These discussions sparked a new level of innovation and helped to guide our plan of action.
Our departments pivoted away from their daily responsibilities and their original job functions. We tasked our real estate sales teams with expanding our scale in the urban multi-family space to reach upscale professionals working from home. We delegated our new product team with answering the marketplace need for hand sanitizers and temperature scanners, while also integrating the content network our audience expects. Out of this morphed our first new product since the company’s inception (Scan, a state-of-the-art health & wellness device).
We added distribution partnerships in doctor’s offices and golf carts (two industries that were continuing to prosper during the pandemic). We completed a cloud migration, which we had been working on for five years to put the business in a position to retire tech debt across the network. This allowed us to expand our content and programmatic capabilities across North America and beyond when the opportunity presents itself. And we increased our programmatic partnerships to nearly double the number of platforms that could be triggered by advertisers wanting to reach our valuable audience.
Lessons from our Covid year
These moments gave me confidence that we would survive and thrive on the other side. Here’s what stood out the most:
- Complete transparency within your company is a necessity to move forward
- Ask for external feedback from customers, stakeholders and competitors
- Continue to trust your instincts
- And learn to move fast, but always with purpose
We understand what it feels like to hurl through space and time where you cannot see where you are going. And yes, we will have a lovely wedding next September in Italy when I will walk my daughter down the aisle. I will be the father of the bride!
