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Work habits in times of Corona
“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” The famous John Lennon quote surely rings true for many of us these days. In order to keep safe and healthy, our everyday life has changed in a way we never thought it would.
In October 2019, when we commissioned our first continuous dry kiln in North America. We were excited, the customer was happy and the results were very good. We were more than ready to step up our efforts to reach out to the sawmills.
When I was in Maine with prospects from Canada at the end of February 2020 to proudly show our new kiln the mood already was a little tense and a lot of people were talking about the new virus.
A week later I was in San Diego at the Nawla Leadership Summit and at that time the stock market had tanked. People were unsure what to say and there were a lot of jokes about how to shake or not shake hands.
Another week later I had to be in Maine again with more prospects. This time two of my Swedish colleagues were with me as well and we had a great time with lots of fun. I was finally back in Vancouver on the evening of March 12th and only the next day – when the news were full of talks about closing the USA/Canadian border I realized how serious the situation was and how lucky I had been to smoothly have gotten back from Maine to Vancouver without problems.
Since then many things have changed. No trade shows anymore, no conferences, simply no travelling at all. So how are we going to do be able to start dialogues and listen to the needs of sawmills?
Well, here’s the thing. It works and it works even better than I would have thought. We must be more creative and use modern technologies more efficiently. Calling still works to show your customers that you care and to ask them how they are. A question that goes unusually deep nowadays.
Online presentations and meetings offer a way of staying connected and getting your message across unlike anything else we could do a couple of years back. It also tells us something for the future: you might want to think twice about jumping in your car or a plane to visit a customer. Why not probing the situation by having an online presentation or a video conference first? That can make a following visit so much more effective because you can cut to the chase right away. After all it is all about the product.
And that has not changed. We still offer the most modern continuous lumber kilns on the market!