I remember March 13th, 2020 like it was yesterday. It was our last physical meeting in our office building before going remote for the pandemic. We had no idea at the time we would never use an office building again, and be a better company for it.
Like many companies, we’d been a “physical” company. We’re an Agile shop and prior to the pandemic, it was a closely-held belief that Agile teams had to interact in person to be effective. We know now how laughable that is. What we talked about that day wasn’t about how to get by until the pandemic passed. We’d crunched the Covid data and knew it wasn’t a matter of weeks before we could go back.
Instead, what we talked about was greatness. That, if we had to go remote, then we would need to discover how to be great at every aspect of our business as a remote company. Client service, communication, teamwork, prioritization, strategy, training. Everything we already did was up for reinterpretation as a remote firm. At least as good as we already were was the baseline. Significantly better was the goal.
This approach is fundamental at Working Planet. Any agency will frequently experience events that are out of their control. But every change has its silver linings if you only look. So we made sure to look.
We haven’t posted a blog update since before the pandemic because the silver linings we found were profound, and therefore we’ve been ridiculously busy. As a remote company, we expanded to team members in twelve US states and three countries. The business has more than doubled since pre-pandemic. Our clients (across the US and in Canada and Europe) have achieved record growth almost across the board. Our practices continue to evolve rapidly through innovation and experimentation but at a faster pace. We’re still an Agile shop with teams that care for and challenge each other, but that now interact remotely. Zoom is our office building and our old building has been sold off. We’re never going back.
What hasn’t changed is our unwavering dedication to growing our clients’ businesses through the financial optimization of their paid media campaigns. We have always recognized that the financial investment in advertising comes with an expected financial return. We’ve never believed that should be left to chance, and that tight financial analysis and optimization yields the best returns from the investment in advertising. It is a hard problem to solve, but the hard problems are the ones worth solving.
In July we passed our 20th anniversary as a media optimization firm. We’re now focused on our next phase of growth in 2024. New Year’s is an exciting time. A fresh new year, hot out of the oven and full of opportunity. We’re excited to continue to embrace the future with constant change and corresponding silver linings. We hope you all are as excited as we are!