Do you remember how the first two weeks of Covid lockdown were?
Overnight, businesses stopped spending money. The tap turned off.
Everyone was in shock, waiting to see what would happen next.
Consultants, coaches, freelancers, we were all looking at tumbleweed blowing through our empty pipelines and thinking, ‘Is this the end?’
As the days went by, the digital penny dropped and kept on dropping. Businesses that hadn’t yet taken digital seriously as a channel for marketing and sales realised they needed to get online yesterday. Everyone else upped their digital ante 200%.
Zooming entered the global vocab.
LinkedIn blew up with millions of new users, many hunting jobs, others chasing sales, some simply hoping to make sense of what was happening.
In all that mayhem, I first noticed this guy called Michael.
He was showing up on LinkedIn with videos from his Christchurch apartment, where he and his wife were navigating lockdown together.
I don’t remember him talking about this at the time, but his income had just fallen off a cliff.
Michael coaches speakers and speaks himself on public speaking.
Covid blew all his bookings out the water.
Of course, now, following the great digital pivot of 2020, speaking events are just as likely to be virtual happenings, as they are to take place in an actual conference centre. But this is now, and that was then. Every single event was cancelled.
So, Michael was probably feeling shocked, even a bit scared and desperate.
But that didn’t stop him getting out there and supporting others. Throughout lockdown, his was one of the most frequent faces in my feed. Sharing advice, showing up, drinking gin online and getting a bit loose and honest.
I don’t know about you, but some of the people that I met online during that whole period now feel like friends. I got so as I was looking forward to them showing up with their daily post, just as you’d look forward to having a coffee with a mate.
So, after lockdown ended, and I saw that Michael was offering speaker coaching as part of the Covid support programme, I rushed off and applied for Covid funding so that I could work with him. Reader, it was a damn fine idea.
So last week, Michael and I met for coffee at the Welder, and over Grizzly salted chocolate cookies (try them, you won’t regret) we talked about his coaching business, his wins, his fails, and his learnings. It may not surprise you that there was much gold.