An agency launched to help clients with the transition to a digital and distributed workplace during COVID-19. Started by Braver in March 2020.
In early March 2020, we had an emergency meeting at the office. We had read about COVID-19 in Asian newspapers, but had no idea what it could mean if there was a global pandemic out of this virus. The only thing we agreed on was that pandemic was unlikely to be positive for us as a company.
This is the short story of how we turned a crisis into an opportunity, launched brand new services specifically tailored for the pandemic, and turned 2020 into our best year so far.
In the aforementioned crisis meeting, we drew up what we thought were plausible scenarios if COVID did indeed strike.
Worst-case scenarios looked unpleasant to say the least — all our customers disappear, missions are paused and the world comes to a halt.
Faced with such a possible outcome, we did what any entrepreneurial bunch would do: we fled the city to think and make a plan.
To calm down from the panic that was on the march in Oslo, we rented a van, filled up with boxed food, and headed for a cottage in the Kragerø archipelago.
Once there, our creative process began to figure out how to turn a global pandemic from a crisis into a growth opportunity for us as a company. We've done this type of process for clients many times — now it was time to do the same for ourselves, knowing that if we didn't find answers, it could mean the end for our entire company.
We started with a couple of trigger questions that we wrote down and brainstormed around:
After we had written down a long list of possible answers to these questions, we had to ask ourselves two more questions: which of these pandemic impacts can we as a company influence in a positive way? How can we contribute, solve problems, and create value?
We decided to make bets that the following hypothesis would play out:
If COVID-19 becomes a global pandemic, as in previous pandemics, people will want to minimize contact between people for a period of time.
It will lead to remote work and home office quickly becoming the preferred way of working, but the transition to such a workday will be difficult for many people and organizations.
We chose this basic hypothesis both because we considered it plausible and because it contained the seeds of a business opportunity if we could help make the transition to a digital workday easier for people.
On March 9, we decided to make an effort to achieve just that. On the same day, we acquired the domain www.remotework.no, and started work on what would later become a full-fledged agency to help customers with digital collaboration.
Three days afterwards, Erna Solberg declared a national lockdown in Norway. The next morning, every single office worker in the entire country was working from home -- many of them for the first time.
It became chaotic. Very few organizations were ready to go completely remote overnight. Many had no practices or routines in place for how to communicate with each other, collaborate smartly or get things done efficiently when all the staff sat separately in the home office. We, under our new domain and separate brand RemoteWork, stood ready to help these organizations function well digitally, because we ourselves had been working that way for years.
We honestly didn't know exactly how to help customers crack the codes of digital collaboration on day one. We also didn't know which aspects of digital collaboration would be most demanding for people. That's why we did what we always do in the face of that kind of uncertainty -- we started by talking to potential customers to gather insights and spot customer issues. We then prototyped and tested a broad set of possible solutions to the problems we had found.
After a couple of boom trips and experiments that didn't work very well, we ran into something interesting. After we announced a webinar titled “Learn how to facilitate digital workshops”, we bought some ads on Facebook to check interest in the webinar. Then we went to bed. The next morning we woke up and could hardly believe our own eyes — hundreds of people had signed up for the webinar!
The interest in the first webinar was a sign that we were onto something.
The first webinar turned into several webinars with the same theme, which led to more than 3000 entries in total.
In the webinars, we expressed interest in taking a course with us to learn more about digital workshops and digital interaction. We received a good response to this, which is why we developed a two-day course that was sold and completed nearly 100 times during 2020 and 2021.
The success of the workshop course led to us receiving several consulting assignments from clients who wanted help to function better digitally and distributed.
That led us to hire more good people in the RemoteWork team and to develop RemoteWork as a separate brand separately from Braver.
All of this led to that story you're reading right now.
We were afraid that COVID-19 would cause us to go bankrupt. That's why we started RemoteWork as a hedge, as an insurance policy if you will, against the pandemic. We wanted to turn the pandemic from being a crisis to becoming an opportunity for us.
Looking back at RemoteWork, we have to conclude that we got to create the hedge we wanted. The graph below is the proof of that. It shows revenue for RemoteWork in brown, and infection figures in Norway in red — note that every time there was a new wave of infection, there was also a revenue surge for RemoteWork a couple of weeks afterwards.
Our RemoteWork project ended up accounting for 40% of all turnover in Braver AS in 2020, despite the fact that RW did not sell anything until April 22 of that year, when Kristin bought the first course space at one of our workshop courses. In other words, RemoteWork was extremely important to us in 2020, helping to make the year the best we had ever had at that point.
RemoteWork also contributed well to Braver's revenue growth in 2021, but the contribution was not as critically important as the previous year, because our other consulting business picked up speed properly.
By the end of 2021, we were at a crossroads. We realized that the RemoteWork project now cost more than it tasted, because it tied up the time, focus and energy that should have gone into developing the core business of Braver. We made an honest effort to separate RemoteWork into a separate company, but unfortunately we didn't get it the way we wanted — that's why we chose to discontinue the project at the start of 2022.
We believe that there is still a market opportunity in creating an agency specialized in helping clients with digital and distributed collaboration, because this way of working has come to stay. But we choose to focus on other market opportunities going forward.
We look back on RemoteWork as an amazing learning journey, a financial success, and a welcome opportunity to work with brilliant employees and get to know many forward-thinking customers. Thanks for the journey to everyone who was involved!
Here is a recording of the webinar “How to drive innovation in the midst of the pandemic?” , which addresses how we took RemoteWork from an idea to a profitable business opportunity in a matter of weeks.
Book a call with Christer, or phone him on +47 400 52 503
