Pause, Adapt & Restart. Our Covid-19 Journey

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Every business has been affected by COVID-19, the worldwide crisis has closed businesses or forced companies of all shapes and sizes to adapt and evolve. We’ve seen cafes become takeaways, vegetable wholesalers deliver produce to homes and local convenience stores become drive-throughs by taking their business online.

We’ve accepted that the pandemic will, unfortunately, have a longer-lasting impact than anticipated, however, one silver lining could be that, like ourselves, businesses are being forced to take time to pause and reflect, repurpose and make changes to adapt their businesses, then restart as soon as they can.

It can be hard to be creative and come up with innovative solutions to adapt your business at any time. And with the pressures of COVID-19 it might be even harder to be resourceful and think creatively. We are juggling so many other things in life, for me homeschooling was tough, finding the balance of quality mum time and work time in order to simply survive and get through this stressful time was tainted with mum guilt. My advice to you is don’t worry too much if the creative juices aren’t flowing properly – relax, they will come – and if they don’t there are other businesses out there fighting for survival that can help. For us NOW is the time to adapt, it’s certainly not time to quit.

Here at Optimul, we set out to look at what changes we could make to be able to continue to support our customers post COVID-19.

We looked at ways in which businesses can streamline, simplify, and add structure to their business. We found many businesses are surviving through sheer graft, firefighting, and responding reactively to whatever comes their way. They may have a never-ending to-do list, plan one day at a time, and know their own processes within their head but this will only get you so far and allows for far too much human error. It also doesn’t allow much in the way of delegation, which would free them up to focus on what they do best.

So, at Optimul, we have streamlined our own service offerings into 3 simple elements to help simplify your business structure and accelerate your business growth, these are:

PLAN. PROCESS. PROMOTE.

Firstly, when it comes to PLANNING, no Optimul client is the same. We help our clients find ways to plan, formulate the roadmap ahead, set goals, and embedded systems to ensure the business and its employees understand the vision and growth goals.

Secondly, when implementing PROCESSES we work closely with our clients to find what works best for them, simplifying working practices, introducing new tools, and ensuring any improvements are integrated into existing systems and tools.

And thirdly, when it comes to PROMOTING businesses we ensure that their marketing efforts are aligned and to the PLAN, ideal customers are targeted and when enquiries or orders come in the businesses, they have the PROCESSES in place to fulfill their customer needs.

Our next step was to get our brand aligned with our service offering and be able to emphasize our personality more in our messaging so we reached out to Reason Agency to help us achieve that.  

THE REBRAND

I’d been feeling a bit blah about our lack of branding for a while. When we did market our services, it felt too stuffy and didn’t get across our passion and personality. We provide professional consultancy style services but our 1 to 1 support and ‘get stuck in’ approach didn’t come through in our marketing.

Our business, as well as our confidence to clearly convey how we support our customers has grown. We are about making business manageable, reducing workload stress, and maximising efficiencies to improve work-life balance. We wanted our new brand to reflect this and show our mixed personalities of advisors, coaches, doers, reviewers, and implementers. Optimul is sociable, approachable, caring, determined, creative, and ever-evolving. The vision for Optimul came down to one thing, we want to help make your business life easier, so you have more time to enjoy your actual life.

Working with Lhacy from Reason Agency, she understood our goals, vision, and saw the impact we want to make and set to work to help us deliver it. I felt Lhacy really got what I was trying to achieve from early on and even now she questions and challenges my thought process to make me explore deeper and learn harder and I love that.

Branding is about achieving consistency across all areas of the business and each and every customer touchpoint. Essentially ‘the big idea’ which lies at the heart of your company, must touch and inform everything that you do.

The vision, values, and tone of voice for the new Optimul brand had to create a ‘connection’ with people, this was a top priority. It had to embody; connectivity, capture the culture, and the personality of its founder Nicola Davidson. Most importantly, frame the brand’s message in something of value that businesses will feel drawn to.

The result, the Optimul rebrand captures the now, its relevant and agile all-encompassing support to businesses and their owners”.

Lhacy Murray, Reason Agency

To support companies with lead generation and growth, Optimul has offered marketing services in the form of websites and general marketing assistance, but coming out of COVID-19 we wanted to strengthen our service to offer more than that to our clients. 

We felt we needed a specialist partner to enhance our Marketing services so we could provide our customers with the best offerings available and help them escalate their own products and services, lead generation, and revenue.

Reason Agency is definitely the Marketing partner we had been searching for. The way they understand Optimul clients, being branding experts they are strategically creative in their approach to marketing and as trained designers they can deliver the whole package – from a brand, to design, to marketing to capturing brand impact they knit it all together.

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