Alright, y’all wanted to know HOW we are doing this.

Good news...

Here’s some insights in a thread of BTS strategy

we wasted no time wondering “what if” - instead, the leadership team gathered in a daily emergency meeting before the statewide closures were announced to game plan.

The Lesson: focus on what you’re doing today but never ever ignore outside forces.

we asked ourselves: what is the nucleus of the core value we provide? We decided: fast and affordable images were the nucleus - everything else was nice to have.

The Lesson: be brutally honest and kill your darlings.

once we focused in on photos, our CTO stopped all product development and moved his team exclusively toward developing a remote version of our core tech.

The Lesson: empowering your leadership team to pivot fast and cancel projects you love is key in a crisis.

our operations team was tasked with selecting our photographers who would be open to launching an “at home” studio and developing remote trainings to help launch in their homes.

The Lesson: your people want to help. Involving them early was key.

my co-founder and I gave each other the gift of “one moping day” to just feel like shit about how bad things seemed. No judgements. No trying to fix it. Just acceptance.

The Lesson: make room for your feelings. Process them and move forward with powerful acceptance.

testing became our life. We knew we had one shot to get our existing customers to convert to our new entirely virtual experience. It had to feel as special as their previous IRL experience.

The Lesson: never doubt the power of retention to propel growth.

launch with joy. We always celebrated new launches with champagne and dance parties and gifs. Going fully remote was no exception.

The Lesson: survival mode is not antonym of celebratory mode.

listen like your life depends on it. Every customer who had a bad experience got a personal call. What wasn’t working? Could we fix it? Is it technical, operational, something else?

The Lesson: most people want to give feedback! What seems negative at first can be a gift.

we realized shipping was a MAJOR new aspect of our new business working. So we shopped APIs and quickly picked @goshippo to get our clients products to shoot faster.

The Lesson: pick off little wins. And don’t build everything your damn self.

all our marketing needed to be redesigned. We became the queens of templates. We launched 12 types of ads in 3 different styles (36 total) in 24 hours.

The Lesson: don’t poo poo workable solutions in pursuit of perfection.

we sent all our leaders to Leadership Camp with @tellsue and doubled down on our leaders. We embraced each other emotionally. We got deep with our humanity. We recommitted.

The Lesson: businesses are people solving problems for other people. Invest in people.

we set the goal BIG AS FUCK. 5 months to $2M. It felt crazy. But we were in it together.

The Lesson: forget surviving. What does winning look like for you? Choose winning. Imagine winning. Winners think about winning.

we celebrated every day. We started a channel on @SlackHQ called Client Love and celebrated like deranged meme driven maniacs when people loved @soonastudios

The Lesson: winners choose to see how they win every day.

I put myself out there. I wrote memos to the team every week reminding them why we are here. I went ALL OUT on company dress up days. I made videos of myself dancing when we had a record sales day.

The Lesson: CEO means Cheerlead Every Opportunity

My cofounder & I went BIG ON BELIEVING. We texted, DM’d and made a point to talk openly about “when we’re a billion dollar business...” we didn’t hold the dream in our heads. We gave birth to it.

The Lesson: be vulnerable as fuck with your cofounder. Dream together.