2020: The highs, the lows, and everything in between
By Lawrence Breen
2020 has been one hell of a year. We’ve all been impacted in a variety of ways, and it’s been a rollercoaster of a ride.
Thinking back over the year, it only feels like yesterday that 2019 had ended and we were spring boarding into 2020. At Inland Digital, we’d had a great 2019 and were forecasting a strong 2020.
Then it all changed!
Droughts, fires and floods
We operate in regional NSW and Western Sydney, so it’s a big area to cover. We started the year with horrible bushfires that affected so much of our country. From a business perspective, many of our clients were directly impacted and there were some amazing stories of courage and hope from that period of time.
Then we were smashed by heavy rain in February and that led to flood in some regions! Again, living in regional NSW, it felt like a feast and a famine all rolled into one.
The one bonus of the rain was that NSW, which had been in drought for so long, saw some of the best rain in ten years, leading to a year of bumper crops.
COVID changes
I’ve written plenty of content around the pandemic and its impacts on our region and our colleagues in the business world. We were no different: Being a business that provides office technology, having people forced out of the office into a full time working from home environment presented some challenges for our business. We relied on the federal government support packages like many other businesses, to ensure we kept our business functioning during those challenging early months of the pandemic.
I’d like to thank both our team at Inland Digital and our clients for their support during this time. Our staff were fantastic and worked with our management team to ensure we could operate as normally as possible during that tough period. Our clients were equally fantastic, working with us to manage their technology challenges and providing support and advice as we all tried to adjust.
We changed the conversations we were having with our clients. It was less focused on selling technology and more focused on helping each other through. The resilience so many people and businesses showed was incredibly inspiring.
So a big thank you to our team, clients, and partners!
Heading back to normal
Being an island nation has really worked in our favour. We seem to be moving back towards a normal life while so many other nations around the world are battling second and third waves.
That ‘normality’ has some differences: It’s not the same as we were before. For business, it’s about picking ourselves up and moving forward, working to create opportunities and employment. There’s certainly some glitter in the dust out there and the opportunities exist for all of us to work together to benefit the entire community.
It’s also great to be working with so many of our clients on automating their process and using technology to drive efficiencies in their business. As we all look to improve the way we work, our tagline of transforming business feels more important than ever.
With technology being so crucial, we’re keen to help as many businesses as we can to unlock the features of their tech to work better for their specific needs Keen to discuss your 2021 technology strategies? Email me at lbreen@inlanddigital.com.au and we can arrange a time to discuss what’s happening in your business.