The Silver Lining

The last couple of months have been a rude awakening for all of us. This Pandemic has made us re-look at our priorities and our general approach to our personal and our professional lives. The plans and forecasts that were being put into motion became redundant overnight. From an industry standpoint, it seems like the Hospitality, aviation, and the event services and entertainment industry has been the hardest hit due to this crisis. Confirmed events got canceled, bookings made in advance had to be called off, work that was in progress had to be stopped and the skill sets that we had harnessed and polished over the last years suddenly became useless. As event managers, a saying that is often repeated is, "One is only as good as their last event"; but in this case, even isn’t good enough.

Of course, the first few days of the lockdown were a welcome relief from the overworked, stressed lives that we all lead. However, once the reality of the lockdown and its side effects hit us, it made us analyze and relook at our business, our strengths, weaknesses, and the market in general and the mood amongst our colleagues and friends. As event managers, we are trained to look for solutions, to plan contingencies that will help us mitigate crisis that might or might not emerge during an event. In this scenario, this contingency was about our very survival.

They say every cloud has a silver lining and in our case, it was the perfect time to use all our collective experiences to come out with a solution that would not only help us survive the immediate crisis but also help us diversify and create a possible revenue model for the future. While one team started researching new technologies and engagement ideas; another team started engaging with friends, clients, and partners to try and understand the effects of the pandemic on each other's personal and professional lives, and what they thought the future would look like.

This helped us give new lease of life to an idea that was left in cold storage. The team at Rigger House has spent a large part of the last 2 months trying to give this idea a new lease of life. Seth Godin, the American author remarked, "Don't find customers for your products but find products for your Customers." and it is this mantra that has helped us launch our new brand, "GLOBAL" which is our foray into the virtual events space. At the present moment, we have already started leveraging GLOBAL with our already existing clients while also reaching out to clients and friends across different industries to see how this product can add value to them.

The exercise of talking to all our friends, clients and partners from different walks of life sprouted the idea of a video series, "Always Riggerous" where we bring thought leaders to answer relevant questions and share their mantras for sustainability and progress, in the form of a series of mini-episodes. The first collective in this series is called "Riggerous Minds," through which we would like to understand the present market scenario and a forecast on the possibilities or solutions that might emerge once we ride over these difficult times.

We at Rigger House are bullish about the future. We are using this time to research, learn and teach something new to each other. The new product Global is the effort of everybody coming together to create something new. The post-Covid World will see a lot of changes with social distancing being the norm and expectations from venues and events changing to suit this basic requirement. As event managers, we need to be prepared for all eventualities and hence our team is also working with our partners and vendors to look at various possible scenarios and the most viable solutions to combat them.

As a Company, we believe in Rudyard Kipling's words from The Jungle Book, "For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack". We strongly believe that if we have to emerge stronger from this crisis, then we must support and look out for each other, be it our colleagues, partners, or our esteemed clients.

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