It dawned on me yesterday…

…when my wife told me she had to lock herself in the loo to get away from our kids and then try to get some work done… I thought, she can’t be alone.

It reminded me of the video I found last year and realised it was more relevant now than ever.

To put things in context, my wife Maryrose, works in our business.  Her role is an administrator, and this works well with our family life.  Our kids are 10 and 12 with the oldest just starting High School.

I Was A Primary School Teacher…

In my first career I was a Primary Teacher, so during lockdown #1 I was able to assess and pull out my old text books and take the kids though a 5 month program of work, which was great, it gave structure to a day and allowed my wife to remain at home and balance work and kids.

This time round it is much more difficult.  High School appears to have less structure and we are quickly feeling out of our depth with the ability to support some subjects, like German!  My youngest won’t get up in the morning and my eldest thinks he knows everything and is able to pull the wool over our eyes with Microsoft Teams.

Family Support

My wife also have elderly parents who need support, almost daily and her brother-in-law finished chemotherapy in April 2020 and has had to self isolate for months, so her sister needed some support.

So, people trying to balance work, home kids and support extended family is starting to take its toll, and we are not alone.

More People Visiting Our Site

What I have noticed in the past 9 months is the uptake of access to our online quoting system.  We receive daily request to gain access to the restrictive pricing that is only available to trade (those who resell large format trade print).  I think this is because our system is transparent and simple to use (watch here).  There is nothing to hide, we will dispatch when we say we will, your job will be as specified.

People Are Working At Different Times Of The Day

What I have found most interesting is the busiest times of day.  Because our clients are able to get a quote 24/7 we have noticed that the traffic to our site has in fact increased but spread our over more hours in the day.

We are noticing that people are uploading their artwork at night-time, checking quotes from us at 5.30am and engaging more with online chat rather than email or telephone.

Lockdown#1 Was a Boom…

We obviously had a boom during Lockdown#1 with floor stickers but this quickly turned into Health and Safety Signage for building contractors, stickers and signs for councils and then wayfinding signs for zoos, office partition screens for offices, transparent rollup banners for hairdressers and barbers and even sanitisation stations, it was incredible.

What Is Not Selling But What Is?

We have not seen a big uptake in soft signage like flags, in fact this has almost disappeared.  But we have started to see an uptake in banners recently.

It is a very interesting time but also challenging as we must remain optimistic that the economy will return to normal and that our personal lives become less stressful as controllable structure returns to our day.

Soon we will be able to book a holiday or just a day off with something to look forward to.

Take care, stay sane, ignore the knocking on the toilet.