Employee Retain and Train

Hey, event gang, I wanted to ask you something today around what specifically are you doing with your employees at this time, if you have employees? It's a really tough question. It's a really unique time we're in.

So obviously the whole event world has just been shut down, from big B to C events that kind of 30,000 and 50,000 music festivals, B to B events down to your small one to 5,000 kind of events, weddings, anywhere where there's gatherings is being absolutely shut down during this time, so it poses a real challenge, not just for business owners and entrepreneurs and even staff, but there's also the next part is how are we going to position ourselves for when we actually come out of this?

You know, a lot of people out there have staff members who range from between one person up to hundreds and obviously each method for dealing with this is going to be different depending on the size of your company.

But what I guess I want to ask you today is what specific things are you doing to retain your staff so that when the event world snaps back into place in the coming months, you actually do have a team ready to go? And how are you trying to retain your staff, but also what skills are you trying to develop within them so that when the event world does snap back into place, you're actually coming back from a really strong position?

So, from a retention point of view, it's challenging when there's no cash flow coming into the business to actually keep paying staff. Some governments have got stimulus packages out there, which is definitely assisting businesses to retain their staff, which is awesome, so I'm just going to focus on that at the minute because it's going to tie nicely into the next part, which is really around training and upkilling and making sure that they're going to be around for the longer time as well.

So the stimulus packages are really helping just keep the lights on in the business. Some companies are going down to 50% time or one day a week and just keeping to pay their staff and keeping keeping along. But my challenge to you would be what's that program that you can put together so that when your staff and your business comes out the other side of this, you're actually in a much stronger position?

So areas like training and development, one of the key areas that we've been focusing on in our companies is really trying to up-skill our staff around what's the latest across Facebook marketing, Instagram marketing, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, making sure we have some really good, deep knowledge in this space. Who's our ideal customer and how are we going to access them? What's our content and strategy plan to make sure that we're getting the message out to the best and most relevant people as well?

And then we're also building a tool which is going to be really interesting in this space to actually, when we come out, to be able to help people allocate the marketing budgets much more effectively and efficiently.

Marketing is going to be a huge area of conversation. There are probably going to be reduced budgets and expectations around that. So how do we help people make the most out of their marketing budget as well is going to be something that we're focusing on at the moment?

So, as you guys know, my name's Robin Stafford, I run a company called Half Eaten Donut. We specialize in digital marketing for events and analytics, attribution, these kinds of areas. So we're really going through this with you at the moment, but trying to understand how to position ourselves so that we're doing a lot of research, a lot of development, focusing on retaining staff, but focusing on how our clients can use this time as well to upskill and train.

I've got a couple of calls today with some of my favorite clients. They're absolute gems, very open-minded and very understanding of this time as well.

We're actually going to go through a really down-led approach for them and their content strategy so that we're going to use this time over the next two to four weeks to get really deep, do some research, understand the digital landscape, understand their ideal customer. And so we can put together content, a plan, and an approach so that when the event happens again, that we've got a really nice, really crisp and clear idea. So we're not wasting any budget, we've just really focused on their ideal customer and ideal prospect and we know that because we've done taken this time to do the research as well.

So let me know in the comments below, how are you specifically doing this as well? How are you managing to upskill during this time so that when you snap back into place, you've added value to your clients, you've retained your employees and you've set yourself up in a position to grow as well?

I'd be fascinated to hear, drop in the comments below, let's have a little convo and let's help each other out.

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