What a year! I started my business in late March 2019 and was expecting an adventure, but the reality has been more than I could ever imagine. My first year of business was profitable, growing and amazing in many ways. I got fantastic customers, ambitious business partners and met interesting people from every corner of the world. I managed to do exactly what I had in mind when I started my journey as an entrepreneur. I have worked with topics I am passionate about, with businesses I care deeply about and have been able to combine my expertise with learning new things. Founding a company was on my bucket list for a long time and surprisingly it also fulfilled another item on the same list: Australia.
My 2020 was supposed to be even better. I was negotiating with several new customers in Asia, Europe and in the Nordics. I was ready to onboard a new business partner. And then we all got hit by the Corona. The pandemic hit Asia first and all my global business died in two weeks. All initiatives were postponed or put on hold, no meetings, no sales, nothing. A week later my European business died and finally my local business died overnight. And understandably so. Everyone had to focus on assuring their own survival with diminishing revenue, stable cost base and people shaken by this uncertainty. I could do nothing but observe the pandemic reveal, take care of my family and do (too) early spring work in my garden.
I live in Finland: a Nordic country with globally the highest level of digitalization and education, extensive social security including free health care, one of the safest countries in the world with clean air and plenty of beautiful nature. And with a young, majority female government that acted swiftly: schools were closed, group gatherings banned and the South of Finland isolated. Within a day my children transferred into a fully digital school with classroom meetings and exams. Their sport teams had to stop practice but came up with digital and individual training instead. People who had not worked remotely before adopted contemporary tools and realized that they became more efficient. Several small businesses that previously relied on face to face interaction turned around in a few weeks: high-end restaurants started to offer take out lunches and five-star pre-prepped meal packages. Small businesses became agile without knowing the word and we have only seen the beginning of this.
I was in London on the Brexit night, devastated. Last fall young, educated people bluntly told me that if an idea/product is not invented in the UK it is not good enough for business over there. The US has been practically closed for international business due to the current administration. At first, I feared this forced isolation might work for these ugly nationalist forces. Even though we are all experiencing lockdowns and are increasingly prone to think locally (and should buy from local small businesses), we cannot afford nationalism or arrogance in order to survive and to keep running our businesses. We need to maintain the best parts of these new ways of working in the post Corona era. The value of face to face human interaction will increase. But the way we do business globally will not be the same after this crisis. And I do want to live in a world where SMEs are able to run global business.
Apeiroga received a Covid-19 grant from Business Finland to research and develop global B2B business tools for SMEs: sales, sales process, contracts – all of it. Technologies that enable us to create trust without being physically present are available. Some of these tools exists and are used by large corporations. I want to make them available for SMEs, easy to use and create the ones that are missing. The goal is to make us all faster to revenue when business picks up and to resolve a few tangible pain points. If you continue to believe that the future is global and digital, also for small businesses, please join me in this initiative and let’s innovate together! There are plenty of opportunities and learning in this situation. The best ones are shared.
There are several new items on my Bucket list post Corona but one remains. I will return to Australia when possible. There will be a time when the beaches are not closed, and the land is not burning. And I will be there in person with my digital sales tools and a surfboard!
