When COVID-19 hit, nobody knew what the future held. Would business be slower or busier? Would clients let technicians into their homes? Would custom integrators be deemed essential workers?
Greg Morales and Luis Rodriguez, co-owners of WOW Media, tackled the situation head-on.
“When COVID happened, Greg and I sat down and said, ‘OK, this is new. How can we overcome it?’” recalls Rodriguez. Soon, their phones were ringing off the hook from clients who primarily wanted network upgrades.
“When COVID first hit, everybody was home. All those prospective clients were home reading their email because there was nowhere else to go. I wasn’t having to chase them down. I cold-called 15 to 20 clients during that time.”
Luis Rodriguez, co-owner, WOW MEdia
“We decided we would take each job one by one and be careful, but we wanted to take care of our employees first,” says Rodriguez.
They started by gathering the entire staff for a team meeting and open discussed the situation. During the initial weeks of the outbreak, they reduced everyone down to 32 hours to boost cashflow.
Then, Morales and Rodriguez had their accountant assist their staff on reducing their personal credit card interest rates and helped them take advantage of the mortgage and rent forbearance program offered by the government. They even helped several team members actually refinance their mortgages during the crisis.
“We wanted to help our employees have more cash on hand. It made our employees feel better knowing that we were here for them,” says Rodriguez.
Ultimately, he believes COVID-19 will be “a blessing in disguise for innovators like me,” not only because he was able to protect and secure his team, but also because WOW Media was able to obtain contracts for several large projects during that time when other local area custom integration companies were not as nimble.
“When COVID first hit, everybody was home. All those prospective clients were home reading their email because there was nowhere else to go. I wasn’t having to chase them down. I cold-called 15 to 20 clients during that time,” he recalls.
One other tactic instituted by WOW Media was to convert some projects to Time & Materials billings during COVID-19 because of the unknown additional labor time due to the PPP precautions necessary.
“When we explained the situation to our customers, they understood. We agreed upon an hourly rate with check-in and check-out time. It actually worked out better for us,” says Rodriguez.
That T&M conversion proved to be fruitful in several instances. In one case, the WOW Media team had to wait hours to access an elevator for a high-rise condo project in Boston because the state was restricting the number of contractors on the site.
