247: Covering the Basics - Running a Business During a Pandemic

Hey there, friends. York here. And as I'm sure is the case with all of you, one of the things that is on our collective mind here as the Food Blogger Pro team and also here at the Ostrom household is the Coronavirus COVID 19, this virus that is spreading throughout the globe. And we do have a global audience here. And one of the things that I find amazing is how we are all in this in the same way. I was just reading the other day the Cebu City, Philippines local paper, the Sun Star. I was reading it online. Lindsay and I spent a year in the Philippines. And so every once in a while I check in on that newspaper and read what they're doing and what they're up to. Was thinking about the people of Cebu in the Philippines during this time. And it's striking how similar the articles and the content are for the Philippines newspapers when compared to the Star Tribune here in Minneapolis St. Paul, Minnesota. We are all dealing with this and it's real and it's scary and we don't have all the information and every day it's changing. And it felt right to have a conversation about that, to share a little bit about how we are approaching that, both personally within our life and then also within the businesses. Because that's what we talk about here on this podcast. We talk about publishing content online, we talk about blogging, we talk about online business. But before we get into that, I just want to acknowledge that this isn't a business first time. This isn't. This isn't the thing that we should be thinking about. First and foremost, we should be thinking about the people who are most affected by this. We should be thinking about our families, and we should be thinking about what we can do to contribute to slowing this down. And as you all know, that means staying inside, distancing yourself, making sacrifices for a relatively short period of time. We don't know how long it'll be, but in the grand scheme of things, it is a relatively short period of time and that will have a big impact on other people's lives. So I wanted to take today's podcast episode to talk a little bit about that and actually have four different topics that I'm going to cover that all have to do with how we are thinking about this. And my hope is that as you hear how we are thinking about it, that you can take something away from that and apply it to how you're thinking about it. So before we get into it, a couple things. Number one, I just wanted to mention and to send out a thank you. To those of you who made, maybe you're listening to this podcast or maybe you know somebody who is this person who are serving on the front lines, whether that be at a business that is an essential business that is continuing to stay open or a healthcare professional. Lindsay's dad is a family practice doctor, so he's on the front lines doing these tests. Lindsay's sister is a nurse. Same for her. She has a patient she's taken care of who has coronavirus. And these are people who are serving, they're sacrificing in a way that is really generous because they're exposing themselves to this. And so I want to say thank you if you are one of those people or if you know some of those people and also people who are working front lines at these stores, that stays open, stay open the grocery stores and gas stations or whatever it might be. We want to say thank you to those people who have those essential jobs to keep things running and to keep people healthy. And then also a reminder to take this seriously. I know that the people who listen to this podcast are smart, sacrificial, good people. And so this might not be many of you, but maybe it will be some of you that need a reminder that it's important to take the guidance that we are getting seriously to, whether it be social distancing, staying at home, doing whatever you can to isolate for, again, a period of time. We don't know how long that will be, but for a hopefully short, and especially the grand scheme of things, relatively short period of time in order to stop the spread of this terrible virus. So those two things are important to point out before we get into it. Like I said, we're going to be covering some things that kind of tie into work and business, but are also, as you know, so personal as well. We have four different things, four different topics that I want to cover. These include conversations that we're having with our team as well as conversations that we're having here between Lindsay and I. And my hope is that you can take something away here. So here's how we're approaching our work, our businesses, our blog during this time. Number one, cover the basics. This actually doesn't have anything to do with work, but I think it's one of the most important things to start with. The first way is actually not to think about work. The first thing we're thinking about is covering the basics. And that means getting as much sleep as we can use, eating healthy, and for you, eating healthy, if that food is available, drinking lots of Water, digitally connecting with family and friends, taking time away from screens and computer and news. Essentially, it's the basics, the foundation that you need in order to feel solid as a person. These are the essentials, these are the basics. And we need to think first about how we can cover those. And if we find that we're struggling to cover those things, then we need to make sacrifices. If we, if we can, with the work that we're doing, it's better to temporarily scale back on some of the work in order to cover the basics. And on the podcast, we talk a lot about playing the long term game. And this is a season that's a great example of how important it is to focus on three years, not three months. And if we get too caught up in the day to day rat race, if we think, you know, the things that I'm working on, the work that I've done, it's going to be impacted. I'm going to see things go down over the next few months or maybe this. This year we're focusing on short term, but what's important is to think about long term here. And if we shift too much thought into growing and building and continuing at the same pace that we were before during this season, where realistically it's not healthy for us to do that, then we risk long term burnout and we risk downside. There's the risk is greater than the reward. One of the things that I shared with our team recently is that the reality is for this season, however long it lasts, we don't know, is that if we usually operate at like a speed of 10, then we should plan on operating at a speed of like 6, 5 or 4. And this isn't a season for productivity hacks or extreme hustle. It's a season of maintaining and stabilizing as opposed to doing whatever we can to seek growth, which is maybe a mindset that we would have a year ago because the waters were smoother. And what I mean by that is like imagine that you're a speedboat. Your business is a speedboat, you are a speedboat, whatever you're working on is a speedboat. And over the past few years, really for an extended period of time, economically speaking, at least, it's been really smooth waters. Your boat can go pretty fast without any issues. So if any of you have been in a speedboat or gotten in a boat that can go fast, you know that if it's smooth waters, you can go pretty fast. And it's kind of fun and it feels good and you can cover a lot of ground, however, or not ground, cover a lot of water. I suppose these past few weeks, though, or these past few months, depending on where you live, have introduced some pretty serious waves. And the water's kind of become choppy. And we need to take that speed of the boat down in order to make sure that we make it through this stormy patch safely and get to the other side where there will be smooth waters again and again. We don't know when that will be or how long that will last. But what we do know and what I do know and what I'm confident around, is that continuing to barrel forward at the same speed that we're going before, when we have these choppy waters, is there's more risk than there is reward in that. And so it's important for us to dial that speed back so we can cover the basics, so we can do those things that are so important for us foundationally as humans to get through this patch of rough weather and rough waters, to get to that other side where maybe we can put the speed of the boat back up again. So that's all about covering the basics. It's one of the things that we're thinking a lot about, how do we do that? And how do we do that well, and. And it's a mindset shift from even three months ago, four months ago, where we were thinking, hey, how do we grow? How do we do that really quickly? Not that we give that up forever, but just this season. This is a season around stability and maintaining versus growing. Number two, I think it's important to take time to know thyself and know thy audience. And as publishers and as creators, there's a question during this season of what does content look like? It feels like the only thing on somebody's mind and the only thing that we're talking about and the only thing we're thinking about is COVID 19. It's coronavirus. So as publishers and publishers in the food and recipe space, how do you go about doing that? And there's questions that are coming in, like, is it bad to write a post about coronavirus? Or COVID 19? Should I just keep producing content and pretend like it's not happening? Or if I mention it, how should I go about talking about it? And I think it's important to point out the fact that there isn't a playbook for situations like this. We've never gone through it. And therefore anyone who's giving advice around this is doing so from their own understanding of the best way to respond to this from a content perspective. And that's why this is one of the best times to know thyself and know thy audience. So as you think through it, what do you feel yourself drawn towards as it relates to the content that you're producing? Maybe you feel like the world is already overwhelmed with news and content about COVID 19 and it feels like the best thing for you would be to put content into the world that gives people an escape from all of the noise. That feels like what would be right for you, and it feels like the best way for you to create content. Great. Or perhaps you're someone who processes through this with your readers and you know that it would also help you process through things. And so you want to go about producing a piece of content and acknowledging it. Maybe you dedicate an entire post to talking about it, asking how people are doing. Great. Or maybe you land somewhere in the middle and you're kind of in the camp of acknowledging the reality of the situation, not pretending like it doesn't exist, but sticking with your regular scheduled content. Great. I think it really depends on what feels comfortable to you as a content creator. And also knowing your audience, what do you feel like your audience would want in terms of content from you? There isn't an exact science, like I said, there isn't a playbook. But I can share a little bit about how we're approaching this with each one of the businesses that we have. So on Pinch of Yum. Uh, Lindsay published a post recently and she talked about what it's been like for us as a family as we've. How we've approached food. So she called it a COVID 19 coffee date, all about food. And she talks about as a family, what does that look like for us? We need to eat, so how do we go about doing that? And she outlined some of the food that we have, some of the recipes we're making, what's in the freezer, and kind of just some high level strategies and some of the ways that we're approaching food in this bizarre, strange, potentially scary time. And that was kind of a conversation with people. There was comments. Lindsay responded to the comments, and there was a conversation around that. And it was an opportunity for readers to engage with Lindsay and to talk about something that everybody was thinking about. But if you look as of today, this is the beginning of the week here. I'm recording this on March 23rd. The most recent two posts are standard recipe posts. They don't include any mention of anything that's happening. And it's kind of back to regular scheduled content. So that's what felt right for us as a team, for Lindsay to acknowledge it and then to go back to regular scheduled content, knowing that that regular scheduled content is less of a conversation or real time news. But it's us saying, hey, these are, this is as a team, what we were working on. These are the things that we need to continue doing because that's what our business is, which is publishing recipes. And so we are continuing with that regular scheduled content for Food Blogger Pro. We haven't done a dedicated piece of content other than this podcast. So this is the first dedicated piece of content that we're doing. But we haven't done a dedicated blog post on it. We haven't done a dedicated live Q and A within the community on it. That stuff might come down the line. But in terms of the other published content that we've had, emails that have gone out, communication that we've had with people, we've gone with the acknowledge and then regular scheduled content approach. So we want to make sure that we give people the, the kind of outlet to say, we know we're all thinking about this, this is on our minds. It is true for us, we're guessing it's true for you and just want to acknowledge that. And it's not going to keep us from doing what we need to do, which is support our members and support this community. So we're going to continue producing new courses, we're going to continue having Q and A's, that's going to continue on. And there's some stability in that, knowing that, hey, there's going to be some element of chaos in the world. But we're going to continue showing up here and we're going to continue moving forward throughout this and then with WP Tasty. So that's a business where there, it's, it's being plugin based, being software based. You know, there is some kind of light mention of it. Like if we have a communication in email, we'll say, hey, you know, this has been a week that is an interesting kind of crazy week. And so there's acknowledgement of it, but we don't have blog posts about it. We're not mentioning it in terms of, you know, strategies around structured data or SEO or Pinterest or anything like that. So WP Tasty is probably the business that is the most quiet around coronavirus and COVID 19. And there is no right or wrong way to approach that. It's just a matter of you understanding who you are, who your business is and who your audience is. And that's why it's important to know thyself and to know thy audience. And that will inform your content strategy around how much you mention this and what it looks like for you to mention this. Because there isn't a playbook. And I think it's okay for you to know that you can build your own playbook. Number three Beware of the Disaster tunity and I'm sure that you've had endless email updates around COVID 19 and Coronavirus, and some of them are kind of pr ish type updates from companies telling you what the approach is and how they're handling, continuing to pay employees if they need to cut back on time or shut down or just the stability of the business if it's maybe a hosting company or something like that. But then there's also on the. On the. More on the end of taking advantage of people. If there is a scale of that between helping and taking advantage of people, there'd be this thing that I would call the disastertunity. It actually comes from a It was a Mac Break Weekly podcast that I listened to that was the episode name. But they talk about disastertunity being this thing where companies see a disaster as a chance for an opportunity to kind of promote their company. And there's a fine line between using what you have to help people in a pure and authentic way and using what's happening in the world as a business opportunity or disaster tunity. And at the extreme end of the scale, it's people, you know, hoarding hand sanitizer and charging ridiculous amounts for it. But if you scale that up a little bit, there's still a fine line between using this opportunity to tap into people's fear, to get people to be motivated to make some decision that is advantageous for you, purchasing something or buying something. And that's kind of where I think the fine line of disaster tunity is. And I think it's not about it doesn't mean that you're not creating content around that. It doesn't mean that you're not having conversations around it. It's not even that you aren't promoting certain things that would help people. I think the key is that it bends much more towards helping in a pure and authentic way versus helping others versus helping your business. And if anything, I think during this time, if you do have these COVID 19 coronavirus related products or blog posts, that it should bend towards maybe stinging hurting you a little bit in order to help other people more. That's not a, you know, that can't be. That's not a blanket statement. It's not true across the board. But it's an encouragement to people who are thinking about ways that they can promote their own thing during this time to bend as much as you can towards helping others versus helping yourself, which I would consider a disaster tunity and less as an opportunity to help people. So just a concept to think about, to be aware of if you notice yourself kind of processing through, hey, what are the ways that, you know, maybe could create more income for my site from this? I think do whatever you can to switch that, that thought process to hey, what are the things that I can do to help people during this time? And that does exist. And especially for us as people who create content around food, around recipes, we're able to help people in a time that they are uniquely in need of understanding how to cook at home or cook for their family or meal prep. Those are all things that we as content creators can do to help people. There was a middle school teacher who wrote a note and I share this because for every note that we get like this, there are ten or a hundred experiences like this that exist in the world for us in general as creators. And so this is a story that we are sharing so you can know that these types of things are happening with the content that you're putting into the world. And this was a middle school teacher who wrote in and said that she had shared a couple weeks ago the recipe for a no knead bread on Pinch of Yum and they had made it in class. And she said that she started to hear from a lot of her students who came from low income families that they were using this recipe and the students were teaching their families how to make this no knead bread, which was affordable, they could make it in batch. And she said that it was literally feeding these families in this time of crisis. And the things that you are creating in the world are doing that. And so I think it's a good reminder for us that we can see numbers. It might be, you know, 10 people or a hundred people or a thousand people who are coming to look at our content during this time. But the reason they're doing that is because they need to make food, they need a recipe and they're using your content to do that. And it's helping people in a real and authentic way. And my challenge for us as creators, if we have the bandwidth for it, is to think about additional ways to do that how can you be doing that even more helping people, making those resources more easily available? Maybe it's something as simple as doing an email roundup and getting the recipes that are the best rated and easiest to make or with the fewest number of ingredients and sending out an email to your readers and saying, we've been thinking a lot about people. We want to make sure that you have access to the easiest recipes possible that are also going to be successful and want to point those out to you. So it can be something simple like that. So that is, number three, beware the disaster tunity. Or if you flip that to a positive, it would be seek the opportunities to help as opposed to just avoiding disaster tunities. And then number four, I think this is really important and a good note to end on is to be gentle. I think it's important, number one, to be gentle with yourself as you know what we are doing is hard and it's much, much harder in a season like this. It's a struggle even when things are going really well and there's not a global pandemic, even more so when there is a season of stress and anxiety and kind of seeming chaos unfolding around us. And so it's important to be gentle with yourself and know that it's a difficult season. It's a heavy season. We have friends. I just had a conversation with a friend this morning who is, you know, an extreme extrovert and also is outspoken in dealing with things, depression. And he said, it's just been really hard. This has been a really hard season because I'm isolating, I'm staying at home, and yet I'm an extrovert and it hurts to be at home. And there's this depression that he's having to deal with. And isolating at home is a really difficult way for him to live and to operate. And if you have, it could be an entire spectrum of that. Maybe you're just kind of down, or maybe you're feeling like you had good progress and now it's kind of taken away. Or maybe you see some certain metrics changing. Or you need to now stay at home for the next few weeks and care for your kids instead of working on the thing that you were working on. We can be hard on ourselves for that and try and fit it in and try and do more than we are capable of doing. And I would encourage you to be gentle with yourself and know that this is a season. It's not forever, it's not the new reality. And to go forth in this season, being gentle with yourself. I think it's also important for us to be gentle with others. And there was a great John Acuff quote that I saw. John was on the podcast, episode 86. You can go to foodbloggerpro.com 86. Um, but John talked about this. This was on his Instagram account. I think it was a screen capture from his Twitter. But he said, I'm being extra forgiving to people who say or do things that are tone deaf right now. Why? And he gave three reasons. Number one, it's the first global pandemic most people have experienced. Of course, they suck at it. Number two, people make more mistakes when they're afraid. And number three, I'll make a mistake and need grace too. And I think this is a. It's a season where it's important for us to be gentle with others. And people might say things or do things that are really frustrating or hard for us, whether that be related to politics or their actions or our actions and speaking into those. But as much as possible, I think we should try and be gentle with ourselves in this season and also gentle with others. So those are the four things that I've been thinking about that we've been thinking about here with our family and that we've been thinking about with our businesses. Quick little recap. Number one, cover the basics. Make sure that you're getting sleep, eating healthy food if it's available, drinking lots of water, connecting with family and friends digitally, and then also taking time away from the computer. Know thyself and know thy audience as it relates to the content that you're producing. Check in with yourself. See how it feels to maybe not mention it or talk about it too much or what does it look like if there's a hybrid there. And also think about your audience. Do you have any sense for what they need? Let that inform the content that you're producing as well. Number three, beware of the disaster tunity. So be careful about taking this as an opportunity to. To just grow your business or grow traffic or create more income. And think instead of what are the ways that I can serve people in need? And it might hurt even a little bit. I would encourage you to lean into that and think through that. And more than anything, it's just a great word to say disaster tunity. Number four. And the final one, be gentle with yourself and with others. So those are the thoughts that I want to leave you with. Know that we feel this. We hope that you have. That's my daughter in the background screaming hello. If you heard that, know that we feel this. We are literally there with you, you quarantining at home. And we will get through this. And I would encourage you to think about ways that not only that you can think about how do we get through this, but how do we help other people get through this? And we'll come out the other side and we'll continue to march forward. Thanks for listening to this podcast. Appreciate you and hope that someday when we come out of quarantine, when we're not isolating in the same way, that we can connect in person. And I look forward to that day. Until next week, stay safe and we will be in touch. Make it a great week. Thanks.