June 15, 2020

Busy?

“You guys are busy, eh?” well, yes, kinda, I guess so. We have never really known how to respond to this. The truth was sometimes we were, sometimes we were not, but to be busy, wasn’t that the whole point? Isn’t it one of the main goals of running your business? Isn’t it the most basic metric in deciding if what you are doing is working? We have always tried to stay hyper-aware of what it really means to be busy. When the times come that we are swamped, we aim to remember that we are fortunate to find ourselves in these moments and that they probably won’t last. We have never let it be a crutch or use busy-ness to justify sloppy work practices “I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you, I was just so busy”. If I have, OR I ever do say that to you, punch me square in the face, seriously you have my permission. The reality is that ‘being busy’ is often simply an excuse for “this really wasn’t that important to me”.

And for the beginning of 2020, we were extremely busy … until we weren’t.

Friday, March 13th, 2020 – Matt boarded a plane to Toronto, shortly after he would be heading to New Zealand via LA for a 2-week work stint. It was a great opportunity for Westfort Productions. Through the tail end of planning the project and as the COVID situation was quickly escalating we had continued to weigh the pros and cons of traveling to New Zealand vs having to pull the pin on a big project. Ultimately about 10 minutes before boarding the next leg of the trip we decided to reroute Matt back to Thunder Bay. 12 hours later New Zealand had shut down their border to all international visitors, the dominos were falling across the globe.

Monday, March 16th it was now clear that all our projects would-be put-on hold indefinitely or canceled outright.

“Busy?” Nope, not now and not sure when.

We all know how the story goes from here, we have all been living it together in real-time. COVID instantly upended the world as we knew it. Depending on your location, field of employment, financial position, health, or family situation, COVID has affected people differently but no one has been insulated from it.

Like many other business owners, the past 3 months have been a mix of stress, anxiousness, and definitely some fear. We have had to deal with what the work stoppage means to Westfort Productions right now, as well as having to speculate on what it is going to mean to our future. We are tired of the same things everyone else is – social distancing, pivoting, new normal, to mask or not to mask, these are all things we can probably all agree that we do not need to hear again, ever. We are constantly questioning how is this affecting our clients? Can they survive this? Is there a way we can help them navigate it? Will their advertising budgets be slashed? Or will they need to rely on video content even more? Many questions with few answers.

We have also tried to appreciate some of the positives of the last 3 months. With both of us having young families at home the time that we have been able to spend with them has been incredible. It is something we are both super appreciative of and realize that in a way it has been a gift. Being forced into not working has allowed us to focus more on our families, be present and spend quality time without our attention steadily being pulled into thinking about work. When would we ever get to do this again?

As we start to emerge from the COVID cloud we are excited to see what the new landscape of video production will bring Westfort Productions. As with everything else it will not be business as usual, not immediately anyways, and who knows if ever. Even in the early stages of getting back at it we have already been asked to partner on projects that would have not been available to us in the past, businesses and organizations are considering how to use video differently to meet their changing needs. How our workflow and the types of jobs we take on evolves will be exciting to see. Wait a minute … did we just pivot?? 😊

Whatever happens we know we just cannot wait to be busy again.