Gone are the days of good old face to face contact and connection.
Growing up, I always imagined what it would be like to work in the professional world. I had always dreamed of big offices, buzzing with life and board rooms full of people and connection.
When I started out in business while completing my business degree, that was still somewhat the case. I had the fortunate opportunity of working in large non-profit organizations for relationship was king and connection was necessary.
As I moved along in my career and life, and time passed further into the new millenium, things started to change. First, I noticed it in my personal life: things were moving online and it was great! You could connect easily with many people without taking much times. This was great! I could stay in touch with the hundreds of business students- now business professionals- that I had met at the dozens of conferences I had attended over the near decade of schooling I had taken.
Slowly, this approach started to creep into the workplace as well. As technology and ideas advanced, more tools were created to keep in touch with your team, colleagues, clients, or management team without having to leave your computer. Again, it was great! All this time saved to focus on being truly productive with my day.
Then I started to notice how the impact it was having on performance- in my personal and professional lives. With my family and friends, I no longer truly understood what they were going through because I was only keeping up by following their highlight reels on social media or reading ambiguous text messages.
With my team mates, clients and colleagues, I started to notice that there was an increase in miss-communication. We hadn't gotten a great sense of what the donors wanted, of the look and feel of a client's retail space, of the smell and opulence of a chef's menu. We weren't quite hitting the mark on the first few attempts. We were turning out a lot of design, reports or programs that weren't bad, but they just weren't quite right either.
We started to lose the ability to listen and understand what they needed. Because they didn't know. The reality is that is my job to hear what a client needs even though they don't know for themselves and guide them to the solution.
Fast forward to this past month. We, the founders of Holly and Oak, were meeting up for coffee to catch up on life, discuss what it was like to be newly-weds and talk about where we wanted our careers to go.
In that hour of time, not only did we share a lot of laughs, we were inspired to re-start an old business.
When planning our new business, we realized right away that we were setting out to fulfill our passion of supporting the north and the small businesses at its core. We also know that we wanted to change the way that we did business. That we wanted to make it a personal experience where we really got to know our clients, so that we could provide them with the best support possible.
Introduce: The Coffee Meeting.
We are committed to meeting all of our clients for coffee. To have a chance to get to know them and their companies so that we can create something inspired for them. And so that they can get to know us and figure out whether we are a good fit for them.
We love to get know local business owners and their stories. Odds are, whether you hire us or not, we will be working with you in the future. And we would love to help you reach your goals.
