Bloom’s (crazy) Year-In-Review

Inside Bloom / December 29, 2020

2020 was something else. We had to make sacrifices and turn our work routine upside down, to adapt, navigate the crisis, and help our clients do so as well. Thankfully, we’ve made it to the end of the year with a team that’s stronger than ever. 

Let’s look back at things that made our year in order to move forward and get ready for what’s ahead.

We Video-called, A Lot.

Strong client relationships and team collaboration are fundamental components of our digital marketing agency. When in-person meetings were no longer an option, we automatically switched to video calls. 

Although we did experience “zoom fatigue” (in our case, Meet fatigue) at some point, we also discovered that video calls are a totally viable alternative to in-person meetings. They definitely are an efficient communication tool that we will continue to use post-pandemic. 

We Grew. 

2020 was particularly challenging but we got great wins along the way. Some of those include:

1. Ranking on the Globe and Mail’s ranking of Canada’s Top Growing Companies for the second year in a row.

2. Being listed on Canadian Business’ Growth List for a fourth consecutive year.

We Worked From Home For 209 Days.

When we left work on March 13, 2020, we thought we would be back at the office in a week or two. Most Bloomers have worked from home every day since then.

Being a Tech agency, we were lucky to have extensive experience with full-remote teams and have operated accordingly, over the past several years. Luckily, we had a smooth transition to our remote-first plan. 

There are definitely positive outcomes to working from home such as skipping commutes and having more time for personal activities. And, although we already had flexible work hours and unlimited work from home days, this added flexibility will stay with us long-after the COVID-19 pandemic ends.

We Helped Businesses Adapt Quickly To The Ever-Changing Situation.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of businesses relied heavily on digital marketing to keep their business afloat, and we were proud to help our clients adapt their marketing strategies as quickly as possible. 

Here are a few examples that we are extremely proud of:

Message Factory

C’est beau

Polysleep

Bath Depot

We Stayed Connected.

Although we couldn’t meet up for our traditional team building activities, we still managed to stay connected through virtual happy hours, games and quizzes, photo challenges, virtual coffee dates, team meetings, etc. 

It’s also no surprise that the number of slack messages sent in the Bloom workspace exploded:

We Hired And Onboarded 16 People Completely Remotely. 

We love having people at the office during our recruitment process. We show them around, introduce other Bloomers, share a cup of coffee, etc. With the pandemic, we had to completely change our processes to be able to recruit talent remotely. 

This was entirely new for our HR and management team but we still were able to hire and onboard 16 new Bloomers who ended up fitting right in with our team, despite having never met in person yet. Read our two first remote hires, Marie and Sam’s experience here: https://www.makeitbloom.com/blog/virtual-onboarding-our-employees-share-their-experience/

We Hosted or Co-hosted 10+ Webinars And Watched Many More.

Webinars came in handy as conferences, trade shows and networking events got shut down one after the other. We were super excited to host a few webinars this year on different topics such as search engine optimization, live shopping, social media, paid media, etc. 

Webinars were also a great way for our team to learn and stay up to date with recent features when working from home.

We Created Our First Corporate Video 

In early March, we were super excited to have planned and filmed (with the help of our friends at WRG) our first-ever corporate video. This video is a great way for us to showcase what makes our digital marketing agency stand out. 

If you haven’t seen it already, watch it here: https://youtu.be/Q2fP_OotGg0 

We Missed Our Offices.

We would be lying if we said we didn’t miss our offices in Montréal and Toronto. The conversation next to the coffee machine, playing board games during lunch, chilling in the lounge, playing foosball, staying around for a 5@7, etc.

We are lucky to be able to stay home and stay safe, but, we definitely missed the fun atmosphere of the office. Fingers crossed, we’ll be back in 2021! 

We Welcomed Our Toronto Managing Director

We definitely started the year with a bang when we hired Chris Kreuter, our Toronto Managing Director. Chris played a crucial role in establishing a strong operational foundation for growth in the Toronto market. Since he joined Bloom in February, we also hired other members working in the Toronto area. 

Good riddance 2020, Hello 2021!

2020 threw us a real curveball. When we wrote our 2019 Year-In-Review, we would have never imagined everything that happened in 2020.

We are definitely ready to leave 2020 in the rearview mirror and see what 2021 has to offer (hopefully a lot more normalcy!) 

Happy new year from the Bloom team!