Today’s Stay At Home Diary comes from Nathan, co-founder of Quickfire Digital, a digital transformation agency based in Norwich.
This article is part of our series, ‘The Stay At Home Diaries’, published every day of the partial lockdown in the UK amid the Coronavirus pandemic. To find out more about this series, click here.
So, who am I and why am I writing this? Hey, nice to meet you if this is for the first time and if you know me already then, I hope this finds you and your family in good health! I’m Nathan Lomax, co-founder of Quickfire Digital. We are a digital transformation agency based here in Norwich. Quickfire has one simple purpose – to help businesses maximise profitability, efficiency and scalability through the use of technology. We specialise within the e-commerce and Lead Gen environment and typically develop websites in either the WordPress or Shopify CMS (content management system). My job is simple. As co-founder of the business, I spend all of my time talking to business owners helping to identify their challenges and then working out how we or someone in our network can solve them.
A lot of the work I do is around having meaningful strategic conversations with existing clients, prospects and partners. While these can be carried out over Zoom, there is no substitute for face to face human interaction. While it’s nice to work from home and have limited distractions, it’s a big challenge not having the team to bounce off to ensure spirits are high at all times. The saying, you are only as good as your team, couldn’t be truer. We are hugely proud of the team we have at Quickfire and I miss spending time with them all on a day to day basis. Online video conferencing software has been a huge help to overcome the social distancing and isolation challenges but company socials and weekly team meetings are having to be reviewed and changed accordingly.
As the clocks are about to change from Sunday and finally it’s about to get lighter, I’m hoping that for many of us the early mornings will start to get easier. I’m not a morning person and so I struggle to get up early. My alarm is set for 5.45 and every minute after that until 6. From 6am, I try and get up and make a series of introductions from the day before. I review my day and send out all of the upcoming Zoom links and check in with all of the day’s contacts to ensure the meetings are going ahead as planned.
I then spend time from 7-7.30 reviewing the sales pipeline to keep this up to date and to update the different stages of the pipeline with where each client or potential client is at.
7.30 shower, breakfast and ready to start work from 8.
After team check-ins and daily virtual stand-ups, 8-6 is filled with 20 meaningful conversations which each last around 30 mins. 6-6.30 is tomorrow planning and starting to recap on the day. Sometimes 6.30-8 will either be a contingency to review emails that have come in or to action any team challenges. 8pm dinner with my housemate and 8.30 onwards is usually spending time relaxing, following up on promised actions for work, planning marketing and sales activity or trying to read/get some downtime. I find it very hard to switch off and so often what I’m doing doesn’t really feel like work. It’s a lovely position to be in when you love what you do and the impact you have on others but I must start taking some more time out for myself.
When I do eventually get time out I like to play a lot of sports. More recently, with the situation as it is my housemate Will and I have been playing indoor cricket most evenings! We have started boxing in the living room, dressing up in stupid outfits for client promotions and campaigns, cooking dinner (Saturday is an Indian banquet) all homemade and watching Netflix. Just watched Stranger which, if you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it, it was a brilliant series.
I’m often told I do too much of an evening with friends, clients, family, colleagues etc. but when this is finally all over I’m most looking forward to just spending time with people again. Going out for dinner, watching or playing sports, returning to the office environment and most importantly spending some quality time with my family.
In these difficult times, I’ve been amazed by the support from the local community. This virus has caused huge challenges to each and every one of us no matter who you are or what you do. I hope that some of the ways in which people have adapted and some of the attitudes people have adopted remain post virus but for now, I would just echo what I have said to anyone I speak to. Keep working hard, Keep Safe and most importantly keep smiling 🙂
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- Britons have been told by the UK government that they must stay at home, apart from some very limited exceptions. For further information, check gov.uk/coronavirus.
- For our latest coverage of the Coronavirus pandemic and for links to official health information, check our Coronavirus page.
- For advice on how to manage your mental health during these difficult times and for links to support, click here.
