Oana Coman and Alexandra Enăchescu have been working together since they met. In their first class at the Faculty of Letters, Oana liked that Alexandra talked about her interest in communication, referring to her passion for movies, literature and philosophy, and felt that they had something in common. They became fast friends and have since written all their college projects together.
They continued to be colleagues at their first job, in a communication agency, where they learned almost everything they know today about how to build a communication strategy and create content for businesses. They realized they had a rhythm compatibility that made everything seem easier for both of them. When Oana needed an extra opinion in a project, Alexandra came with a new perspective, and from their clash of ideas, an even better idea always came out. If Alexandra got stuck in a process, Oana would help her clear it up. But above all, they trusted each other and that was the most important thing.
Five years ago, Oana left the agency where she had become a partner and started a business on her own. He also collaborated with Alexandra on various projects, but every time they met over a glass of wine, they became nostalgic for the time when they were colleagues and, at the second glass, they started to dream of their own communication business.
Everything happened on the fly, without any set plan. When Alexandra resigned last December, they talked that this was the time to start something together, and on January 5th they actually started. They met to set up a new office for Alexandra and plan the year ahead, in which Alexandra would turn 30 and Oana, 29, in which they would become partners in a business and the news about a highly contagious virus were still far from us and all that was to come.
Here's what the first year looked like for Crafters, Oana and Alexandra's agency that offers communication services for businesses, and some lessons they learned:
In March, we called the eight clients we had. We wanted to know how they see the pandemic and how what is happening affects them, in the most humane way possible. I no longer took into account any contractual commitment, but what mattered was the emotion and the relationships built between us. We said to ourselves: "It's a pandemic, it's miserable for everyone, we roll up our sleeves and see what we can do."
It seemed like an anti-business gesture, but in reality we were also afraid for ourselves. We were laughing bitterly that we were going to close before announcing that we were officially launching. We decided that we had to get involved as much as we could. After two months of intense work, the most important lesson I learned is that a choice based on good intentions leads to the harmonization of some relationships, but also to difficult conversations with some clients: it is very difficult to return to the paradigm before after what you used to a partner with a certain volume and pace of work.
Our recommendation for the clientţwas to not give up communication, especially in moments of crisis, because sometimes it is the one who can make the difference. But I also saw how unexpectedly you can lose control of a business. One of the most affected clients I worked with was from the area of food delivery. Although deliveries have increased during the pandemic, not all services have benefited. For a business that delivered mainly to companies, when work moved home, demand dropped a lot. In addition, more and more restaurants began to deliver during the state of emergency, so the competition increased and they ended up having fewer orders than before, until the business was no longer sustainable.
The biggest challenge in the category work from home I met her at a call center with 300 employees, present in three cities, who had to move everything home in five days. How do you manage the situation internally? What do you need to create an emotional framework as stable as possible? And how do you give people the assurance that they still have a secure job? On the one hand, the work of a call center from home involves an infrastructure that you cannot do overnight – you need to ensure data confidentiality, have a stable internet network, a laptop or computer and not all employees had this.
Their performance was directly related to interaction with colleagues and informal meetings between them, so it was important to greatly intensify online communication. Our mission was to create a daily mix of useful information about the virus with a side , with games between colleagues and relaxed discussions. The feedback was like this: people couldn't wait for that email "like a pat on the back" because they needed to feel that someone was thinking of them. For most, working in isolation from home was extremely difficult.
Work kept us busy because we felt it was an island of stability, but in May we were very tired. Because things were changing from one day to the next, we were no longer able to impose any kind of limits on ourselves. We started holding a time tracker which showed us how many hours we worked for each project and where we consumed energy, in order to find a balanced solution. We had reached over 50 hours in total in one week, but it was not the volume that surprised us, but the chaotic organization for each.
