NAME: Angelo Pace

DATE: April 26, 2022

Assignment 1.1: Reimagining Your Business
Activity Instructions:
Based on what you’ve learned throughout the module so far, identify areas of your
organization that have not performed well during the pandemic. What opportunities
exist for economic change? How can you use what you’ve learned from this crisis to
reimagine your business?

In 2020, as government’s mandate the shutdown of non-essential businesses, our retail

software division was impacted significantly by retailers having to shut down their
businesses and some even had to claim bankruptcy. The impact to our retail clients,
directly impacted our revenue both with clients that were no longer able to pay us or
delayed any payment of invoices for our services due to the uncertainty of their
business. In addition, any current projects were put on hold. As a result, we had to
figure out what to do with our staff that no longer had any work and no idea when
things would pick up again. We had to make the difficult decision to furloughs a large
part of our staff for 2-3 months for most employees and management also went down to
a 4 day paid work week. Luckily, with the government assistance programs, we were
able to bring back most employees after 3 months and only a very small percentage (less
than 1%) were eventually permanently laid off.
On the positive side, we had acquired an online grocery software business in 2018, for
which we were building the next generation software solution for, when the pandemic
hit in spring of 2020. As a result of the economic changes and the grocery industry
having to meet the new consumer demands during the pandemic, we had a prime
opportunity to gain their business and upgrade their online ecommerce systems. We
were able sign several new grocery banner clients and partner with them to accelerate
the features/solutions they needed to pivot to offer curbside pickup for their businesses.
The other opportunity this enabled, was for us to pivot our retail software division
employees to our grocery software division, which essentially saved about 20% of our
professional services and R&D staff.
Another opportunity for our business to reimagine is with regards to the fulfilment of
orders that we have learned is labor intensive for our grocery clients as they have had to
expand their ability to pick and pack orders. If we partner with an Order Fulfilment
company that has automation through robotics, that could solve the staffing, efficiency
and scaling for our clients and provide an end to end solution for them.
In essence, what was essentially a crisis for traditional retail, was an opportunity to
reimagine our grocery business and enable our new grocery clients to stay competitive
while allowing our company to recover financially from the loss of revenue as a result of
the pandemic and lockdowns/restrictions.
The other area that we were able to reimagine was with regards to our office real estate.
With the pivot to work from home, which was fairly straightforward being a tech
company, we quickly determined that employees were able to stay productive and the
need to be working from an office was not mandatory. We actually took the opportunity
to re-evaluate our office needs and negotiated sub-lease deals in some offices and
simply did not renew leases in others and we are effectively now a primarily remote
working business with some exceptions for offices that require computer equipment and
infrastructure.