Starting a new job during quarantine “Never let a good crisis go to waste”

We hosted a little Q&A session with our latest employee Charlie, who joined us officially on April 1st 2020 as Head of Marketing during the second “official” week of lockdown. It took a little over 2 months to complete his first full day in the office, finally able to meet most of the team members from the London office (luckily we have enough space to adhere to the government guidelines of 2 meters apart).

In a few words, introduce yourself in a working capacity.

Hi I’m Charlie Herbert, I have been working within branding and marketing for various start ups and scale ups around the country for the past 6 years.

What do you do here at Cosmonauts?

I was hired as the Head of Marketing for Cosmonauts, my main responsibility is to oversee the continual development of the Cosmonauts brand identity including all residual event brands and partner companies delivering all marketing materials online and offline.

How have you managed starting a new job during lockdown?

Well this isn’t my first rodeo, but I remember joking with the team after my second interview in February about their lockdown plans (we ended the interview watching the tail end of a Boris update on CoronaVirus in China), at the time we laughed it off assuming nothing would really affect us to dramatically.

By the time my start date rolled around we were in our second week of lockdown, I was working from my old Macbook from university that had a massive crack in the screen and needed 4 hours of updates… it couldn’t have been a more sobering moment professionally. 

But I soon got to grips with the marketing team and it’s been almost plain sailing since. It’s always great to work with an enthusiastic young team who are willing to work hard to get the job done. In the past 2 months I feel like we’ve formed a strong bond and culture of working together during the lockdown transition.

It sort of feels like a social experiment and I believe that when it is over, we will realize some jobs can be done just as well from home.

What has been the toughest part of joining during lockdown and how did you overcome this?

It’s always tough starting with a new company, joining part way through projects, not knowing where to find any documents on the server and how you fit into the team. But when you add not being in the same room as your peers, without the indication of watching the team in action so you can adjust your way of working to suit your environment makes things way more complicated. 

I stood back for 5-10 working days and watched as the team began to work together online, luckily I have a lot of experience working from home and was able to help initially with the general organisation of workflow. It was at this point that I was able to understand my value and begin to inprint my personality. As a department head, I didn’t want to come like a bull in a china shop, making heavy demands “It’s my way, or the highway”, so it was important for me to showcase my skills without dominating my peers, I’d ask the team how they things have gone since I started but they are way too busy and I don’t plan on distracting away from their good work. It’s crazy to think how far we have come as a team in what is just 2 working months. 

What have you enjoyed most about your time with Cosmonauts so far?

The fast paced action – In 2 months we have closed out over 50 jobs within our team from web design and build, through branding development and into marketing strategy and copywriting for a range of companies across the world as well as our own. We also have a host of exciting projects in the pipeline both internal and client side. 

What are the big plans for the future of Cosmonauts?

We have many plans up our sleeves, we have a MD who is brimming with passion for growth whose motto is “Never let a good crisis go to waste”.  Within the first 3 weeks of me joining we had already doubled our service offering on our events and BD arms of the business. Since lockdown we have brought in new customers across the business and everything looks like it’s moving forward in a positive way for the short and long term.

One thing to look out for in the future a blog and potential video series called CEO talks. Similar to this discussion today we are looking to interview and discuss the hot topics from CEO’s in the modern world, 2020 and beyond.

Stay tuned in!!!

As a country we are now coming out of the other end of the pandemic as businesses and humans start to go back to their day to day lives. For some businesses this transition period has been a learning curve, a chance to take stock of all previous accomplishments and develop a plan for the future. For others it’s been more like “suck it and see” with businesses heavily reliant on government funding via the furlough scheme and even bail out loans. 

This situation has been and will continue to be a challenge for the company as well as for the employees but we are getting better at it as time goes by. We are grateful to Charlie for hitting the ground running and maintaining a healthy and positive attitude whilst being a leader for his team. 

We look forward to the future and can’t wait to delve into the new normality whether we are working from home, the office or both. 

Follow us on social media for regular updates across the business.

Categorised in: Staff Blog