Each week, XI Technologies scans its unique combination of enhanced industry data to provide trends and insights that have value for professionals doing business in the WCSB. This week, XI’s Vice-President of Business Development, Jennifer Baerg, wanted to share her thoughts on the current situation in our industry. If you’d like to receive our Wednesday Word to the Wise in your inbox, subscribe here.
This is our 68th weekly “Wednesday Word to the Wise” and for the first time since we embarked on this initiative in late 2018, we considered not submitting an article. We tossed around a wide variety of topics such as evaluating properties that are currently for sale, a look at the OWA and the recent federal stimulus, or offering webinars to those who want to use this time to brush up on their skills, but ultimately didn’t land on any of those. We endeavor to write something that is topical, accurate, and finds the right balance between providing useful information and displaying our capabilities without being overly promotional.
This week was different for us. With the unprecedented global recession due to COVID-19 and now with oil prices plunging to negative for the first time, we understood that people were just trying to get their heads around their situations, and our topics could be back of mind for good reason.
We are now into our sixth week of working remotely with no concrete idea about when we might get back to “normal”. It is easy to feel a sense of hopelessness as we watch the news and see the horrific loss of human life, the destruction of our companies, our industry, and our economy. We’ve all gone through the emotional roller coaster of feeling the sense of loss, rallying to stay positive, fearing the unknown, enjoying small successes, anger over what could have been prevented, the quest to find positive silver linings… the list goes on and on.
We are all in the same boat hoping that we are making the right decisions and finding opportunities amidst the disruption. We are used to innovating – that is our spirit and reputation here in the West. At XI, we have brainstormed ways that we can help our clients, the industry we serve, and our business community as a whole. We’ve tried to focus on the positive things we’ve seen such as greater communication with our clients, streamlining our business and workflows, and opportunities for new and exciting emerging trends. We continue to be optimistic that, like other industry downturns we’ve seen in our 25+ years, we will survive this one too.
So although this article will not have any fancy graphs or insightful information, it does have a heartfelt message to all of you. We are here. We want to help. We want to survive this together. I think of all the innovation we have had at XI over the years and how much of it has been inspired by collaboration with clients and industry contacts. I can’t help but think that this will be an enormous uphill climb but also a time to come together (virtually, for now) and re-think how our industry must evolve. Reach out to us if you have ideas, suggestions, or simply just want to connect.
Take care of yourselves and we look forward to having a coffee with you soon.
Yours Sincerely,
Jennifer Baerg & the XI Team