As we all continue to operate in whatever fashion is possible during the current lockdown, our time is now focused more and more on what comes next, and what it might mean for our future market.

For the first several weeks of the shelter-in-place, our daily tasks primarily consisted of dealing with requests to move or cancel previously scheduled events.  As with any new activity, there was a learning curve on our part.  We were not as effective as we would have liked initially speaking to our clients to address and resolve their issues while mitigating the negative results for us as a company.  Over time, we have learned how to better respond and react to help minimize stress to our clients, the sites we work at, the vendors we work with and within our own organization.

As this is being written, we continue to not have reliable forecasting methods indicating what the near future will look like, and as a result, we are unsure how to reposition what we do with any degree of certainty.

While focus is often an attribute that is used to describe one of the key ingredients to success, in this case, we are viewing focus as a detriment. Our reason for this is, as we said, we do not know what the future holds, so at this point it appears that rather than trying to predict it, we might be smarter to prepare for the variations that seem most probable.

As our core market has been weddings in wine country, and the historical methods of selecting venues, vendors, and planning their event are no longer possible for couples, we are pivoting to offer several alternative ways in which to move through the process.

Specifically, we now are looking at how we can provide a shopping experience for clients who:

• are now more cautious – how can we make them feel safer about their decision
• are more willing to make decisions remotely and not spend as much time on location
• have additional spare time and are more willing to allocate time talking on the phone to gain information
• are worried about cost and are seeking a lower priced experience
• have less time due to problems in their world and want solutions that come together more easily
• want to plan for smaller guest counts but have the flexibility if larger ones are possible
• want to keep their guest counts as originally envisioned, but be able to reduce them without undue financial and logistical strain
• want to focus their reception differently than before
• are interested in providing a different guest experience that is not compromised by clumsy workarounds
• are able to include people who now, for one reason or another, might no longer be invited nor able to attend

We are making this list is as long as we can make it, and we are producing as many services and marketing tools that can attempt to accommodate these scenarios.  We do not know which ones will resonate, but we know the more options we have, the better we will be able to pick up our share of the business that comes back, when it comes back.