Rikki:

How did you feel when Covid first hit? You're running a peer to peer network business, which means meetings. What was the shock?

Bob:

It's interesting. We've been doing okay. We'd grown about 20% per annum for the preceeding three years. We had five groups across South Central England meeting regularly. 

But as you rightly highlight, were meeting in person. So yes I did consider for a moment, not very long, stopping, because most, many people my age are retired. (I don't ever see myself retiring and, you know, but I would like to slow down a bit one day)

Rikki:

No, you won't. 

Bob:

You know me too well!

But anyway my first thought was, I can't do that to my members.  They need MD2MD. They need the meetings we run more than they ever! Because ... we've talked about MBA courses Do you know an MBA course that taught you how to deal with a Covid crisis?

So the first thing I realised was that our members needed us and I needed to help them through the crisis.  I'm not actually talking about me personally, I needed to facilitate the conversation between them. And so we switched.

So I decided, no, we've got to do this. Bob. You've got to go for it. So we switched immediately to online meetings. 

We were actually meeting weekly in April 2020 because I don't know if you remember that time, but things are moving so quickly!  What the hell is going on? People trying to find out which way was up. 

So we switched online immediately and did weekly peer group meetings. We dropped our normal professional speakers for the time being. We later brought the speakers back in, went to meeting fortnightly, then meeting every three weeks. 

And so where we are, we moved on massively, such that now we are as much an online business as in person one now.