Corona. Maybe you came but you are totally welcome to go now, thanks.

The arrival of the pandemic surprised us all. No one was really prepared for such a crisis that would shake up the whole world. An economic crisis on the other hand, is something you can expect once every few years. It usually brings a lot of opportunities with it and can even be healthy for the function of our economic system.

Every 10-15 years there are declines that indicate the coming of an economic crisis. But for something as big as a pandemic, there are no signs at all, and it happens completely out of the blue. So naturally, we were all caught off guard.

This health crisis directly led to an economic crisis and for us we had many plans ready for what we are doing in times of crisis. I think that in such moments the world is divided into two parts. Those that will take advantage of the situation and those that will be influenced by the circumstances and will have their life dictated by it.

It was clear to us that no matter what part we were choosing in our private lives, the business had to be in the part that takes advantage of the situation.

I had a duty towards all my investors. To come to my senses as quickly as possible and work even harder during this time for things to keep moving forward. This led me to move to Thessaloniki permanently. Working remotely may had worked well before the pandemic (even then I used to visit the city a lot but not as often), but now I had to stop and had to be on site myself in order to push our team even further.

This pandemic will sooner or later create an opportunity. And because it is already causing me to lose money, I want to be the one who takes advantage of the opportunity as soon as it is created in the market (to my surprise it took more than a year before the opportunities started to arise).

All businesses fall, but not all get up and rebuild themselves. For us it was important to rise above the challenges. So, in order to do that we had to make a lot of changes. My move to Greece freed up a lot of time for us to locate deals. We made an adjustment to the number of workers who would come to each project, in order to avoid the whole team to fall sick and be disabled by corona. We divided the renovations into capsules according to the execution area, which led to much slower work that required good scheduling. Everyone had to follow the schedule and know exactly when to show up to the project and when to leave it.

At the end of this period, we only had two covid cases in all our team that were in the same capsule. For me that was the biggest victory during that time.

 

Waiting for you in the next chapter,

Gal Rubin