Turning Thirty During the Pandemic

The pandemic sure appeared to be a trend when we started working from home in late March. By August, working from home was clearly past being trendy and had become our new mode of operation. By then we had hired the first employee who doesn’t live within driving distance from our office. Melissa Eller, our Web Development & Support Specialist lives in Michigan and we’ve yet to meet in person. She has been an outstanding addition to our team but in any year between 1991 – 2019, I would not have found her because I wanted the team to be working under one roof every day. That will never happen again. Few of the changes the pandemic has forced on our business and small businesses around the world are trendy.

I wish I could list all the lessons I’ve learned since starting Interactive Knowledge with Chuck Barger and Sam Hess in January 1991. I can’t possibly remember them all and probably a bunch of the important ones slipped by without causing me to change my beliefs or behavior. But I have learned a few lessons that have stuck with me:

• Interactive Knowledge is in the interactive content business. Various defunct technologies have delivered content for us over the years including videodisc, CD-ROM, the World Wide Web, TenCore, Director, Flash, etc. But because we were an interactive content company, not a CD-ROM company, we survived the early 2000s and thrived as the Internet took over content delivery.
• My background and training are in education and that doesn’t take me very far as I try to make business decisions on technology-based products. I knew that we could only succeed in a constantly changing technology market by relying on the staff members who have a background and training in technology. I have always empowered our team of developers and designers to take the lead in predicting the direction our field is going. We’ve had some detours but we’ve been right often enough to weather thirty years of constant change.
• I am always learning new things and I attract a staff of professionals with the same inquisitive approach. This love of learning has also drawn an outstanding group of loyal clients. I believe we have developed long-term relationships with folks at the Smithsonian, the American Battlefield Trust, the Fetzer Institute, the Toledo Museum of Art, and Power to Decide, to name a few because they see the respect we have for their unique content. We stand out in a very crowded field of technology firms because we consistently deliver beautiful, content-rich experiences.

It’s daunting to reflect on the past year as a small business and try to put it in perspective. We are grateful for the position our clients have put us in to succeed while so many businesses have not. We don’t take that for granted. We’ve been preparing for the changes this pandemic has caused since the 90s because it was clear to us from the start that opportunities and obstacles were never permanent. Some change in the technology, the funding structure, the culture, or within our own business would make each year look pretty different from the previous one. The flexibility needed to respond to so much change is baked into our approach and process. We were ready for the pandemic and have been able to continue thriving despite so many new obstacles. So far, the opportunities have created plenty of positive energy and the problems have never been insurmountable. That is one thing that 2020 had in common with our previous 29 years and I believe that trend will continue.