Last Weds I got the team together for the first time in ages to share in the excitement of the first CIPR Pride Awards for two years. The last 18 months have been tough for my agency as it has for many others and every business in the country. We were built on solid foundations but we certainly lost some revenue in 2020 and on one occasion last April we lost around 80% of revenue and projects within 48hrs and that was a very dark time. It took a lot of tough decision-making and hard work to pull ourselves out of it.
However, we never made one team member redundant and in fact, my team has grown by more than eight since the beginning of 2020 because we decided to invest our way out of it.
The world has started to feel much more normal now and budgets have returned and I have seen some real positivity in the market. There is so much marketing and PR work out there at the moment that a lot of it isn’t even competitive. So my team has been working hard to keep pushing Prohibition back to where it was before 2020 and we are already well ahead of that now and firmly back on track.
So it is with some slight reticence I approached this year’s awards. Basically, because it was the weakest year for us in terms of submissions due to budgets being cut and us having to make the best of it with virtual events etc. However, my worry was short-lived as we managed to scoop 2 Golds and Four silvers, and the team was delighted and I am glad because they deserved it. They are the ones working tirelessly to make these stories into news pieces and exciting videos.
2021 has been much better than 2020 and I can only see positivity on the horizon now no matter what is thrown at us, so let’s stay positive and push forward
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.
