CEO REPORT – 2020 THE MOST SPECIAL YEAR IN MY LIFETIME
When you are sitting down and trying to summarise the most special year in your life, it´s hard to highlight all the positive things when you know that other people are still struggling because of the ongoing pandemic. We also faced that reality in the middle of March. We had our best quarter in the company’s history and hired new colleagues for further expansion. Overnight all the borders closed in Europe and many countries were on lockdown. Our revenue dropped with 93% almost overnight between March and April 2020.
Building something from scratch without loans or investors, this situation could have sent us into bankruptcy. But it did not. Thanks to the business strategy with strong liquidity from day one to secure the jobs, as well as the way the Norwegian government handled the situation, we managed to survive and rebuild the business after Q2 when the borders opened again. At the lowest we only had 2,4 employees in total working to keep the business afloat, the rest were home on 100% lay-off waiting for the business to start up again.
I really feel sad for all the people losing their family members, life projects and businesses during this pandemic that hit all the people on this Earth somehow. It would have been my worst nightmare if that would have happened to us. Covid-19 is also sending people into poverty and mental illness. We all have people around us in this situation and we should be grateful of what we have and appreciate it even more in the future!
Back to business, what happened!? We fought back. We had to adapt to the changes really fast and trust in our colleagues. The situation forced us to work remote. Colleagues left Oslo but stayed in the company. Everyone was back working 100% from 1stof July, and the adventure started where we left it off in March.
We decided when the darkest day hit us! We were the best Nordic recruitment agency with a fast-growing multilingual branch before Covid-19, we should continue to be the best agency during the pandemic, and we should also be the best agency after Covid-19 with all the new changes. I feel that we have achieved the first two so far.
Some milestones:
We helped over 800 candidates to get a new job!
We established 2 new offices in Estonia and Spain.
We have colleagues working in multiple locations all over Europe: Oslo, Tallinn, Malaga, Le Mans, Copenhagen, Vaasa, London and Lisbon.
Many new internal roles with more responsibilities were shared.
We have a revenue growth of totally 27%.
We have a 200% profit margin growth. We have secured the liquidity for future growth and development of all colleagues.
Multilingual Jobs Worldwide has been growing a lot during this year, taking a bigger role in the company in general. The Nordic brand had to work with Multilingual roles and languages during Q4 and the second wave to secure budgets. The multilingual brand in general has the biggest growth potential and made up 20% of the total company revenue in 2020. For further company growth the MJW position in the market will be extremely important in 2021. Today they are 8 colleagues in total, we started the year 2020 with 4.
The Nordic brand still stands strongest against all competitions in the market with client partnerships all over the world.
We delivered recruitment to 80 different clients in 26 different countries during 2020.
To summarise this report and year. We are still fighting an invisible virus and must work, day to day, week to week with all the challenges it presents to us. But one thing is certain. We have an amazing organisation with fantastic colleagues that moves mountains together every day. It was fun to see how fast people adapted to the new situation. We really followed our values as a red line in the company and the three key words that have been following this journey from day one is more important now than ever.
