Hi APW,
Here at APW, we’re coming up on the one-year anniversary of our business falling off a cliff with no warning. I mean… we knew the shutdown was coming. But we didn’t fully realize that the traffic from people planning weddings and display ad revenue from honeymoon advertising would plummet, literally overnight. And, I’m not here to tell you that everything is fine now. It’s decidedly… not fine. I’ve spent so much time getting us much-needed loans and grants (not exactly fun, but very important). I didn’t pay myself for a good long while and then started paying myself again… just less for now. Our staff took voluntary pay cuts. So many of you stepped up to support us on Patreon, something that remains so important to us to this day (and, if you haven’t joined yet, we’d love to have you for our regular community check-ins and hangouts).
And more than everything I’m proud that as we approach the one-year mark, I’ve been able to keep our core team together. They still have health insurance. They currently also have greatly reduced flexible hours (but still full-time pay!), while we try to keep everyone from burning out. We’re still here, and I am hugely grateful for that.
I’m also beyond tired. Like most small business owners in America, the stress of trying to keep my business functioning in the smartest ways possible, without racking up too much debt, is a lot. Trying to do that while caring for two traumatized kids, being in quarantine with my whole family at once, trying to keep a functional household, and having the pandemic drag on and on and on, has worn me out on a soul level. There are times when I look at folks who chose / were able to pause their business and careers and take an (awful, traumatic) year off and feel envious. But, that wasn’t my path, and here we are. Tired.
But the good news is, we’ve done so much work both on APW and on launching Practical Business School in the past year. It’s been (so) slow with everything else going on, but steady. We’ve been able to dig in and do some of the strategy and planning work that we’ve needed to do for years, but didn’t have the time to do when everything was moving at top speed. And as tired as we all are, it’s been rewarding.
All of which is to say: you may have noticed that this week our publication schedule was a little slower than normal. Or, honestly, you may not have noticed because *gestures around*, the world is a pretty wild place right now. And publication on the site is going to slow down a bit for a moment, so we can better spread the content we create across multiple platforms and meet folks planning weddings where they are. Back in 2008 when I started APW, blogs were the thing. That’s where you came every day to read content. And we have 13 years of archives to prove it. But in 2021, we’re all consuming content on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Medium, Pinterest, TikTok, Clubhouse, in our emails, and…. the list goes on and on. So after a lot of thought, number crunching, and study, we realized that we need to slow our front page content, so we could give the work we’re doing (and hell, the work we’ve done in the past) more breathing room. We need to use some of our time to make sure that our content is living on all of our platforms, not just popping up here for a day, and dying out.
None of that means you’ll be getting less of us. It just means that you’ll be getting more of us in different places. First up, if you’re in the middle of wedding planning and you haven’t signed up for our email list yet, do that here. (You can also get our free Ebook on wedding planning during a pandemic right here, and our brand new, hot off the presses, ebook on putting together your wedding website super fast right here.) If you don’t follow us on Instagram, please join us there. We’ll be launching on new platforms soon, but in the meantime, if you’re interested in my personal life, follow me on Instagram at megkeene, and if you’re interested in learning from me as an entrepreneur follow me at PracticalBusinessSchool
We can’t wait to make more, new, different, meaningful types of content for y’all. And if you have dreams of things you’ve always wanted us to make or platforms you’d love for us to be on, let us know in the comments. (We mean it… we’re doing it for you, after all.)
Till then, we’re so grateful for each and every one of you.
And deep down, underneath all the trauma, stress, and exhaustion, I’m grateful to have the time and opportunity to make long-overdue changes in the business, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.
XO
Meg
