The ongoing pandemic has hit businesses hard, and Hippo was no exception. With the vast majority of our clients being business owners, big companies, and entrepreneurs, once they had to stop working, so did we. It was a hard time for everyone.
However, instead of seeing the temporary closure as a loss, we turned it into a learning opportunity and came back even stronger than before. It was all possible because we stuck to our core values and kept our positive mindset. We believe that the way we handled our business during COVID-19 could benefit others in similar situations.
Hippo functions through a handful of principles that allow our company culture to thrive. We work to ensure each sentiment comes across to our clients, and encourage them to walk away with similar ideals. We have built a team-centric culture in the workplace, between our in-house employees and the Virtual Assistants we hire. Our directors maintain a level of humility and gratitude that encourages equality in the workplace, as well as strong mutual respect between employees. Without the ties of positive relationships at the office, we wouldn’t be able to support each other the way we do.
Our core value, however – the one that essentially founded the company – is time. We value our time, our employees’ time, and our clients’ time. Our goal is to help entrepreneurs and business owners save time, all by systemising and outsourcing the necessary daily tasks that take up too much room on the schedule. We want our clients and workers to find their HIPPO!
The way we do this starts with our company mindset. Hippo had positivity, gratitude, and optimism instilled into it from the beginning, having been founded by four entrepreneurs – a career where success relies heavily on dispositional optimism and the idea that good things are coming. It’s often thought of as a defining characteristic of entrepreneurialism!
There are always going to be challenges in life, but being optimistic and positive in your thoughts makes hurdles easier to overcome. Admittedly, COVID-19 is a particularly large hurdle that businesses have had to clear, and there’s much more involved in recovering from it than simply thinking positively.
But the drive to recover – that comes entirely from optimism. It’s the refusal to stay down once something has knocked you over, and the determination to find a way through rather than rolling over and taking it. The impact of an optimistic mindset is much more than pseudoscience and psychobabble – it’s proven to enhance more than just your business. Optimists manage better under stress, are prepared for the future more than pessimists, and have better success in business by being prepared to approach tasks from different angles. Those who practice gratitude find it easier to see the silver lining in any situation. Furthermore, people who see the positives are also more open-minded and likely to move forward with broader perspectives than before. It’s all about your attitude.
This is the kind of mindset Hippo tapped into during COVID-19: we found our silver linings. By approaching this set-back as a learning opportunity, we decided we would reset and rebuild, investing in new aspects of our business that we hadn’t looked into before. Believing in our company’s founding idea of helping others and sticking to our values kept us going through the pandemic. We took our framework of Systemise, Outsource, and Scale to the next level within our own business.
If we had instead chosen to see it as the end, we wouldn’t have made it through and scaled the way we have. See all the difference your mindset and attitude can make? Everyone finds themselves on thin ice at some point, be it with work, study, or life in general. But if you’re sold on yourself and your goals, that thin ice doesn’t mean you’ll fall.
While the way we’ve structured our company works ideally for us, we know that’s not how everyone operates. However, it’s not difficult to introduce a more positive and optimistic mindset into any business. Expanding one’s worldview and introducing new possibilities is what Hippo does – hiring a Virtual Assistant and encouraging remote working is not something everyone is open-minded about. But we have that faith in what we do, in our goal of saving time for other companies.
The benefits of optimism, gratitude, and positivity are enormous. Hippo’s success is a testament to that, and we want others to triumph the way we have.