This article was written by Jill Griffen reposted from Forbes.com. Read the full article here.

Genna Franconi is the president of  Trade School, an integrated content shop and full-service production studio in Atlanta. Trade School helps clients like The Home Depot, FedEx, and SharkNinja scale their approach to content creation.

I had the opportunity to interview Genna recently. Here are some of the highlights of that interview:

Jill Griffin: You were days away from signing a lease on a 30,000 sq ft office space when Covid hit. How were you and your teams able to pivot so quickly? 

Genna Franconi: I would love to pretend there was a specific pivot strategy that we executed flawlessly as soon as the pandemic hit, but the truth is that we just did what everyone was forced to do last year: make thousands of little decisions with the information we had and white-knuckle our way through it. At times we were cautious and played defense, other times we were bullish and proactive. It was less pivot and more “bob and weave.” It was a really interesting time to be a leader because there was no rule book to reference, no mentor who had lived through anything like this before. I watched progressive companies to observe how they navigated their way through, but took just as many notes from my daughter’s first grade teacher as I watched her master the virtual classroom with such empathy and innovation. She set high expectations for the class, but made sure each student met them in their own way and that no one was left behind.

Griffin: And you’ve doubled in size since then. To what do you attribute to the growth? 

Franconi: Our team. It’s one thing to build a company. It’s another to convince a bunch of talented people to do it with you, and then three weeks later, watch the whole world tilt on its proverbial axis. I think we felt a collective resolve and tremendous responsibility to weather the storm together. Someone once told me that when it rains, there are two types of animals - those who stand still or hide under trees and those who run straight into it to get to the other side quicker. Trade School is full of rain runners. We were strategic in the types of new business we pursued, fought hard to defend our current accounts and tried very hard to show up for each other while we got to the other side.