As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to force businesses into taking tougher and tougher decisions, one of Malta’s most well-established marketing and brand consulting companies, BRND WGN, has shed eight members of its 35-member team.

Speaking with WhosWho.mt, Chief Executive Officer and founder of BRND WGN, Peter-Jan Grech, sounded clearly emotional when saying “it was the hardest thing that we ever had to do as leaders”.

“I haven’t shed so many tears in a long time,” he added.

Shedding light on the company culture, Mr Grech said “we have always celebrated the team, we always put people before profits and we always celebrated the ethos ‘once a wagoneer, always a wagoneer’”.

He said that all that changed on 3rd April when the company’s four partners had to take the tough decision of letting people go.

“Their crime, only to be the last to join the WGN in a specific function at the time when a vast majority of our clients decided to pull back significant amount of spend due to fears brought about by COVID-19”.

Mr Grech stressed that BRND WGN was quick to react after the pandemic reached Malta, on 9th March. “We gathered an emergency meeting between the four BRND WGN partners to set our crisis response in motion.

“For long we had been forecasting an economic downturn of sorts, we assumed it might have been, post-Brexit disruption, Malta’s decaying reputation, a pop in the property bubble that doesn’t exist, or possibly the loving global trade relations between the ego-powers of the West and the East.”

It was a health pandemic to bring the economy to its knees, causing the company’s leadership to draw up forecasts and scenarios. An aggressive cost cutting plan was put in place while the team gathered its belongings to start working remotely within 48 hours.

“Running BRND WGN is my life’s work and I am proud of what we are building, sure there are tough times and sacrifices to be made, but there are many more great times than most entrepreneurs could have ever hope for.

“We work on countless amazing projects for many amazing customers, locally and internationally, we help people get dreams started, we support businesses through tough changes, we are the guys that make things happen.”

He revealed that the company’s next challenge was opening another BRND WGN in Lisbon, but all that changed thanks to COVID-19.

The organisation quickly reduced rates, launched a range of support measures for customers and tried to reassure them that assistance would come. The team even offered free hours daily to help clients that needed further assistance.

Mr Grech said that the clients started to really pull-back after the Government announced its Annex A and Annex B wage supplement aid measures, focusing on industries it deemed to be worst impacted, such as wholesale and retail, hotels, restaurants and travel agencies.

“Our forecasts stopped looking as hopeful as we originally thought. So, day by day at 13:00 we would all meet up as partners on a conference call, discuss, hypothesise, strategise and wait. Then one day we decided it was not responsible to wait anymore, and we had to do what we had to do.

“Letting go of any team member was very far down on our list of options, an option which for many days we did not even want to consider, but after many sessions running different scenarios we quickly realised we were between a rock and a hard place. When the news was clear that we were only on Annex B and only in a position to apply for €160 per employee, there was only one responsible thing left to do.”

He stressed that this places the company in a strong position to protect the rest of the team, and ride out the rest of the storm for the foreseeable future.

Read Mr Grech’s full insight into the company’s decision here.