It is Monday. Russia invaded Ukraine four days ago. My inbox has a quality it did not have last week — every message carries a subtext that has nothing to do with the subject line.
This morning I sat down and wrote check-in emails to our international contacts. Not about the invasion directly — that is not something a Swedish digital agency has standing to comment on with authority. But about continuity. Are you operational? Has anything changed for your clients? Do we need to adjust timelines on joint work? Is there anything we can do on our end?
The phrase that kept coming back as I wrote was “special times.” It felt inadequate — the situation in Ukraine is not “special,” it is catastrophic for the people living through it. But from the operational perspective of a business checking in on its network, “special” captures the reality that the normal assumptions about stability, timelines, and planning horizons have shifted, and pretending they have not is worse than naming it.
The operational question
The invasion did not create a direct operational impact on BBO. We have no Ukrainian clients. We have no Russian clients since our Yamondo partnership in that market went dormant. Our supply chain — such as it is for a service business — is not exposed to the conflict zone.
But the indirect effects were immediate. Clients with European exposure paused campaign budgets pending clarity on macroeconomic impacts. One client with logistics in Eastern Europe asked us to halt all paid media until they could assess their supply chain. Another client, in travel, pulled back on forward bookings in destinations that suddenly felt less certain.
The pattern was familiar from COVID two years earlier. Not the specifics — the mechanism. An external shock creates uncertainty, uncertainty freezes budgets, frozen budgets create revenue gaps, and the agency scrambles to fill the gap with pipeline that was not there a week ago.
We had learned from COVID that the scramble is a losing strategy. The right response is not to sell harder into a contracting market. It is to do three things simultaneously: communicate with existing clients to understand their revised timeline, protect the relationships that will recover when the shock passes, and use the breathing room to fix internal issues you have been deferring.
What the check-in emails actually accomplished
The international check-ins served a purpose beyond logistics. In a network like Yamondo, relationships are maintained through activity — shared briefs, joint events, referral flow. When activity drops, relationships atrophy. Two years of COVID had already thinned the connection with several partner agencies. Another disruption risked turning dormant relationships into dead ones.
The emails were short and operational. How are things on your end? Any client-side impact we should know about? Are there timelines we should adjust? The subtext was: we are still here, we are still paying attention, this partnership still matters.
Most replies came within a day. The German partner reported client-side hesitation but no cancellations. The partner in the UAE noted increased inquiry volume from European companies exploring market diversification — the opposite effect. Two partners did not reply at all, which was itself information.
What COVID taught us about crisis rhythm
The first time an external shock hit our business — COVID in March 2020 — we reacted emotionally. Freezing everything, cancelling plans, hunkering down. The recovery was slow because we had cut too deep and retreated too far.
By 2022, we had a different muscle. The rhythm was: assess the direct exposure (minimal), communicate with clients (proactively, within 48 hours), reach out to partners (within a week), and then resume operations with adjusted assumptions. Not panicked, not dismissive. Just operational.
The difference was not intelligence. It was practice. We had run the crisis playbook once before and we knew which parts mattered and which were performative.
What I am watching
The thing I am most attentive to right now is not revenue — that will recover or it will not, and we have enough runway to absorb a rough quarter. What I am watching is whether our clients use this moment to rethink their channel allocation. After COVID, several clients shifted budget permanently from offline to digital. If Ukraine creates a similar structural reallocation — and the early signals suggest it might, particularly in travel and logistics — then our pipeline in six months will look different from our pipeline today.
The other thing I am watching is energy costs. Sweden has been partially insulated, but clients in Germany and Central Europe are already citing energy-price impacts on their marketing budgets. If that pressure sustains, the international work that has been a growth driver for us becomes a vulnerability.
The honest admission
There is something uncomfortable about writing a business-continuity post while a war is happening. The operational framing feels inadequate. People are dying, and I am writing about client budgets and partnership maintenance.
I do not have a good resolution for that tension. The honest version is: I can influence what happens inside BBO and within our network. I cannot influence what happens in Ukraine. Maintaining the operational health of the business is not a substitute for caring about the human cost — but it is the thing I am equipped to do, so I am doing it.
If you run an internationally connected business, I am curious how you handled the first week. Not the big strategic questions — the small operational ones. Who did you call first? What did you say?