A global pandemic taught me that, and it’s a lesson I wish I had learnt sooner.

Sometimes the best way to hit goals is to get off your ass and do it, and a memory from that dark, crazy world hit my timelines this morning.

You see, when COVID hit us all, we did what we could as an industry.
We all did!

Sponsorships, live events and well, everything, pretty much dried up overnight, and we were left with Teams Calls and Banana Bread baking to see us through.

So I did what anyone would do.
I connected dots. I networked.
I hustled.

This was one of the results.
A Drive-In, fresh out of lockdown number whatever.

There was no business plan for this “thing”, no boardroom pitches, no in-depth research and analysis paralysis.

Just an idea that I knew I could make work, and it became a “thing” and grew into something glorious.

Not because it was pretty, or brilliant, or “award-winning”.

Because it was necessary, it served a real purpose.

Frankly, should never have worked. But it did!

With a few firm, convincing and maybe slightly assertive (me, never) calls to colleagues, it all happened really quickly.

Global film studios gave content. New content. Tentpoles. Premiers. (Unheard of)
Cinema chains gave infrastructure, ticketing advice, content support.
Shopping Centres gave space – and money.

And it just worked!

Planned for a month, our V&A Waterfront Drive-In sold out, and our Sandton City Drive-In stayed open for 5 months, instead of the planned 1 month.

People drove in, stayed safely in their cars, and maybe, for a few hours, they started to feel normal again. They laughed, they smiled, they connected, they cried.

And that is one of the lessons I am most proud of.

It’s so easy to forget that the true power of what we do is not a results slide to a client, an engagement metric or a pretty graph in a PowerPoint presentation.
It’s not an award for the trophy cabinet.

It’s the way we can use an idea to make people feel, really feel.
Connect.
Live.

So next time you have an idea, a random one that you just know, deep down, feels right, get it off the PowerPoint slide and into reality.

Just do it, and repeat as many times as you need to the exact words I did until it’s real.

Don’t be afraid to fail, be terrified not to try!

Andrew Ross, Chaos Theory CEO