June Lien, Founder/producer, Liendani Creative
A lot of people were blindsided by the scale and ferocity of the coronavirus pandemic, but June Lien was better prepared than most.
Her small marketing consultancy firm specializes in the health care market, and she dealt regularly with organizations like Austin Regional Clinic. “They’re one of my biggest clients,” she said, “or they were.” ARC cut off all external contracts April 1 “but I saw it coming. Being in the health care space, I was tracking it, and knew it was going to be very, very bad.” The biggest sign was when Austin ISD closed all campuses on March 12, but even then she’d known the day before that bad times were in the wind. “I went to the grocery store that morning, I canceled all the calls that I had, and it was like something was coming.”
She’s seen downturns before – the UT grad had moved back to Austin in 2008 to work in health care, which turned out to be one of the few market sectors that wasn’t pummeled. This time has been different. Doctors and hospitals are hurting, as patients are delaying even essential treatment, and so their marketing budgets have been slashed. So, Lien’s first job was to apply for Paycheck Protection Program loans for herself and for her parents’ restaurant in Houston. “Miracle of miracles, I got funding for me in the first round and funding for them in the second,” she said, but putting the paperwork together had been a full-time job. Even finding a bank that would help process her application was a major challenge, and she finally had to go with one in Colorado.
With that little bit of security (and Lien acknowledges she’s been lucky, because the PPP system seems inherently biased against women and people of color), she’s been looking for work outside of the norm. She quoted what one friend had told her: “It’s like the 1920’s business world. We do whatever we can and figure it out.” Freelance rates have been slashed, and many marketing firms are looking at fields they never considered before (she’d recently subcontracted on a health care project with a firm that normally specializes in restaurants). However, her big message to her regular medical clients is that this is no time to pull back on marketing, and she says that as a concerned citizen, not a PR professional. In the middle of a pandemic, she said, “This is when we want to hear from you.”
This article appears in July 3 • 2020 and June 26 • 2020.
