How to Utilize Pandemic to Enrich, Not Get Rich
I’m going to share some critical and very practical ways we can lead our businesses through the worrisome waters in which we all stand. But first, some context on how I reached these conclusions:
At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, my head was buried in my laptop. News outlets bickered back and forth. Daily articles speculated who was to blame for a new virus that could be headed to the United States.
But I wasn’t buried in my laptop reading articles. I was focused on my work. I mean, I’m an Entrepreneur with a Pre-Seed startup and critical benchmarks to nail! And this wasn’t the first time the news outlets were predicting a “new normal” for us all.
To make things more interesting, on 4/3 at 4:03 (yes that’s on her birth certificate) — my wife and I welcomed our fourth child (it’s a girl) into the family! But a newborn? At this time? Really?
I gotta be honest, birthing a new human life into a world currently thrown into panic is stressing the crap outta me. But even having a new baby didn’t get me to pay attention.
I still wasn’t listening. I was just too busy.
Every time my wife told me to order something for the house. I’d agree and quickly add to our Prime Now cart. Like a classic workhorse in a head-down type gesture, I’d smile, nod, and quickly swipe to “1-Click Buy” as I rushed back to the office to get caught up at work.
To be honest, I didn’t start listening until they canceled the NBA.
I mean, when they canceled Basketball, It was personal!
Then it all hit the fan mid-March.
…just after LAUSD, the second-largest school district in the nation announced their shutdown, we lost 100% of our customers at Three Good. Why? COVID-19. Nothing else. Completely out of our control. Our wellness product was made for the office. And now, nobody was going to the office.
We lost all our revenue. The baby came. And suddenly this Great Pause became about much more than business or basketball.
Here’s the point: I was so busy, I hadn’t stopped to think about the thousands of families in China who had already lost family members to this aggressive virus. And now the US and all over the world.
And that’s the issue. Most of us are still too busy to notice just how much damage this virus has had on millions of unemployed people. Not to mention families mourning the loss of loved ones. You can go-off about how the media skews stats, how H1-N1 is worse, or how more people die of car accidents or some random quote. But the gist is this. People are dying, depressed, and out of work. And nobody alive can remember a time this bad. So have some empathy y’all. Economists are projecting we’ll reach 30% unemployment by the end of July. That’s higher than the numbers in the Great Depression. Need I say more about the increasing numbers of depression and mental issues plaguing the world subsequent to this outbreak?
This is real ish. Can you see it? These are real people. Our beloved Nanni’s and Naana’s. Our fathers and mothers. Our aunties, uncles, cousins, and friends. And they’re all hurting. Fearful, anxious, and confused. You see people, this is the greatest historic event for nearly a century. It’s gone beyond just a worry for our grandparents and the random old person you hold the door open for at the bank.
So now is not the time to downplay the crisis and carry on with “business as usual”. Or “get aggressive” and make it rain with more sales and pushing through with tenacious taglines and clever marketing gimmicks. These grim realities should not be ignored. Rather, they should determine how we lead our companies through these present waters we find ourselves in.
Because whether or not you stop to listen and step into the pain that those around you are experiencing -it’s called empathy- this point in history will shape your legacy as a leader. Period. Full stop. End of story. And it will forever shape how you do business on the tail end of this thing. How do you want to be remembered?
Here we are, two months after Los Angeles’ Mayor announced the Stay-at-Home Executive Mandate, and my inbox is still filling up with unsolicited emails trying to get me to click. Yesterday, I got an email completely ignoring our current place in history. At least reference my family or something. At least show me that you care about my situation. Maybe then, I would at least click. For now, I’m ignoring this staffing firm and will probably never work with them for the simple reason that they aren’t nurturing relationships with this approach. But it’s not this poor saps fault. It’s the leader who issued this kind of approach who should know better.
It reminds me of that classic opening scene from Coppola’s Patton where George C. Scott is pacing up and down a stage with a massive flag filling the frame in the background. The simplicity of it is remarkable. Scott’s deep and scratchy voice alone commands your attention!
The General is speaking to thousands of scared young men who are all about to ship out to Europe in World War II.
He says, “30 years from now when you’re sitting by the fireside with your grandson on your knee, he’ll look up at you and say: ‘Grandpa, what did you do in the Great World War?’ and you won’t have to say, ‘well… I shoveled shit in Louisiana.’”
Now. Today. During all the uncertainty around you. This is your time. It’s our time. The period in history where legends are born and innovative products rise to the top. And might I be so bold to say that the following 3 axioms will be more important now than ever before!
Because what we do now is both deeply meaningful
and undeniably challenging.
The following list isn’t a Google search on best practices in leadership or “business 101”. It’s honing our attention to the most essential aspects of who we are as leaders. It’s how we follow through that makes the greatest impact on fellow team members. It’s about a heightened sense of self-awareness to the critical nuances of team dynamics and people management.
1. Don’t Be Evil: Do the Right Thing
I was on the phone with a leader from Google at the end of March. He mentioned that his executive team sent out a memo about not being opportunistic. It made me think of Sergie’s original mantra when he first founded Google. “Don’t Be Evil.” Wow, here I was almost 20 years later and this Director was giving me genuine and strong advice coming from a leader at Google. Now that’s great leadership! And that’s the key to what we need today. We can’t use this time to try and pander prospects for personal gain.
I mean, I’m sure you read about that schmuck who was hoarding Lysol wipes in his storage unit. What a joke! Not to mention all the opportunistic emails we’ve all been receiving on the daily with “COVID-19” or “Corona Virus” in the title. Using this worldwide pandemic for personal gain is not only grotesque, it’s piss-poor leadership. And now is not the time for it. Remember, regardless of the stats and bias of whatever news channel you’re trolling: people are dying, losing their jobs, and becoming exceedingly depressed. As leaders, now is when great things happen! Where good leaders rise to be great leaders and where poor leaders continue to look like idiots.
This is not the time you force people to start a new project or subscribe to your product. Or to play survival of the fittest. This is the time to make the right decisions for your people. Whether that’s not laying off a few employees, or offering forbearance to some clients who owe you money. This is a temporary time and how you react to this pandemic will either diminish your relationships or strengthen them for the future. I choose the latter.
The idea here is to do the right thing, only collect what you can, and always be sure to offer a helping hand in return.
If you grow your business now by coercing people into opting-in during this period in time, that will be your legacy. You’re not going to have anything great to talk about down the line. It’s better to actively look for partnerships through symbiotic matches, rather than force a sale to meet a personal quote or departmental benchmark. Simply put, put your people (customers/partners/employees) before short-sighted wins!
2. Enrich Your People
Guinea-Bissau’s Braima Suncar Dabo helps Aruba’s Jonathan Busby to the finish line ( AFP/Getty Images )
Enrich means to “improve or enhance the value of something or someone. To put this into practice is simple. If someone is losing (most are right now), this is a time where nurturing relationships is more important than completing deadlines. For now, just check-in to see how your partners are doing. No strings. If they are not yet a signed partner, be careful to take care and DO NOT SELL anything. Because no matter how relational your “sell” is, it’s going to hurt and alienate them more than anything. Why? The fact is, most likely every one of us knows at least one other individual who has gotten COVID. And regardless of whether they survived, getting the virus is hard on everyone. Below I’ve listed some practical ideas on how to enrich people.
Reach Out: Call, slack, text, send a handwritten card. Include a small gift card as a personal token of gratitude for their hard work or partnership.
Empathy in Action: Don’t be shy. It’s ok to talk about personal life with your employees. It’s actually proven that empathy generates lasting results and produces highly productive teams.
Pray for People: And this has nothing to do with politics. In hard times people rarely say no to prayer, even if they don’t share the same faith, are agnostic, or atheist. If you’re shy, do it privately. Pray for protection and blessing over their family and business/company.
Afford Stability to Staff: Issue COVID stipends to help your people get through this time with some extra cash in their pockets. Or at least don’t issue pay cuts or layoffs. Remember how Germany handled the Great Recession? We should do well to learn from their aggressive example in times like this.
Offer Forbearance to Subscribers: A signed contract without payment is better than a canceled contract without payment. Momentum is critical to project success and team efficiency. I suggest offering real help. Pro Bono type help, with no strings. Just good ol’ humans helping each other out. Only it’s a professional project. Don’t defer payment. Just don’t charge for it. Most of us aren’t going to get rich during World War COVID, so why not do something revolutionary and reach out with a helping hand.
3. PIVOT Now!
Drucker once wrote, “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence — it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”
If you don’t already know this. You should. All the best companies PIVOT. In fact, according to a Forbes study the most successful startups pivot at least three times prior to settling-in with their core product.
At La Visual, we acted decisively at the outset and the managing partners have weathered the storm well. Now they are hiring during this time, rather than firing, and are set to have a 150% increase in revenue over 2019.
For my primary business, Three Good, we had to discuss the reality that a product designed to be installed physically in our customers’ offices was no longer in demand. In fact: I would say it’s obsolete at the moment. So what did we do? I knew we needed to pivot and pivot quickly.
So I rallied the team (including the board of directors) and had two separate brainstorms around new product pivot ideas.
The results? We discovered we had some pretty cool assets to repurpose into a new platform. We decided to move from a focus on delivering real-time hydration metrics to delivering real employee engagement analytics and insights via a completely different platform! Does that mean we needed to rebuild our product? Absolutely. Has it been challenging? Of course. Is it going to make us better? You can count on it!
Change is something that entrepreneurs need to embrace. Regardless of whether 100% of our subscribers finally return to the office and renew their subscriptions for the hydration system. I’m confident we made the right decision.
Quoting an early article Sequoia published on Medium, “Having weathered every business downturn for nearly fifty years, we’ve learned an important lesson — nobody ever regrets making fast and decisive adjustments to changing circumstances. In downturns, revenue and cash levels always fall faster than expenses. In some ways, business mirrors biology. As Darwin surmised, those who survive “are not the strongest or the most intelligent, but the most adaptable to change.”
I originally set to publish this article on April 2nd, but our new baby girl had plans of her own. I say that if you have been dragging your feet it’s never too late to be decisive and get it done. Even if you’re having a baby and getting very little sleep. And always follow through with it. Even if it’s painful. And it is painful out there right now people!
If you’re overwhelmed. Reach out to me directly. Why? Because my estimate is that only 1% of entrepreneurs who are heading a pre-seed company had a baby in April! And probably 0.005% have three kids already! In other words, chances are my life is one thousand times busier than yours, and I’m still getting it done.
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