205: Kevin Hundal — Pivoting During Lockdown

Well, I don't know about you. Many businesses are hurting one way or another right now. Our guest today is pivoted, tells the story of a pivot and I think that'll be useful to everyone. Our guest, his business first went down 15, 20%, then it went down 80%. He's got a large or large ish facility, lots of headcount and saw the business closing overnight and they pivoted rapidly into something completely or seemingly unrelated to what they did before and and is now fully employing everyone and on an uptick and an increase. This is a really useful story. I think you'll hear something useful for yourself in it if you listen keenly. Plus, he's a really nice guy and a great conversation. So listen in as we talk with Kevin Hundle and how he's pivoted his business, what it means for yours. Hi there. I'm Bill Gallagher, scaling coach and host of the show. The show is all about how to scale and grow your business no matter what the economy is doing, no matter what industry or what part of the world you're in. We've got hundreds of episodes on leadership and scaling up at our website, scalingcoach.com we in addition to my own work, we also have 200 coaches in our group who are working as flexibly and as creatively as they can. Right now, we're doing things online with people. We are using a combination of online and learning and full and virtual learning and phone calls and zoom sessions and everything else to help people pivot and make the move from surviving to thriving. We know that you would love to lead the recovery and we want to help you get there. We're busier than ever, but we're also flexible and mindful of that. The website has hundreds of downloads of these episodes plus all the tools and things that we talk about. And we'll even give you a free copy of the best selling business book Scaling up right there@scalingcoach.com so just go to scalingcoach.com and get all the free tools and let us know if we can help you connect. Maybe it's the right time for you to get a coach. It's never been easier to work with us. Listen in now as we talk with Kevin Hundle. Kevin, welcome to the show.

Bill, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

So, guys, Kevin is head of a company. So he's had a company forever, a trend usa and we're talking, we're telling the story of a pivot. Today, Kevin and I first met. He Was helping to run and be a trainer in the accelerator program that I've been involved with around the world for some years now, helping to develop those early stage companies. And Kevin's own company does. The parent of the core company has been involved in cool ass speaker boxes, drop the beats and other kinds of audio gear, speakers and audio equipment and amps and things like that that you would do to power for your audiophile experience. But everything changed, right? And even some of their core customers aren't buying as much. People are laid off. There's not live performances going on. And so that world got changed. So we're going to tell that story and talk about what they're doing now and how they've gotten so, so busy and how cool and gratifying that work is. So, so glad to have you. Now you're in the West Loop area today and what's it like there now? You guys are sheltering. What's the deal?

Yeah, it's. It's shelter in place here in Chicago, Bill. And I'll tell you, it's. It's quite eerie. In the morning I run quite a bit and part of my run is running in the morning around 6am and you can literally run down Michigan Avenue and see maybe three cars. So it's a really interesting time and very quiet. Although you see people enjoying the city with walks and such, but it's very quiet here.

Well, I lived in Chicago many, many years ago. When you were very young.

Yes, very young.

And I so enjoyed my time there. Not the winter even a little bit, but the rest of the year. I lived there for a couple different companies and I had a great, just a great experience. My last office was on Madison and I loved working in the Loop and living in Lincoln Park. And this time of year as spring arrives, just people can't wait to get out on the street and eat in outdoor restaurants and walk around the parks and begin to emerge from the, the wretched and endless winter. So I know that's gotta be weird as hell that now people can't do that. You can't just go to the neighborhood bar or sit in an outdoor restaurant and enjoy that, you know, the odd warm day as, as it starts to turn, it's gotta feel really strange to be.

Yeah, yeah. Summer shy is what they call it, right Bill? So it'll be interesting how summer shy unfolds this, this summer for us.

Be really interesting. All right, so talk to us before we get into the pivot and what it's like today because they're Just doing phenomenal work today in the world of safety equipment. Talk about how you got into your business, your background, that kind of thing.

Yeah, Bill, sure. So I say I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. It was fourth grade in which I started to understand what distribution models look like. And I also had a rude awakening when it came to governance and how that works. It was fourth grade. Fourth grade, yeah.

Fourth grade. Distribution model is who's got the best comic book.

Where can I get more gum? Yes. And actually building on the gum is what the distribution model was. My, my mom got a membership to Sam's Club. And I remember going there and it's like, hey, why Sam's Club model so different than the Aldi we've been going to our whole life? It was, well, you can buy in bulk here, you've got a membership so you get special access to deals. And I remember, let's call it acquiring my first box of Blow Pops. And I told those Blow Pops, put them in my backpack at school. And I had a pretty good gig going on for a while, making 50% margin. And like anything, I didn't pay taxes. Right. So the principal got involved and that business got shut down probably in about 20 days. But that was my first experience.

Interaction with regulatory bodies.

Yes, exactly. I guess now you know, it was. I wasn't paying my fair share to the school. It could be different, I guess. Right?

Yeah. Not properly taxed, unregulated, unauthorized distribution.

Yeah, absolutely. So my story kind of starts there and you know, came from a family of entrepreneurs. My father moved here in the 70s, first of seven siblings. And in the 90s he started a manufacturing business. And you'll love this. It was a manufacturing business that made reindeers and slaves for Christmas time. So if you will remember the wooden reindeers and slaves you might see in people's yards in the 90s, where did he move from? He from the state of Punjab, which is northern India, and that's where my family from.

Some guy from Punjab making sleighs and reindeers.

This is the American dream, brother. Right. So my father starts manufacturing these and he's a financial advisor by trade, just, you know, as a backstory there. So he's now he's an entrepreneur and he's making slaves and got some pretty big contracts with Ace and True Value. So as, as a 13 year old, we were back there in the warehouse in a shabby neighborhood called Maywood here in Chicago. You might be familiar with Maywood.

Yeah.

And the only place he could afford rent back Then and the labor pool was my whole family. So if you will imagine all the, all the parents packing reindeers and slaves and all the kids helping out. So we got involved there and business was always around me. That business in the late 90s, early 2000 really kind of got crippled by China imports of, of these lighted reindeers. So if you recall, there are these wooden ones and then they turned into these lighted ones that we see now that are more prevalent and that I would say in, in hindsight, as I think about my journey, I actually had my first pivot in 2002, unbeknownst to me, because what we did from there was took the one piece of machinery that was left in that company and started a trend. So a trend came to life in 2002 and it was like, what can we do with that machinery? We had a family friend who was a distributor of car audio and said, hey, I think you guys can maybe make enclosures. So I ran with that and we started a trend in 2002 making speaker boxes.

That's, that's amazing. And what year again?

And that was 2002.

2002. Yeah.

So over 18 years, I've made a lot of bad decisions, Bill. I've got a lot of experience.

Right.

I've been punched in the face, so. Well, this is, this is actually the second limit right now.

How big is your facility now? All of a trend.

Yeah. So we've got 50,000 square feet here in Elk Grove Village Commercial park, which a fun fact is one of the biggest commercial parks in Chicago in the US actually.

Yeah. And how many people were you employing at your peak?

At our peak was about 34. And then also manufacturers reps who are commission based reps and 1099s and that sort.

So including those or plus those not.

Including the 1099 and sales rep force that's out there.

So if you, if you expand your contractor force as well.

Yeah.

What do you got?

There's about 25 of those folks. So somewhere near the 60 mark. Almost.

Yeah, 60 folks and that are counting on you for. In your organization for a living. And was that the way it was just before the virus hit?

Yeah, we were probably within a 10 12% variance there. And I'll say that the virus hit us back in December when it started hitting China, because part of my revenue is also importing products out of there. So we had to start making changes in a small degree back then.

Yeah. So beginning to do that because of the impact on theirs. Yeah. I remember seeing the first news reports of the virus and realizing that I was about to go out on a 7, 8 country international speaking and workshop trip and being nervous about the trip and maybe getting stopped or stuck somewhere or encountering the virus. But it was beginning to be on my radar. I did view it as something that was not going to be global in nature, but focused. My son was far more worried about it being global. And in fact I had the whole family about to come join us in the middle of my trip. I had a week off and so I flew the family out to Greece and we spent a week together. But he was very like should I go? Shouldn't I go? What's going to happen? He decided to come anyway and we were all there and we had a week and. And for the most part people were relating to it as that's a thing that's like in China and northern Italy. And we were still thinking about that in late February. Right. But it. Everything changed really, really fast.

Yeah. And did you. How was the. The journey back home? Was the flight still full or did you see some drop off start happening?

There was already beginning to be drop off. I would not. I noticed a little bit of soft as I began the trip in February. It was pretty fall. Maybe there was softening. Hard to tell. Depends, you know, depend on the route that I was on. But the cost for the. For the upgraded tickets was less and less by the end. The la. The last couple long legs of my trip were half empty and. And I. There was lots of listing. So I came back that the end of the first week beginning like the 7th or 8th of March, I flew back to the States and the business class on my return flight was really, really loose. The cost for the. The difference on that flight, the upgrade cost was minimal. So it was way easier and comfortable. But we had become increasingly aware of it. And certain things that I would do like I would take a conversational ball and I would throw that out to groups that I'm talking to to start and engage the audience. And I didn't pull that out of my bag the whole time where we began the trip with maybe some fist bumps and not hugs and that kind of thing. We. And then a few people would accidentally shake hands and then it was very rare to see people embracing in the same way. I started the trip in the middle EAS least. But by the end there was less and less, you know, people were more and more distant and being careful about touching things. Washing sanitizer, hand sanitizer was now out. But on that last flight home on I want to say the 7th or 8th of March, you couldn't find hand sanitizer anywhere in the airport. It was gone. They were like, nope, there's nothing available. There were no face masks, no hand, nothing. You saw people walking around with things, but it was like, oh, things have changed. And then, of course, a week later, we were on house arrest.

Yeah. Because you flew right into it, basically, May 7, if you got back, you guys were shelter in place.

Yeah. And I was reading about, like, oh, it's. It's community spread in Santa Clara. I mean, that's literally an hour away by car from here. So, like, that's going to be the whole Bay Area. We're screwed. We're like, we're going to be sheltering. Yes. And I came back and people are still going around, but where I. So I haven't owned a car for several years because I'm on the road so much. I didn't want to get an Uber anymore. I'm like, honey, I need to use your car. I've got a meeting in the city. And then I was. I went in the city, and the building that I was going to, where I was going only had valet parking. So I had brought along with me antiseptic wipes. And I more of a germaphobe than most. So this fits right into my time. I, like, wiped down everything that they might have touched, including everywhere that the. The Valley might have sat. But I didn't worry about air breathed. Right. I just rubbed down all the surfaces with an. With a wipe. And then as I went through the building, you know, if I went through the elevator then I. I used hand sanitizer after, but I wasn't. Nobody was wearing a mask yet.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's. Seeing how it's becoming socially acceptable now. Right. Back then, perhaps people were staring at saying, what's this guy Bill doing, doing all of this? But now.

Well, if somebody wore a mask before, what did you think about them? You thought maybe they have cancer and they're on chemo and they're. They're compromised, so they're wearing something. You thought of them as particularly sickly or you thought. Or they were Asian. Right. Because the only folks who wore masks consistently were, like, from Asia or even perhaps a polluted area like a city in India or something like that, where you think of, like, I'm going to wear a mask for improved breathing. And in fact, we had masks already in Northern California because the last two years we've had substantial fires. And at one point, two years Ago, you couldn't see across the street because the smoke was so bad from a fire more than 100 miles away.

Yeah, yeah. And some of that. So it's right, yeah, it is very interesting on that.

So you're, you go there, your business starts to taper off on the supply side and talk to us about the whole, the experience in the pivot. Paint that picture for us. Take us through.

Yeah, yeah. So as a trend, manufactures and distributes. So about 60% of our revenue is created from goods that we import support from Asia, which is speaker enclosures and these accessories. So as COVID 19 hit Asia, obviously that put a cripple on our supply chain, which immediately started impacting revenue, impacting revenue to probably about a 15 to 20% swing. So it wasn't significant enough where we had to go into defense mode immediately, but it raised red flags of saying, okay, how are we going to manage through this? And then as you fast forward into March and shelter in place starts happening, and I believe the date for us was March 15th, where the governor, Governor Pritzker here in Illinois stated that there's going to be a shelter in place. Within 48 hours, the volume of orders that we see coming in dropped off significantly. So now we're facing over a seven day span, we're tracking data and seeing what's going to happen from a forecasting model. And it was a significant drop of about 60 to 80% revenue we were seeing that was already impacting the business. So it's kind of like you, you jump into a fist fight and you get punched once and you get back up after that first punch. And now here's a second blow coming at you first from Asia and now with COVID coming into the US So that put us in a position to have to get creative and start responding.

This is a good thing to remember because there are some noticeable blows that we take or drops in the business, but it's usually not just one, it's usually several. At least to an existing business.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So there's been a couple blows that came in into play for us and it's, it's from Asia to, to here. And then it was also in a market that is already slowing down. Right. As, as you mentioned, Uber people don't buy cars as much anymore. And you're a prime example of that, that you jump in an Uber with your headphones. Right. So the need for some of our product has been declining over the last couple years also.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. A change in that whole personalization and yeah, neither of my kids have their a driver's license. They've both relied on Uber and they're both 20 and 22 now. But now they're thinking, okay, maybe I need to learn to drive. Yeah, maybe I don't want to get in and out of Uber and I certainly don't want to get an Uber pool or Lyft line anymore. That whole thing with budget, you know, getting around and they're more nervous about getting in public transit. So now they're kind of challenged even as we lift, what are they going to do? So I think this next month my daughter will probably learn to drive and then get her license immediately on, on the lifting and then, and then buy a car and I'll probably pick up another car in the next little bit. And I imagine some people will be in a world of hurt and need to get out of their cars and leases quickly, so it'll be easy to pick something up.

Yeah, yeah, the DMV is going to be pretty busy, it looks like, after this.

So there you are, business down. And what's your approach? How do you come up with the idea to move into this? What's your thinking, your process?

Yeah, so I'll start with. So my brothers and I are very entrepreneurial and that's a blessing and a curse. So we've made quite a few wrong decisions the last 10 years also because we chase these squirrels all the time. Right. So it's like there's a shiny object. What should we go do next? Like, let's try that.

Yeah, yeah.

I'll say in this case, it's really helped us out because the, the challenge I put at hand to our leadership team was that we've got to get this business back on track. So what ended up happening the third week of March, and this is after we took zero partner pay down. We looked at costs on a defense, everything we could do. Then we got to the last stage, which was payroll, of course, being the biggest one, and had to make the hard decision of laying off 25% of our blue collar workforce. And these majority of these folks are Hispanic. They're the head of the household. That's the only income in the household, young kids. So it was a very difficult decision for me to make and execute on. And coming out of that, the thought process was, hey, it's our responsibility to put food on the tables for our people. And then I said, however, it's also our responsibility to make sure there's a company left at the end of this to put food on the tables of our people. So we've got balanced. And the challenge I put to the team was that we need to work our asses off to figure out how we get business back on track immediately. So our team rallied around and this was not just the leadership team, but the people on the floor that were left over still. And we looked within our plant and we started said, let's look within our walls. What's within our walls that we can do? So we've got a high tech CNC machine that cuts plastics and wood and some of those plastics are used in our speaker enclosures. It's an FDA approved PETG plastic which FDA approved for also face shields. So my brother went to work and looked at what we could do with face shields and started tinkering around with things and came up with a face shield that we could start manufacturing. And on the other side, we started looking at barriers that were made of plastic. So I don't know how much you've gotten out, Bill. Looks like California. You guys are pretty locked up. But if you've gone to a grocery store, you'll see some of the acrylic or plastic barriers that provide protection between the customer and the cashier. And so then we started adding those to the line. So now we've got two product categories that we started manufacturing and the first week it was pretty chaotic when we started marketing some of that. So we got out there, started marketing. We looked outside of our plant over the last. Right. 2002. 18 years of all the mistakes I've made, well, what can I learn? What can we do to really get this out there and do some good in the world? Our company's purpose is one, this is.

A good thing to know. It's not just face masks and face shields which is important and urgent right now, but as businesses go back to work and some that are already in these dividers are going to be. If you look at pictures of restaurants and cafeterias that are reopening now in Asia, where they're ahead of the curve on us, they have already erected plexi barriers so that I'm sitting across from someone. I don't necessarily need a full six feet of distance. I'm facing them and I'm looking through a glass window so I can still see people and feel. But I'm not, I'm not spraying on them, Right?

Absolutely.

It's not necessarily going to freak everyone out in quite the same way. But if you think about it, right. In your most grocery. Well, most of our grocery stores around Here now have these. And then other places like the UPS store and FedEx and that kind of thing, they have these, they're rapidly putting up these plexi barriers that are more like, like, like the bulletproof glass in a check cashing place or a bank in, in a bad neighborhood. Right there you're going to have this in every single business. Your receptionary is going to have a barrier like that because nobody's going to sit with somebody sort of towering over their desk looking down at them anymore more for a long time. And even maybe after we get a vaccine because people are going to be worried about the next one or a mutation or whatever. I mean we've had SARS and MERS and Ebola and that kind of thing. And people are starting to be like, oh, maybe the world is connected now and these things are going to spread. So I'm sure some of it, like every single office, I think is going to need this kind of stuff now.

Yeah, yeah. Bill and we've been doing some proactive feedback and survey and interviewing larger organizations, 300 people plus and saying what's your coming back to work strategy? What is that going to look like? And you're absolutely spot on. It's that, hey, we're going to have these barriers or an area where people have to get temperature checked when they walked in every morning. And then you walk in and then you get your gloves and then you get your masks and you have a certain allotment of those every month that you have to utilize. So people are preparing for this new work behavior that's going to come to life here quickly now.

You know, some people are horrified at this, like, oh my God, this is just the worst thing ever. I can't imagine a world where I have to do. But you know what? I've been working with a company that does supplements, vitamins, fish oils, things like that, that people take nutritional supplements and for their health and which there's plenty of interest in right now. But you know, those people, every day they go to work, they step in a little thing, it puts a booty on their shoe, they wear a smock, they wear gloves, they put on a face mask and, or goggles and they put on a surgical mouth covering right there and a hair net. All of those kinds of things are already doing because they are covering, they're, they're producing something you're going to put in your mouth, right? You're going to adjust this and purity, the health and purity of this needs to be very, very, very high, well above Standard for a premium brand. So, you know, that's not a horrible place to work. That's a great place to work. It's just people are suited up for it and this is gonna become normal part of everyday discourse in many places that we interact with each other for a while.

Absolutely, absolutely. There is a head, there's a model called Scarf Bill, have you heard of it? David Rock, he's the co founder of Neuro Leadership Institute.

No, Tell me about that. Or maybe I have. Yeah, but I don't know.

It's been great. It's something I subscribe to and one of my forum mates turned me on to and it's, it's this model around that. In our, on our brain as humans, we have this flight or this fight, this risk or reward response that happens. And in this risk or reward response the acronym is scarf. So it's status. So relative importance to others, it's certainty, our ability to predict the future. So if you think of certainty, people don't have that right now, any. In most cases we don't have certainty in what's going to happen here in the next week or three weeks or shelter in place. And then the A is for autonomy, our sense of control over events. Yeah, I know I have a sense of some control, but some I don't right now. And the R is relatedness, how safe we feel with others. And then fairness is how fair we perceive the exchange between people to be. You know, am I getting my fare from, from government checks? Am I getting my fair share right now? So if you think about Scarf, three out of those five is at high, high risk right now. Certainty, sure. Autonomy and fairness. So how do we position that to get restarted in our businesses and restarted as an economy? And what can we do to get people more acclimated to this restart and what it's going to look like?

So I think it's useful for people to realize that there's a lot of this language. I think it's normal, it makes sense and on one sense it is valid. On another sense it's not valid. There's no restarting. There is an economy right now. The economy didn't stop, it slowed, it changed, it shifted as it always does when there's a, a dramatic event. This is an unprecedented event in human history. Not that we've never had outbreaks. Right. There have been things like the plague and the 1918 flu and there have been things like that before. But this global spread and the way that we've responded and the awareness on a global Basis of what's going on is unprecedented. So we're dealing with this thing, but there's an economy. I'm buying groceries, I'm buying, I'm buying all kinds of stuff every day. Amazon is getting a huge amount. There are delivery drivers showing up at my house every single day.

You're probably buying more than you thought of on Amazon, right?

Yeah, I mean, I am cautious. I'm not going nuts. My wife and daughter would like me to put in a hot tub Now. A little slow to bolt, but for a couple reasons. One, just to be smart and sensitive. Not to be too hedonistic. Yes, I live in a better neighborhood, in a comfortable house, that kind of thing. And not everybody does both. Some of our listeners and some of the people on our teams live in dense urban environments. They have too many. If you even ask me. A few years ago I used to have my brother and his family living here due to some family circumstances and my kids were still at home living at home versus living out in the world. And so my daughter's sheltering here now, but has had an apartment for the last year or so of her own. And so my personal impact so far is limited. But there are people around us like we're already seeing increases in domestic violence, hardship between people living in much. I want to be really sensitive to the thing and that we don't all just post pictures of the great meals we're making and, and how nice it is to be in our home with our family. There is an element of that that's good but, but there's others who, who are scared and, and under severe stress right now, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Bill and I can tell you a story of Griffin. And Griffin is this 10 year old boy whose father works for us. He's the director of product development for my organization. And Griffin this morning was on a virtual class. He's a 10 year old in his classroom in the virtual session and the teacher said kind of opening statements, how's everyone doing? And Griffin puts up a KN95 mask and he says, I'm doing good. I'm really proud of my father because he's helping to provide these to the world. And the teacher came to tears saying that I can't even get access to that. So in a day and age of today where folks who have the means can't get access to it and of course the folks who don't, even further down the totem pole of getting access to those goods and we've seen in such an, it's such an emotional thing when people get their hands on some of this, especially some of the ones in these underprivileged neighborhoods are impoverished neighborhoods unfortunately. And just getting access to that isn't God sent.

Well, if you try to go on Amazon right now, you're going to see maybe a delivery of a mask between sometime late May to June. But if you want a mask right now to go, you're going to make your own mask. Right. And we're starting to see people make that, but those are providing not full protection in the same way, there's a real demand and then there's people who really need more protective masks who are working in at risk places, whether it be a supermarket or a medical facility, who, who need better protection equipment. And there's a real scarcity of some of those things available.

Yeah, it's a, it's the, the amount of influx of calls we've been getting in emails. It's something that's flabbergast me. I would never imagine that this is the reality that healthcare workers are calling us looking for products to support them and help them. And that's a scary situation. Having to go into the hospital every day and reuse a face mask over and over.

See what I hear you doing? I don't know. Did you know were you using consciously the SWT sweat tool and process for this?

Not consciously, but I think it's ingrained in my mind through the accelerator training community build. So I'm kind of wired that way naturally.

Yeah. So a couple of years we've been doing in the world of scaling up, and in particular because scaling up is the core tool set of that accelerator program, the SWT tool is we're looking at what are your strengths and weaknesses. Right. So you're thinking about what are you capable of, what are you good at doing and what's needed in the world. What are the trends that are going on? What do we see? So you look out there and you realize we can work with and we have some of this plastic and we have access to more of this stuff and we see that this kind of thing is needed. And then that leads to more conversation about, well, we have sources that could get their hands on stuff that people have trouble with and there's other things that we could make here. So you've got distribution, you've got suppliers, you've got reps out in the field, you've got, you've got some light manufacturing capability in some specific areas and you start to see a whole bunch of things that have nothing to do with speakers and audio equipment.

Yeah, let's say we have the experience of doing a lot of shit wrong. So we know what to do right now to try to get, try to do some good in the world. Right. And looking at our resources.

So what are you guys making right now and where is it going and what's that been like?

Yeah, so the product category continues to grow literally every three or four days. So we're manufacturing the face shields, those are going to nursing homes. We've done deliveries. Frontline workers in hospitals, we've done deliveries. UPS drivers or logistics drivers. So a lot of those have been going to frontline workers. And then the barriers have been going into all sorts of locations, including what's interesting up in Minnesota at a voting booth a couple weeks ago, they put up a ton of them for the polling station they have there. So we landed some there to help support them there. And then what we started doing is from the strategic sourcing side, as you mentioned, Bill is tapping into our 17 years of experience in Asia, the right people with the right factories and getting to the FDA approved factories and started importing the masks that have been such shortage. And what we found is sourcing it is one thing. Getting proper product is a second thing that's not fraudulent, that actually does the job that it's supposed to do. And then it's been how do you get it out of the country? Literally getting flights out of Shanghai has been a, a simple project. Should be maybe an hour, has been days trying to figure that out. And what you find is that there's such a backup because of the demand even getting it out of the country. And then how do you clear through customs and get it on the floor here? So we went in and unwound a lot of that. But that expertise and experience we've had has allowed us to add masks and gloves and hair nets. And now we're looking at a few other things that we're probably going to add to the catalog.

Should get those shoe things too. The shoe guards that you step in and they. And they put a little, little scrunchie around your shoe.

Yeah, absolutely. It's on the radar. It's been amazing to me. The, the market, the products that are coming out at such high speed right now is the whole globe is looking into this, this Tyvek suits.

Gotta get little bunny suits.

Yeah, we'll get a custom mask for you, Bill.

Well, my brother's company is a distribution company and one of their big lines, they sell all kinds of equipment that's now being used for people to work from home. But they also have historically sold the video conference room setups so like the big screen monitor and the special cameras, that kind of thing. And now people are putting more and more of those things out of there. So they're selling the smaller at home kinds of equipment and there. But they got their mats and they, when they sell secondary medical gear, so there's a range of medical stuff they remarket as people trade up and do that kind of thing. But now like people want everything, you know, so the demand is very high for that. So they're doing really well. But they of course are working differently within their warehouse and so on as they provide an essential need. And they, they branded their masks. So they've got their logo printed on the front of their mask. Yeah, yeah. Which is awesome.

Yeah. And I think you'll see, you'll see more of that. The survey has been that we've been taking is as companies come back into the offices and start working physically in front of one another, is it going to be these washable masks with brands on them or what your passion is, right. Or your purpose is or is it going to be disposable ones and it'll be interesting to see how companies respond to that and perhaps it's going to be a fashion statement. Right.

I probably wouldn't put my logo on a mask that I gave to anyone. I probably would put something like, you know, thank you for your distance or thank you for covering up or I might put I'm smiling, I'm smiling behind the mask or I might print a smiley face on it. I probably would put some other kind of message on there if gave it to people. And I imagine that we will and should probably get something like that as we get a soft lift and I get teams who want to meet in person again. Right. I think we should probably just tell folks where to go and to get. I think you've shared anything else to share with our listeners on this story. I think you've done a great job of pivoting into a line of something that's needed. Leveraging your company strengths and your resources to move into something that really makes a difference. And is your whole workforce now employed or only some of it brought back?

Yeah, we've, we've brought back everyone. And in addition, I just did another hire today of a ex employee who was laid off. So that was a proud moment. And I feel we'll be hiring up here in the next 30 days. So not only did we get Everyone back. We started to create some jobs now.

It's really great. What any else folks should know?

I would say, you know, Bill, from. From a pivot standpoint, I've thought a lot about pivot and. And also honestly preparing to have this conversation with you, which I was excited about and thinking about pivot is that consider a pivot. Pivot just doesn't have to be in business, right? What's the pivot for the family? What's the pivot for yourself? And take the opportunity to explore the pivots. These are all just changes, right? What are these pivots we can make to. To uplift humanity as the goal?

Well, I've never been busier as a coach than I am today, and there are 200 coaches in my group. So if we can help you, please let us know. We are exceedingly flexible. We have a very flexible mix of coaching, team coaching, planning, scaling up, implementation. We're doing pivots, we're doing startup, we're doing a little bit of startup. That'll come soon enough. We're doing quite a bit of pivot work and transition work for people. If we can help you, if it's time for you to get a coach now, please let us know. You will find us and me very flexible and working. Even though we're already busy, we're acutely aware of the distinct honor, privilege of doing the kind of work and the need for this in this timeframe. So you'll find us at scaling. And if you want to get some safety equipment, you should go to a trendsafety.com or you just want to find out more about Kevin's work and company, go to atrend safety.com. we'll put the link in the show notes and then he's even got a code there for you to get. Friends of the show, use all lowercase one word. Coach Bill. So Coach Bill, lowercase. Get your safety gear, masks, face shields, whatever stuff, gloves, whatever you have. It's expanding minute by minute. So Kevin's a great resource for you. And they will get stuff shipped out to you for your, your team, your family, your nursing center, whatever it is that you've got. Kevin will hook you up right away and if we can help you, let us know it's time for more people to get coaching than ever before. Scalingcoach.com thanks again, Kevin, for coming on the show and sharing your story. Hopefully it inspires folks and have them think about what could they do. That's like a completely different thing except leveraging their existing team their existing resources and put them on a path to growth again.

Yeah. Thank you, Bill. Thank you very much for having me. Appreciate it.

Well, if the show is helpful, please tell somebody else about it. All the world. We need to help each other as much as we can right now. So pass it along. Turn somebody else onto the show. If you like it, if you give us a review that helps us and if you subscribe, it helps you to get them every week. You can also drop us a line. Send us an email info scalingcoach.com Big thanks to Vern Harnish, author and creator of the Scaling Up Framework. In the original Rockefeller Habits, the show was produced by Lucy Summers, the audio is edited by Albert Burge at Podfly Productions, and our show notes are compiled by Ein Kodina. Proofread by Tim McGowan. Thanks again for listening. Keep Scaling Up.