5 Big Moves for Crisis Leadership

So welcome everyone. Thanks for coming in. I hope the conversation is helpful. This is not meant to be, you know, authoritative or the be all end all. I have experience with quite a few recessions, both personally and with clients, and so I'm going to share that what, you know is kind of universal. But instead of just talking about the big main things, I'm going to focus in on some of the things that are most forgotten or missed or skipped over and talk about each one of them in turn. I'm also going to share with you a little recap of what Vern Harnish put out this week. And we've been sharing each day this week a podcast on one of these big areas. And Vern will finish it out Friday with a podcast on the five Cs that we'll post at the Scaling up podcast. So if you're not a listener to that, go find that wherever you get your podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, iTunes, YouTube. The scaling up podcast is there. So you'll find that we started the week with Warren Rustand. We talked with mental emotional stress health expert Heidi Hanna. We talked to Greg Crabtree, we talked to successful serial entrepreneurs, senior coach Rich Manders. We talked with Cameron Herold. Cameron is tomor episode I believe, and then Vern on Friday. And then we'll have some stuff on remote working I believe next week, setting up and managing remote workforce. So this is in addition to all of that and just talk through them. I've been doing quite a few sessions, one on one calls since I opened up this week and said listen, I'm going to coach anyone I can. You don't have to pay me anything. If you make a jillion dollars off of this later, send me a fat check. I won't say no, or a fine bottle of wine. But I offer this to make use of the time. Right? I'm not flying everywhere anymore for a little while. So enough said. Let's get into it. First, the number one thing you've heard the phrase before, put your own oxygen mask on first. In this case, I think the thing so Warren Rostand talked about eating right, about sleeping, about exercise and how we cut short exercise. There's a lot of things that people address, but I think the emotional side of it is often not well addressed or ignored in this face or we try to put a good face on it, but you've probably heard the phrase before that you can't put lipstick on a pig, you can't put icing on a mud pie. Trying to fake it in this time in this place, I mean, it's never really a good idea, but especially now. So if you're feeling off, if you're feeling anxious, if you're feeling activated, it's helpful to do it. Sunday morning, early Monday morning, I woke up two in the morning. I wasn't particularly anxious, although you could call it a form of anxiety. But I woke up just really wound up thinking about all kinds of things. So I just leaned into it. So if you find yourself feeling anyway, notice where it occurs in the body. Notice the thoughts, the feelings that you have, how it shows up for you. But don't try to avoid it, replace it, numb it, but go into it. And the thing that's really powerful about this as a leader is that this emotional awareness, emotional intelligence, will make a difference for your team as well. If you're willing to lean into and look at how you're feeling, and then even go public with it, that'll make a big difference for the people that you interact with. So the next step, the next thing to do, is lead without a plan. I think a lot of times leaders feel like they need to have a plan before they go. And you come on conversations like this in your peer groups and YPO and et cetera, and you want to have a plan together, but you don't have a plan. And even if you think you do, you don't, because you don't really know what's happening yet. You're going to have to be planning on goingly in a time like this, and you can lead. So in the 2008, 9 downturn, when the whole world looked like it was ending, I ran a jewelry business with my wife. And overnight people stopped buying jewelry, and I didn't have any plan. And I kept all those feelings to myself for a while, and I tried to put on the right face and that kind of thing. And at some point I realized that all I was doing was figuring out how to survive and move on to the next business, that I'd already sort of written it off. And Lori challenged me to find something that mattered to me. And I took on fighting and fighting the situation, all that. And I did a lot of extraordinary things in that time. But the first thing that I did is I went to the team and said, look, I don't know what to do. We're going to have to figure our way out of this together. And that kind of leadership, I'd learned earlier. But go to them, engage. Let your team create the plan. It's not really up to you. Warren Rustan talked about this in our podcast Sunday morning. But really go and communicate and engage the whole team. So leadership is about being willing to lead, about engaging the team, about creating opportunities for them to lead. And this notion of servant leadership is really ultimately about leaders creating leaders. And so it's really essential that you lead even before you have it all figured out, right? Engage your team, Let them know you're there and that you're there for them and the enterprise. Vern also talks about communicating at least once a day, maybe more, and talking to all the different. So you're not just leading your employees, but you're also interacting with customers, vendors, partners. A whole world of that needs your leadership in this timeframe. The next thing up is radical requests. So everybody's talking about conserving cash right now, and that's well and good, but it's a lot easier to do a couple months ago than it is to do right now. And the typical thing that you're going to do right now is lay people off or cut off services. One of our clients called me and said, listen, I know we've been working with you for years now, and I'm really happy about it, but I'm fucked, were his words. And we have to stop our scaling up work. I'm trying to survive now. I said, don't you dare cancel. That's a no. But I will work with you for free until you get on the other side of this thing. And, and you should not call anyone else and cancel anything. You should call people instead and make radical requests of them. So call up your landlord, call up your major suppliers, ask for different terms, ask for special concessions. In 2009, I went to our landlord and I said, listen, I don't know if I have a business, I don't know if I'm going to keep my house, but I'm committed to both of them and I'm going to play through this thing. But I can't pay any rent. And listen, I don't mean to threaten you, but there's no claim to make. Like, if you try to go against me or sue me or evict me or whatever, the business will just be bankrupt. Nothing that I have will really be touchable because it'll either be in protected accounts or in my house. And that's just not a good direction. But you're a good guy. I don't want to do this. Anyway, I made a radical request of him and I got up to a year of free rent in exchange for a quarterly review of my Estimated financials, so a regular check in at least every quarter and two year extension and not waiving his rights in the event that we did file bankruptcy that he would get to go against us. So I also didn't ask for a loan. I hear a lot of people talking about taking big loans now to cover everything up. But if you saddle yourself up with massive debt, you're just going to come on the other side of this creeping out of a recession, depression or whatever the hell we are dealing with and find yourself in a world of hurt that will just delay a BK down the road. So making radical requests takes a couple things. So first of all, if you make some really radical requests of someone, you have to really appreciate and be compassionate for what you're asking of them. What represents. If you will get in somebody else's world and appreciate the magnitude of what you're asking of them, it's going to go a whole lot better than if you are throwing your weight around and trying to leverage things and like that. So appreciate that, but also appreciate what you are, what your business and your team represent. This is a time to acknowledge the world of it and share the weight of it together so you don't have to eliminate all the pain and suffering from the employees, the bank, your partners, your vendors, your landlords. You can share in all of this pain together and you can ask people to give you. In that 2009 downturn, I went to some suppliers and I said, listen, we can't do business in the old way. We need some help. And in that timeframe I had one guy give me 90 day terms and a $5 million line of credit. Now you better believe I shifted as much of my production to him and purchasing that I could as a result of that and other people who said, listen, we can't, we're sorry and people who told me to F off. So this is a time to ask for big things from people. And I think when you think about the cash side of it, this will matter and make a bigger difference for you faster, right in the next day this week you could get major concessions out of key suppliers and costs on your expense side. So there's a real opportunity here. And you'll hear also the phrase never waste the opportunity of a great recession. There's an opportunity here to shift things on the tail end of this thing. We had completely reinvented our business and went through several years of substantial growth. All right, so first we've got taking care of you, then we've got engaging leadership. Now we've got making some radical requests to manage your cash position. All that gives you breathing room. And now you can start to look for the breakout opportunity. Now, this next step number four is maybe a little bit early, but there will be substantial breakout opportunities and even some opportunities in the near term. Right now to do something. This thing that I'm doing this week where I've just been busy every minute with people, is exactly that I asked myself, what's going on? Well, people are freaking out, their business are failing, they don't know what to do and they certainly don't want to pay for a scaling up coach. So I offered my services for free. Right now I'm making no money on this, but I think that in the larger, something really great happens from this. And I don't know what it is yet, but it's a, you know, it's swinging out there. The key in our world is the SWT exercise. So swt, or sweat is a more strategic version of swat, right? We all know swat, but swt, you look at your strengths and your weaknesses, narrow them down. Just look at the core ones, not the strengths or weaknesses that have to do with this particular environment or timeframe, but the ones that have always been there, the things you're always great at, that you always suck at. Map those out, maybe put them up on the wall or on a online whiteboard and then start to be a trend spotter. What's going on? I don't just mean in your industry. I mean in the world, right? What's happening in families, what's happening in health, what's happening in media, in restaurants, in entertainment, right? Look broadly at that and you'll see opportunities both near term and short term for breakout strategies. If you think about it, or if you look at every single recession, even the Great Depression, the actual shrinkage of the global economy or a national economy is actually pretty small, relatively speaking, but the dislocations are massive. So you're looking here for where things are going, or as Gretzky said, you want to skate to where the puck is going, not where it's at right now. So trying to figure out where things are going and then doing something creative and innovative. This is a great time to do that. And I think being a trendspotter is key. And this again is one that you can engage the whole team in. You don't have to do this work on your own. All right, the last piece is pretty simple and obvious. We're seeing a lot of this already, but you want to keep up all Your good execution habits. So setting and revising priorities on a regular basis, keeping track of your metrics and keeping progress on things visible with dashboards and then your meeting rhythms, Daily huddles, weekly meetings, quarterly planning sessions, all of these things. All of our quarterly planning sessions with clients are moving to settings like this. We use things like this plus online versions of whiteboards in order to do our work as teams together. But you could move all the kinds of things that you're doing to more homework type remote worker environments. Now that's not true of every business, right? If you're shipping, if you've got a restaurant, a commercial kitchen, if you do like whatever, there will be lots of things you can't do. But there are also other kinds of things that you can. So we just had some guys deliver furniture earlier today and they're like, oh, the deliveries are really slowing down. But they said, but it sounds like Amazon and other people are hiring, so they will take their truck and their hands and they'll start working there. We've seen other people start to look and shift what they're doing and in different ways. And this is the creativity. But don't forget the basics, right? Rinse and repeat. We see written on every shampoo bottle. You've got to keep up all the daily huddles and things like that. So those are the big five. Let me throw up Vern's real quick five C's for scaling up. These are really practical things. So communicate daily, says Vern. Or twice a day. Get in and engage, provide support and be supported by your customers in your community. Use this time to clean up and catch up on things. We all have a corner of the office or something that is cluttered and messy and filled with crap. Find ways to improve and optimize your cash position and through it all, take care of yourself so that you're calm and considerate with the freak out and the stuff that people are doing. Those are the Vern 5C's a little more practical in some respects, but tie very nicely to this. So. So let me throw these back up the four moves and then just open up for conversations.

This is Stephen. I just wanted to say I love exactly what you said and I have a branding and marketing agency and since Friday I have had eight zoom meetings with our team, two with clients, and it's just gotten me to think totally differently about connecting and communicating and also setting expectations with our clients. So we sent out a global email saying, hey, we acknowledge all this stuff's going on with you. We're here to help. Whatever you need. In other words, I didn't put money in it. It's just if they need some help with something or email, they have to go out, we'll do it. Because I want them to know we're living in unpredictability as well. And now it started thinking we've had a few clients not in the Bay Area. We have one that will, that has outside the Bay Area. It's opening an opportunity to scale our business in a different way because the relevance of location isn't as essential for the work we do.

Yeah.

And so we're looking at our strengths in a different way.

That's really great.

And I think your insights here have just been really great. And the one I didn't even think of was ask for forgiveness. You know, we literally go and say, look, we can't do this right now. Can you let us pay you a month later.

Radical requests.

Exactly.

Making requests, you know, So I really got inspired by this. Thank you so much.

Oh, pleasure. Pleasure. Kit.

Hi, how are you?

Hi, Kit, how are you?

Hey, thanks for, thanks for putting this on, Bill. I said to Megan, my wife, this morning, I said, God, you know, she said, you're spending so much damn time locked in the bedroom and, you know, you're helping the kids. And all of a sudden I said, you know, kind of running a business, we're doing damage control and, you know, whatever, just normal stuff. I'm sure every one of us have had a conversation with our spouses recently.

Yeah.

What I've, what I found here is that in the last three days I've gotten more tactical. Take this step, make this move, do it now. Simple communication from this EO group. And this is, and you put this out. Vern's little 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. They've already started doing the video once a day to my team. Just little things that aren't hard. And it was actually put in Vern's write up as well. As you just said. It's like, hey, if you're going to say you're going to do more, you won't just go do the one. And I think that was really valuable because of course I'm one who's going to overthink and try to figure out how to do it just right. Nope, don't do it just right, just go do it. The idea of leading without a plan, I think is really powerful. Definitely starting to get my ducks in a row here with the calling of suppliers and just basically saying, but what your comment there Is about radical requests, I think is a great mindset to go with it while putting ourselves in their shoes. Radical requests, they don't have an option. They're not going to go re rent the building. They're not going to go have someone else step in and buy the product right now. It's just, hey, it is what it is.

If you have a lot of compassion, respect for them and what they're dealing with, what you're asking of them, they go really well. Miracles and magic happen really fast with this. As long as you're not trying to get one over on people and then it'll backfire. Good.

Hi, my name is Javel Lamano. I'm in Oakland, California. We have a criminal defense law firm. And I wanted to ask the question from the group because I think that I'm too much in my head and I'm in the industry, that I'm not thinking like an average consumer would be in would be thinking. And my concern is that criminal courts have shut down for the month, and they are only prioritizing people that are in custody, in jail, and are executing their constitutional rights to a speedy trial. What that means for private attorneys is that business is slow. And so what everyone is doing to. What everyone is doing to react to this is they're looking at their expenses and they're cutting all their advertising, cutting, you know, letting people go. And I decided to be still and not react and process what's happening so that I'm making decisions based on logic and reason rather than fear and emotion, which is. Which seems like the real easy thing to do right now that I really want to do is just freak out. My question.

Well, let yourself freak out. Right? Look, you might need to put on a crazy playlist and smash some things up and dance around the house and scream out the window like, we don't neglect that. But I love what you're saying because it's not. Freeze.

I'm getting hot just thinking about this. So I'm trying really hard not to freak out. And I also want to be vulnerable and admit that I'm avoiding my team because I know they're looking to me for leadership and my default and my pattern is to comfort people and tell them everything's going to be okay. And I recognize that I may be doing that, even though I don't necessarily authentically feel that. And so I'm glad that we have this space where I can be myself and ask the questions that I want. And my question is, is this. They say that in a recession There's a lot of opportunity. Right. And the business. Not to sound past, but the shitty businesses are going to fall off because they don't have the strategy and the execution and the infrastructure and the cash flow.

That's right, yeah.

This is what I'm thinking. 70% of our revenue is driving under the influence. That is our bread and butter. People are not driving right now because of the quarantine. However, what I'm thinking is people are at home 24 7. They're not used to it. Spouses are driving each other crazy.

Oh, really?

We're gonna start drinking. There's gonna be a lot of domestic violence, a lot of battery, a lot of assault, Neighbors, you know, freaking out. So I'm thinking maybe hold off before I cut off advertising, before I start laying people off, maybe I should just chill, wait to see, because I think that my competitors are all freaking out and whatever they're doing, I should do the opposite. And I'm sorry for the long winded explanation, but my question to it's really.

You touched kind of the whole range of it. So you got to reach out and lead people, but it's not your job to tell them it's all going to be okay. You could tell them they're awesome and that we can do this, but we don't know how it's going to go, right?

Yes.

Yes.

And I want to be vulnerable and I want to be transparent and have authenticity in how I'm approaching this. My question to you folks, especially because you're not in the criminal defense field, is even though courts are closed, do you guys think that crime is going to increase or decrease as a result of this quarantine?

Wow. Right now it feels like we're gonna pull together, but at some point, the cattle eat our face.

So this has been in Arizona. I can just tell you from a property crimes standpoint, what I experienced during the last market was that people were struggling when they didn't have jobs and they needed to put food on the table. So vacant properties, steal copper, steal air conditioning systems, steal whatever they could to be able to put food on the table for themselves. As soon as the market picked back up and they had jobs, they were making more money with a real job than they were stealing things, and so stop stealing. So I think that it's too early to tell as it relates to that sect of crime. I think that if it lasts for a long time, it will increase. If it lasts for a short time, I don't see it will have an impact.

Bashir agrees With Ben, you know, I think it's hard to say, but I would keep watching it. And the question I ask myself is, what does the world need now and what's showing up? And you'll find that you can address it. So, you know, you think about people in difficult, dysfunctional, violent or disruptive households, man, those people are going to, if they're actually in, they're going to boil over, right? And if you work with that sector, God bless you. And they're going to need help. So. But it, but you know, it is weird now when I get like stupid tone deaf advertisements that have nothing to do with what's really going on, right? So, you know, if you've got something, watch careful. Well, what was the thing I heard earlier today? Something. Oh, A Smile is contagious was an ad slogan for a company. You know, mentioning the word contagious was really off. So they yanked all those things really quickly and now they're rethinking their slogan really quickly.

Thank you.

Yeah, your pleasure. Somebody else.

This is Andy Hilliard. I'm living in Sonoma right now and I run a technical services consulting firm. And just last night I actually, I own a place in Costa Rica and I requested from the owner, it's an owner financed situation that, hey, in the vein of, you know, everyone is trying to help one another, I'd like a six month deferment on the payment of the. And I was wondering first, I thought, at first when I was going through my head, I thought two months. And I thought three months. I'm like, what the hell, I'm gonna say six months. And I said, you know, no changes in the interest rate, no changes in the amount, six months deferment, I write it up, everything will continue. You know, I'd appreciate that. And I thought, why not? And then when you did this podcast and I'm thinking about radical requests, I immediately shot out an email to everyone in my company saying I could think of right now eight different ways to ask radical requests that are mutually beneficial for everyone. Like, if you pay now, we'll add in an additional service, for example, down the road. Or like a major vendor, like a CRM company, saying, hey, if we can get a break either on the cost or on defer of payment, we'll add an additional six months to our contract. I mean, we're going to use it forever anyway, so what the heck. So I just thought that really resonated with me as well as other people here on the podcast.

Obviously.

You know, I canceled a haircut on Monday and I realized that probably everybody else was canceling. And so I sent her a message and I said, listen, send me your thing. I'll venmo you the money right now and I'll just prepay you for the next cut. And in a few weeks, when things settle down, if you want to make a house call, there's a nice spot on my deck where if you'll wash your hands, you can come on over and cut my hair here. And she said that was really awesome. She was going to go back and discuss with the other folks in the salon about starting to do that kind of thing because I'd much rather have one person come by and touch me and then I could go shower off, right, Than have go into a salon where there's a lot more touch points.

It's Kit, can I clarify? Just get a pulse. Check from those on the call, we haven't heard a whole lot about. We heard a little bit, I guess from the criminal defense lawyer regarding layoffs and also unemployment. You know, there's an ability right now, state of California, to cut people's working hours back as to as little as 10%, as much as 60% with some, with some support from the way the state of California is operating. Any polls from people, if people are looking at that is just, you know, flat out just, just getting rid of people or moving people to a minimized workforce or taking them off salary and putting them on part time on hourly. Any feedback that people are leaning one way or another or is it all across the board?

I can speak into that. This is Mary Frances and I have a wholesale handbag company. So I mean I decided just to make moves fairly quick. I have 12 employees and just, you know, not knowing exactly what was the right thing to do. I just didn't want to wait too long. So I did lay off a couple people and then everybody else I put to almost part time. And in this moment I'm really surprised, but everybody was very understanding and accepting of it for this week. And I have a feeling next week, like the pain of it's going to kind of surface or come come forward and it's going to. It's probably going to get tougher with the questions that come my way and.

What'S going to happen.

And I'm in a business where nobody works remote, we're completely not set up for it and we're product driven. So it's all about packing, shipping. So there's a lot that actually cannot be done remotely. So it's been really challenging.

My brother works for a distribution company, and he. He said what they have is limited folks who work in separate areas. So he'll go in for a few minutes once a day to hand some things off to shipping, and they use gloves and that kind of thing. And then they. They ship out. I talked to Rich Manders in the podcast, and Rich talked about how they held onto their hardest to replace their engineers, but they asked engineers to do things like customer service calls and client support stuff in the 20012 downturn. And then on the other side of it, as quickly as possible, they were able to hire people back, but they didn't lose the people that were the highest end and hardest to replace. Right.

Yeah. That's great. Yeah, thanks.

Made a difference. And Kit was talking about, are there maybe some benefits? It sounds like there may be going to be some benefits to cover the cost to people in the near term. Right. So that really fast, that was a.

Decision like, am I not being fair cutting somebody down to 20 hours a week versus just laying them off so they can go get unemployment like that.

Yeah. When I cut people back in 2009, I was sure that I let them know that I was taking no pay until I was able to hire people again. So I took, you know, I led from the front. Right, right.

I think that the unemployment maximum amount that you can get is $450 a week, which is $1,800 a month. So what I was considering doing is saying, whatever. Let's say, for example, somebody gets paid $100 a day. This is just another example. Try to maximize that $1800 a month so that I cut their hours only by that amount. And so they're still in some ways getting a paid vacation for the days that they're not working.

Yeah, that's great.

This is Bashir. If I can step in.

Bashir. Yes. Joining from Costa Rica.

Yeah. To your question, Mary. I have a restaurant. I'm in the retail business. And so what we are doing is kind of rotating time off. They are all working less, but they're all continuing to work. So no one person is bearing the brunt of it all. And they're taking it quite well. They appreciate the fact that they're being treated equally regardless of seniority. We have been there a while, some who've been there less, but everyone's taking that extra day off that they otherwise wouldn't have. And I'm trying to keep the restaurant as open as long as possible, but I'm in the tourist side of town. And Costa Rica has just banned all flights coming in starting midnight tonight for anybody that's national. So that business is going to trickle down. And so we're doing a couple of other things. We're discounting our food significantly. If you were to come in, everything's obviously sanitized. And then my next approach next week is basically my goal is to stay open as long as I can. So my employees have a job. They said there'd be some unemployment measures but they haven't been announced. And so next week because we sell some dry aged steak, really good food, we're actually going to be selling our inventory of steak uncooked to people who want to come in and buy and shop at our kitchen. So trying to do different things.

Interestingly, Bashir OpenTable, the reservation service just sent out messages today to people saying that while most restaurant, while all restaurants are ordered closed in this area, many are still offering takeout and delivery service. So places that didn't have delivery are adding it. Other places are just adding takeout. So you've got a couple of people handling food in a safe fashion, then you can pick it up and you know, if you've got kids at home and you're trying to deal, that may be a really lovely thing for to keep some amount of the staff in.

Yeah. So we started free delivery on Monday night as one of the initiatives. And then after the steak sale, my simultaneous initiative is gift cards and you've probably all heard of this one is, you know, buy a $50 gift card for only $40 and discounting the gift cards equivalent, discounting food for 20% and hopefully that'll generate cash for us.

Yeah.

That'S going to be helpful. And again keeping the doors open now that doesn't really help Javal criminal business prepay for your court costs. I don't know if that works for.

You but you know a whole world of creativity will and can ensue in this. You want to innovate. You don't create a fancy colorful innovation center. You throw a guy or gal in a cave with a stick and you say dig your way out. That's where somebody invents the lever. So that's, that's really the key. I mean there will be interesting things. I there's an events, this group called Mavericks that I've done some stuff with and on Monday they had an event, they had meditation led by Dance all via Zoom. They had a professional DJ meditation guide, they had two MCs and then they had somebody managing the Skype session, the Zoom session. And it was really cool. I mean, we had like 75 people around the world following along in this beautiful thing. They had it lit. Right. They had the music piped in. Right. They had a great DJ and, you know, everybody was dancing in their living rooms all over the place. It totally gave me a great start to the week. Right. To go through this. So thinking creatively, we're seeing artists starting to perform online with donate buttons. Right. Because you can't go to live shows now. What are the things that you could do where, you know, there'll be interesting things that come from this time?

We're actually. We also have. One of my businesses is a restaurant.

Yeah.

And we just like kind of took the bull by the horns and like, where I live, like, there's no more hand sanitizer and anywhere. And so my husband found like the little tiny spray hand sanitizers and he's printing the logo on them. And so basically for every of the restaurants, so for every pickup and delivery that anyone makes, they get a free hand sanitizer as well. So kind of like joking a little with. Right.

Like, what's happening.

So it's like, if you want one.

Yeah, really great. Really. You know, a real estate agent that I know in San Francisco who was in one of my leadership programs years ago just advertised that she had bought, you know, months ago these little branded hand sanitizer bottles to put her open houses. So now she's giving away to people. I think she had 700 of them. And she's like, I'm going to give them out to the world out there and let people know, you know. Sean, Will, Scott, Franka. Anybody got any questions, comments, anything to add? Sean, go ahead.

Yeah, so we run an IT solution provider business. So this is not totally impacting us at the moment, but. And we haven't made the choice to lay anyone off. My, I guess, decision is to see how long this plays out. And we've got the red folder and, you know, so I want to see how this plays out and see what happens in three weeks and see if this, you know, home lockdown. And then based on that, we'll kind of make a call.

So. Right. Well, you can think. So people are going to need help configuring VPNs and understanding they're going to need remote support for their laptop. People who aren't used to working from home and who are less than technically able. Right. You're going to have a whole range of things like that that are going to go on.

Fortunately, we're seeing that. I mean, we're seeing a lift on those types of services. My concern is we are product heavy. So as those products start to slow, we're going to have AR and lines slowing. So what's critical for us is cash and collections and a lot of our business, our customers are larger size businesses. So we are absolutely on collections at the moment, but we've got a pretty good cash position. So for me, I'm in a hold position kind of let's see what happens over the next three weeks and then if we get the delay tactic, I think I'm going to move to, you know, cycle out folks that are not directly revenue producing and go from there.

And you know, you can look, you can challenge your people to come up with things to work on. In several downturns, I've had my team create breakthrough strategies and moves that I did not think of myself that created huge lift for us or dealt with legacy kinds of things. I mean, I once was carrying inventory that I couldn't figure out how to get rid of. But the team figured it out because they wanted to free up the cash. So you won't figure it out on your own, but if you get everyone engaged in being a trend spotter, you start to make radical requests of people. You know, you could ask people to pay up earlier, to pay differently or to communicate. There's a whole world of things that you could do do there, right?

Yep.

Yep.

Alrighty. And then Franka had something.

Well, I just wanted to share what we have kind of seen in the last couple days. My business is Pacific Quest Group and we do lots of HR consulting as well as financial consulting. And on the HR side it's been super busy because yes, many of our clients and businesses are doing layoffs. For example, construction company, all of construction is on hold in San Francisco. The supply chain is broken so they really couldn't even work if they wanted to. But then there's also smaller businesses where they were trying to keep good employees and trying to figure this out. So they change a salaried person to an hourly person and make them part time. So there's many ways to deal with it depending on what your strategy is. And also there's a lot of new relief things coming out from the state of California. For example, unemployment insurance will be paid right away, so there's no waiting period. Typically there's a week waiting period. And other things that are helping business owners are like the delay of tax payments, payroll tax payments and so forth. So there's a lot of stuff going on, it's hard to keep track of it all. We're creating a full on accumulative like area where I can just see all of it. But every day new stuff will be coming out in that area. Between helping employees who got laid off or businesses to manage their cash flow to get through this. Of course we've done a ton of SBA loan applications in the last three days. You most likely heard about those and they're really good cash for 3.75% for 30 years that can help businesses get through this and keep their better employees employed.

Iman?

Yeah, I had an unemployment related question. So for employees where their income is like commission based and due to the quarantine they can't make pretty much any revenue until this gets lifted, is it more compassionate to lay them off, letting them know that like, hey, you can go like file for unemployment and at.

Least get that revenue stream coming in.

Or you know, is that the, you know, the nicest thing you can do.

For them at this point or is.

That not really the way to play the, play the game?

It's a good question. Do others have thoughts? I probably would have a conversation with them and talk about options personally.

But Iman, if I can offer, I would say if there's a decent unemployment program in your state or country, that's probably the better thing for them all because they are also not forced to come into work with less hours and less pay. They actually get some time off and then you can, you can reset and start from there. That's my personal based on experience in previous businesses.

Iman, may I ask what location you're in?

In San Jose.

Oh, okay. I'll send you a direct message because I've had some experience with unemployment in California.

Okay, awesome, thank you.

If you don't have an employment lawyer, it's a good time to consult one. Right. And just know the basics of stuff in wherever your area is. I worked with the same one for years and years and years and when you get a good one, hang on to them. All right, well let me just say that if you or anyone you know needs any support, if you know somebody who's on the ropes and they, they'd like to talk, I time allowing, I will do free coaching with anyone right now with no expectation or debt or obligation. If you have a big breakthrough, you can send me a fat check later. But like really I'll do whatever I can as long as I can. We pull through it together. So there's my contact info or many of you found me through some other way and so I'm happy to do what I can. Thanks everyone for coming on and for having this conversation together. Sharing your ideas, your wisdom together. We get through all kinds of things right? Thanks everyone and as I heard from the folks in Italy, be positive. Stay negative. If this show helped you, please share it with somebody else right now so they can get all the benefits that you got like it and subscribe wherever you got it to get them every week. You can also email us with any feedback, questions, concerns or comments to info scalingcoach.com I want to give special thanks to Vern Harnish, the author and creator of the Scaling Up Framework. This show is produced by Lucy Summers. The audio was edited by Albert Burge at Podfly Productions and the show notes were written by Ayn Kudina with proofreading by Tim McGowan. Thanks again for listening and keep Scaling Up.