Surviving and Thriving in Times of Crisis

Well, change is upon us, Shannon, isn't it?

You know, that might be the biggest understatement of the year so far. I know we're only in March, but it seems to change every day. But, you know, maybe next week we'll find something else. But I would agree, you know, I'm.

I'm someone that looks at the. I can't help but always being an optimist. It's just hard. Yeah, I know. It's. We both share that. It's a, it's a. If you call it a affliction, whatever it is. Like I always am seeing opportunity, like, okay, and we always talk about change or not always, but change is a topic that we talk about on the show all the time. And right now, because of this, you know, whole COVID 19 thing and everything, you know, we are. There are changes being imposed upon our lives at a level that is perhaps unprecedented, but certainly not normal.

Right, I would agree. Unprecedented. I would agree.

But we humans are change resistant.

Right?

Right. But we have learned to be less change resistant. Right Now I always talk about my favorite little tactic of proposing a temporary something for two weeks, right. And you can see I'm not the only one. Because everything that's happening now is like, we're gonna do this for two weeks. You know, the schools are gonna be remote learning for two weeks and then we'll reevaluate. This is a bite sized chunk that we're able to sort of process. And I'm not, I don't mean to scare anyone and say that I believe that schools are going to be remote learning forever. I truly do not. But.

No, I don't either.

But I don't think it's just going to be two weeks either. Only because we just don't know. But as I'm looking at all of this, I'm like, wait a minute, you know, how many of these changes that are going to happen are going to be permanent in the end? I saw. There's a couple that I've seen. One is if this is not the first one, but I saw yesterday or earlier this week, I guess that New York City or maybe state or both passed some temporary ordinance that allows restaurants to sell liquor to go. Like you can sell alcoholic drinks to go in New York City. And I'm like, okay, well that's cool. Smart allows them because that's a huge profit center, right, for restaurants. So it allows them to keep in business and keep the cash flowing. That's great. But here's the thing, you know, New York is certainly not alone in being a place where you normally can't do that. But they're not it. That's not the universal norm. There are places where you can buy, you know, drinks to go. New Orleans comes to mind. But there's other places too where you can have walking drinks, you know. And does that change get reversed once people. I mean, I'm going to. Again, my optimism is going to shine through. Assuming we get to the other side of this and the world didn't end, we will actually be able to say, you know, here in New York City, and I'm not in New York, but they could say, here in New York City we allowed restaurants to sell drinks to go and the world didn't end. I mean, this will now be a fact, right?

That's right. Well, it's a great test, right? Yeah, it's awesome.

Yeah. Yeah. So assuming there's not some catastrophic outcome from this, I don't see that being reversed. That's just not one of those things. It kind of feels like a blue law. It's not, but it, you know, it's one of those sort of blue laws that's like, well, we accept this, but we only accept it because it's the status quo. But it's no, in the end of this, changing back will be more of a change than just accepting the new status quo. And there's some other places where this shines even more importantly for me. That one's just sort of, that one resonates with everyone. So it's a great place to start the conversation. But, and I know I'm all hyped up, but there are some places where I think this change has needed to happen for a very long time. And a few of them are airline tickets and concert tickets. Right. This whole concept of change fees or you being unable to cancel, we need. One of the things we need to fix, and I think I said this last week, is our culture of working when you're sick and going to work when you're sick. But it spreads more than that. Right. We do need to fix that. I don't mean to be dismissive, but we need to like, culturally, we need to accept that if you're sick, you should stay home and you should not be incentivized to leave because while you're sick, and the problem is if you've bought a non refundable, you know, vacation airline ticket, whatever, you've not bought a non refundable concert ticket, you cannot get that back or get any value of that without leaving Your home while you're sick. Right. Because this is expiring inventory, to adopt a term. So I. But I also don't think that refunds need to be the new culture, because that starts to mess with cash flow. Right. If you wake up sick on the day of a concert and you say, I want my money back. Well, you know, are they going to test you? Like, there needs to be some. They're going to have to take your word for it if they're going to do this. And now you sort of open the door for it changing too much. However, you can have store credit and to say, look, I'm not going to be able to make it to the concert tonight if the show's not sold out. Well, the show's not sold out, but if the show is sold out now, they've just got a. They've already got your money, and they're not going to give you your money back, but they'll let you use it for a ticket in the future, and they could put a time limit on that. That seems fair to me. But to charge you an exorbitant change fee like the airlines do, no, that's got to go away. There's some processing fee, you know, that's less than. Less than 10% of the value, but also less than, like, $15. I mean, it's not going to take someone an hour to process your change. Right. So charge 15 bucks or. Or 10%, whichever is less. Okay. I could. I could accept that. Fine. No problem. And, yeah, and now you got store credit. So anyway, like, I think, like, these are changes that I think are already happening. Not so much in the concert industry yet, but they're canceling shows, so they're going to be for anything. Yeah, but the airlines are definitely doing this. In fact, my tickets that I'm supposed to be in Austin this week for south by Southwest, obviously I'm not, but the airlines and I bought my tickets months before any of this happened. They allowed me to trade them in for store credit, and they did not have to. The contract said they could charge me a change fee, and they're like, no, no, no. Both. I had two airlines, JetBlue and Delta, and they were both like, no, no, you're. You're good. You've got store credit. They gave me a time limit and when I have to use it and all that, but it's like, no change fee. The money you spent is the money you get to spend. I thought that was good.

It is good. And I. We're doing the Same thing with our vacation rentals. We've had, obviously, lots of people wanting to cancel their trip. Right. Maybe they can't travel right now. Don't know. But, you know, even beyond where most of our stuff are, you know, within driving. Guests that drive. But. So what we're doing is say, hey, you know, even though we have a contract, acts of God, whatever you, you know, we're not. We don't give refunds when it's so close, like if it's outside 30 days. Yes. But we're. We're hitting all these guests coming up, especially as things change daily. So we've just decided, hey, look, we. We don't give refunds for this, but we'll give you 18 months to pick another date. Here's the time window. Here's the calendar. Go take a look and pick a date that works, and let's get you rescheduled up to 18 months out. And so far, we've had, you know, really. The people have been very open to that, and it's worked out well for us and them.

I like it. Yeah.

Yeah. Because they want to go on the. They want to go on the. We do with. With one of our places, we keep a pretty hefty deposit, about a thousand bucks. So we're kind of dealing with. Well, we can't give their deposit back because there's no way to recharge it at the next time. So now we're kind of managing that. But those are all issues to take care of. And the key is getting on the same side of the table with the. With your customer, which we've tried to do has made all the difference.

I like that. Yeah.

Because we're almost. We're on the same boat. You know, I've had to cancel concert thing. I've had. I just was canceling flights last night. And, you know, we're all trying to work together to make this thing as painful as possible.

Yeah. But it is highlighting some. Some issues that probably should not revert back to where they were. And I think these are some of them. So. Yeah. All right, well, I agree.

I agree.

He is Shannon Jean. I'm Dave Hamilton, and this is episode 267 of the Small Business. Well, here we are on Wednesday, March 18, 2020. Shannon, how are you, man?

I'm doing good. I'm, you know, like everyone else, I'm adjusting to change. I'm. I'm really. I embrace change. Usually not this kind of change, but I'm taking it day by day. I think, like everybody else is and you know, since, since our listeners might have a little more time on their hands. That's good because I think we have a lot to talk about today. So this show might like gear, so that's great. I'm looking forward to talking about a few things. One is how to get help for your small business if you've already started being impacted. And then the second thing, how to communicate with your customers during this crisis time right now. And then lastly, why I think it's a great time to start a new business or to expand your existing business.

Yeah, I like it. That's good, man. That's good. The, the next thing I want to do though is I want to tell everybody about our sponsor for this episode, which is Linode at L I n o d e.com SBS I mean here on this episode we're talking about either starting a new project or maybe even starting a new business. You are definitely going to need a server for that business and you're going to love that. You get a $20 credit towards your account for your new server at Linode when you visit linode.com sps but you don't have to worry because every one of their servers runs on super fast native SSD storage. So you get a lot of those bottlenecks just right out of the way even on their $5 a month nanode server, which is a great place to get started. And you can do the math. 20 bucks for free in credit. And if we talked about store credit, here it is. You just get some. You don't have to do anything first except go to linode.com you get your $20 to store credit. You can have a Nano running for four months. If I, if I did the math right and you get to pick from any of their 10 worldwide data centers, you can leave it up and running for the month and then you pay, as I said, the monthly fee or you can pay for what you use with hourly billing. So as you're getting things going, maybe you don't need it up and running all month. You just while you're working on it until you launch, you're good to go. So you got to check this out. Their cloud manager makes it super easy to set things up without having to get to the command line, which of course you could do if you want. But cloud manager makes it super easy. Even for those of us who are geeks. The cloud manager is great. So go check it out. Linode.com/sbs and our thanks to Linode for sponsoring this episode. All right, where do we go first? Yeah, yeah.

You know, one of the things I've talked about on this show over and over is, you know, I always kind of complain about the small businesses, the real, you know, mom and pop or under 10 employees, you know, and I've started and owned a number of those. They often get missed in a lot of this, like relief packages and things, you know, they're talking about today. I listened to press conference this morning, you know, 800 billion, $850 billion stimulus package, which is a huge part of it, to help businesses, right? Yeah. Well, large and medium sized businesses, you know, they get it faster. They're, they're better, they have better connections, they have a louder voice now. You know, tell me if I'm wrong, if you think I'm wrong about that. But I just see it over and over. Like, you know, the airlines are going to get a ton of cash. Huge restaurant groups are going to get some kind of, you know, I don't know, I don't say bailout, but they're going to get some funding to help them out, which is great because we have to keep the economy going. I understand that. But as small business owners, I think what you have to do right now, if you haven't done it already is, you know, you don't want to get left out of any kind of stimulus or opportunities. We talked last week about what to do or the week before about what to do when disaster strikes and we talked about some resources there. You can go back and listen to that episode. Small Business Administration is doing some, you know, low interest loans and different things. But I think you need to get your voice amplified and a couple of different ways you can do it is first off, you know, join the US Chamber of Commerce. You know, and we'll put the link in the show notes at BusinessShow Co and join your local Chamber of Commerce. You know, you don't have to go to all the meetings if you don't want to, although it's usually a good idea. But get, get involved in that group and they will help connect you with the people that are going to be making these kinds of decisions. I think another good group is the nfib. It's the National Federation of Independent Businesses. You can go up there and join. That's a paid group. I think the lowest tiered thing you join is like 395 bucks and that's at, you know, nfib.com again we'll put the link in the show notes. Those organizations, the chamber website, the NFIB website. They have big things right in the front about coronavirus and here's what they're doing lobbying the government to do for small business owners. You want to be involved in that. You want to try to, especially if you're a business. I mean, you know, one of my businesses, the revenue has dropped, you know, 56% in the last five days. And so you're looking at, okay, wow, you know, what, what can I do is, you know, how do I get involved in a group that's lobbying and advocating for my business? I know one of the things they announced today is the. Even though you're going to have to file your taxes by April 15, they're extending the payment deadline by 90 days, interest and penalty free. So if you owe taxes, you could be able to hang on to your cash a little longer if you haven't filed yet, which I think is great for everybody.

That is great. I, I mean, there's no way to, to have known that, you know, last year.

Correct.

When I was paying all my estimated. But you know, that, that would have. Yeah, it's still a great thing, not having to sweat that. Yeah, for sure.

That's right. And then the other thing I think, you know, is really helpful is get connected with your local representative in Congress. You know, we'll put some links in the show, notes again how to find your, how to get connected with your House of Representatives rep, and call their office, email their office and make your voice heard. They want to hear from you, believe it or not. Yeah, yeah. They work from you, you know, for you. And no matter, it doesn't matter if you agree with their political, you know, agree with them on the issues or not. That doesn't matter. They, their job is to help you and they will help you get connected into programs that can help your business when things like this happen. Same with your, your state senator. We've got a link up there to get connected. So make your voice heard, email, make some phone calls. You want to be part of the process so you don't get left out because there's going to be lots of opportunities. There is a safety net that's being put out there right now, but you want to be above that net, you know, not below it, where you, where you get missed. For sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's, that's great. Yeah. Because you're right, the larger places are sort of. They've got people that are connected to these things. Whereas you and me and all of us listening as small business owners, we don't you know, we don't spend a lot of time on that because we're, you know, running around like crazy people running our business.

Yeah.

So keep things going. Trying to keep things going, but there are resources out there that, that and probably more coming to, you know, help stimulate the economy. And like you said, I mean we're, we're, we're seeing some signs of it here. We've had a couple of advertisers need to kind of push things off. If they, if they're, if they're, if their products that they were going to advertise were for example, going to be somebody to clean your house, well, that's probably not the kind of thing you'd responsibly want to promote right now. Yeah, I mean none of the, that we have seen are panic cancellations and I don't think we've even seen a cancellation yet, though we might have. Most of them have just been rescheduled to again, you know, a month or two down the road.

More appropriate time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Makes sense.

Yeah. But so which is good. You know, I always say that advertising is the first budget that everybody kills the moment that they get scared. Right. It shouldn't be for obvious reasons, but it is for also obvious reasons because you feel like you can run your business without it in the short term you can until people forget about you. But I get it. I understand that the logic, it's, it's a little short sighted if you ask me. But, but I'm, you know, I'm biased here. Yeah. But we aren't seeing like, we're still seeing new deals coming around. You know, I would say that smart companies that are doing things like, you know, delivery of like the recipe delivery, meal delivery service, those kinds of things. That's a great, you got your home, you're, you've got more time. This gives you something to do. Right. Like there's, there's a lot of those kinds of things that I think again, opportunities here. Let's, let's, you know, push that into the market, keep economy going and then, you know, do what we can. So anyway. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. Yeah. So we haven't seen the hit that you've seen. That's, I hope that.

Yeah.

Comes back around quick.

Yeah. You know, they've done the whole shelter in place thing. First it was just the counties and now this morning it's the whole state and there's a lot of, you know, not, they're calling them non essential and I always get it, you know, the hairs in the back of my neck, stand up when some government bureaucrat starts talking about certain small businesses as being non essential. And I think of those employees that are there and the business people and their clients that rely on them for certain things. And you know, that that term is, is just rubs me the wrong way. So, you know, they're going to make those kind of decisions and there's a lot of businesses out here that are shut down and I don't know, you know, hopefully again, we're talking about just a couple of weeks, but as you go and are making adjustments to what you're doing with your company, you know, I want to talk about how to talk to your customers and how to communicate. And right now, even though you know your head may be spinning and things are going crazy, it is really important to communicate. Your customers, they need to hear from you. They want to hear from you. Now's not the time to sell them more stuff or more services typically. And it is a time to, you know, talk about what you're doing. You know, you, I'm sure you've been getting emails from large companies that have said, here's what we're doing to help. Of course, I got one from Costco this morning, the CEO. I even got one from, you know, Harbor Freight, you know, tool guys and all these things. That is a great thing for you to do with your small business. Reach out to your customers, communicate often, you know, it's time to open up and connect more. But it's important the way you do it. You know, I'm going to link an article that I really like that Jay Revelle wrote on LinkedIn up in the show notes. And one of the things he points out is that you need to always start with empathy.

Right.

Think about how your customers, your clients and how the market is going to interpret what you say, write or do, Right?

Oh, yeah.

You know, the focus needs to be on community, on your team, how you are working together to keep things safe.

That's it. We're all on the same side of the desk here. Yeah, like when I, you know, I got an email about something that was changing and it's just, you know, one of the sponsorships was running this week so well beyond any reasonable cancellation window. Like, right. There's no opportunity here to cancel. In fact, the show could have already gone out, but it hadn't, you know, and, and, and they were like, do you mind? And it's like, of course not. I totally get it. You know, here you go. Here's the flexibility. Yeah. Because I mean, it would be very short sighted to say, no, like, we're taking this money here and it's like, great, you'll never get any. We don't trust you anymore. Right. It's that we have a lot of. I always say that trade shows, which aren't happening right now, are great opportunities to remind each other that we're human beings. Those opportunities are coming up right now and it needs to be genuine. It needs to be. Look, I get it. I understand the scenario you're in. You understand the scenario I'm in. Because in a sense, we're actually in the same scenario. So, yeah, let's just work together.

That's right.

Yep. That's it.

Yeah. We're all on the same side of the table. And to your point, it's a time to build trust, to show stability and not to sell. You know, you're trying to create a lasting connection with your audience, whoever that audience may be. And, and you know, ways to do it. You know, share resource information, you know, what's going on in your local community, how, you know, give people links to learn more, you know, that kind of thing. How's your local community responding? What's going on? Can your company do anything to help? You know, are your team members available to help out some way? And I, you know, I always come back to this story. You know, focus on stories that connect. You know, it's a great time to share what you were doing to minimize contact maybe in your organization or with your customers. You know, if you're in the face to face business, you know, what are you doing? You know, are you, hey, we're only doing deliveries to the front door or this is how we're cleaning, this is how we're, you know, sanitizing. We've been doing the same thing with our people that stay at our vacation rentals, saying, hey, here's the process we're going through letting you know things sit for 24 hours out of after every guests using these sanitation methods because you want people to feel confident in what you're doing. And you know, I've been seeing lots of this too. I really like is, you know, can you do like a webinar maybe about topics that could help your customers during this shutdown? You know, if you're in the tech business, can you do a quick webinar or a video about backing up your data? You know, how to transition from the office to your house, how to disinfect your technology? Right. You know, even Apple put out that white paper thing and hey, it's okay to use Lysol wipes or disinfectant wipes to clean your phone.

Right, right, right. No, that' like valuable information. Right. There it is.

It's even, you know, a trillion dollar company. Maybe not so much, maybe not a trillion anymore.

Not today.

Not today. Maybe a few weeks, you know, but you know, that's a great message. It's like, hey, here's, here's how to do it. You know, how can your business connect with those customers? Think about what they're going through and be authentic and say, look, we want to help these people. You know, one important thing is to do this. Or how. What cloud services could you use? Or how do you manage. Here's some ideas to manage your, your kids in technology or something like that. I don't know. But get with your team and you know, we'd love to hear what you're doing. Feedback at BusinessShow Co or I've been sharing lots of tips at the small business support group, which is@businessshow co Facebook. Let us know what you're, what you're doing.

Yeah, yeah. And you know, in addition to talking to your customers, you're not the only one talking to your customers, of course, but you are the person that leads your staff and it is important, I think, to really be aware of that role here. Your staff is hearing everything that you are in the world and more about how, I mean, Shannon just said, oh yeah, 57%. We're down 57% or whatever number you said. I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but significant number.

Close enough.

Right? You said that in passive. If I were your employee, that would concern me. Like, wait a minute, I know our profit margins probably aren't 50%. So then I know you don't. I mean you have like your family members work for you and stuff. So it's a little bit different. But you know, like hearing that about other businesses will make your staff wonder what's going on with you. So yeah, tell them.

Good point.

Be upfront with them, get out ahead of it all and just they will not ask until they've been worried for a long time. So get out ahead of it and just tell them, hey, look, here's where things are for us right now. Can I predict the future? Haha, no. But neither can anybody else. So that's okay, you know, but here's where we are. If you've seen a downturn in whatever your important metrics are, acknowledge that, because that's not going to Be a surprise to anyone and, and then also point out like, we have enough cash flow to support current operations for, you know, three months. Beyond that, I can't really tell you because I can't predict the future. I don't know. But right now, here's, you know, things are looking okay. We're not concerned or we're not concerned in general, but we are concerned about these couple of things. So let's do these few things at. This is also a great time to say, you know, know, assuming that everything else is smooth and you've got the cash or the cash flow to keep things going, but you are seeing some decreased need for some aspects of your business, now is a good time to kind of do some of that retooling. If you've been thinking about, hey, wait, you know, like, this is. I say that this is one of the things that kept Backbeat Media alive. We started that business and for the first, like 13, well, maybe like 15 months, we were in the heyday. It was before the dot com bubble burst and the stock market tanked and all that stuff. And we were just collecting money. We didn't know what we were doing, but we learned. And in the process, we were just collecting money. Thankfully, we didn't spend most of it. So when, yeah, when ad rates went from, you know, $12 cpm to a dollar cpm, we had to make some changes. And we did. And we automated so much of our internal stuff. Everything except customer service was automated and even parts of that were automated too. But we had now some experience with our business, which was good, but we also had a little bit of money, which bought us a little bit of time. It didn't buy us unlimited time, even though it was more money than we'd ever seen before at the time, it was, okay, let's spend some of this time that we have retooling and retrenching so that we can run the business on a skeleton crew and do these things, things that are, that we're going to have to do. And it worked out great. You know, we're still here. Yeah, exactly. So, but you need to communicate with your staff like, okay, here's where we are, you know, and, and be honest, if you're, if you're concerned about something.

Oh, yeah, for sure.

Communicate that in a, in a, you know, in as soft a way as possible. You don't want to be the one just, you know, raining doom and gloom on everyone. But if doom and gloom is raining upon your business, you kind of need to Acknowledge that because everybody's gonna know. It's. It's probably not something that's hidden. This isn't one of those things like, oh, you know, crap, wait, I, I screwed up and I didn't pay our, our bills. I didn't manage the cash properly. And now, you know, there's this, like, those kinds of things can happen and you can sort of survive them without your employees knowing. Hopefully you can survive them without your employees knowing. You know, you make a mistake, you fix it, you, you remedy, you move forward. Your employees don't need to know about that stuff a lot of the time. So you might be not in the habit. Habit of telling them. That's okay. This one, they know. They already know.

They know.

They already know.

Most of the time when there's bad news, you'd be surprised. They know what's going on. You know, you try. I mean, they know. They have a good sense of, of what's going on. So it is really important to talk to them because the more information you give them as well, well, that's it better. They're going to know how to respond to your customers and that kind of thing.

Well, and you can, you can give them confidence and then that confidence and info and what I say, you can give them conf. Often just giving people information is all like, we're, you know, when we don't have information, we get scared. When we have information, we process. We can see a path that's, you know, predicated on what we know. Okay, great. Like now, now they can talk confidently with your customers. Your customers hear confidence from you. That's a good thing. You know, that your staff is still empowered, all of that, you definitely want to be. Be ahead of that. And, and I think it's worth again, if assuming your business has the cash flow to support it, making it clear, look, you know, more people will be getting. If what we know turns out to be still true in the future, more people will be getting this virus. And if you need to take some time off of work, you know, extending your sick time, if you can afford to do that, and telling people, look, you know, take the time you need. Your paycheck is okay. If you can do that, tell people that before it happens so that, you know, everybody can feel a little more confident because there's a lot of things they're worrying about in their personal lives just like you are. Yeah, that for sure that they. That it. If you can take some of that worry away from them, even if it's just saying, look, I Can't predict six months, but I can predict three. Or I can't predict three months, but I can predict one. Okay. Like that's, you know, that's fine. That's more than we're getting from any other source. So, you know, it's not so bad.

Bad, yeah. Sharing that information is important even if it's bad news. I mean, it's better in the long run.

Yeah, it's better in the long run. It is, yeah. Yeah.

So I, I, I want to, you know, kind of end on this positive note. You know, we're eternal optimists here and I've been through a few of these kinds of things now as I'm a little older than I used to be. I guess we all are. Yeah, that's how it works.

Linear time being what it is.

Yes, that's right. I have seen, you know, a number of opportunities. Let me back up. Always after a crisis like this, a disaster if you will, they're always followed by a period of growth, sometimes rapid, really rapid growth. You know, we're going to make it through this and there's going to be a ton of pent up demand that will need to be met by someone.

Yes.

And someone or you know, groups of people or you know, companies, individuals are going to benefit by providing the products and the services. The manpower that is, is going to be required to meet this pent up demand. So now is the time to get ready. You know, you have to survive right now, but then you have to focus. At some point the switch gets to flip about thriving. And I guarantee you there are people and companies and small businesses out there that have already made that switch and that are thinking about, okay, what's going to be needed. Not to take advantage of a situation like trying to sell a roll of toilet paper for 50 buc. But thinking along the lines, what are people going to need when this is over? What happens? We're going to transition back to schools, back to work. What are the services and products they need? And people are already planning and I would highly encourage you to be that person either with your existing company or maybe starting a new business. This could be the best time to start a new business in decades.

Yeah, right. Yeah. You need to overcome your change resistance though.

Yes.

If you assume you're right. If you sit there and say, and I'm saying this mostly to myself, so, but you're, you're, you're all welcome to listen to my internal chatter. If you sit there and say we can weather this storm and then we can Just get back to normal when it's over. That, that may well be true. Right? Like I can say that. And, and I'm, I'm pretty sure that that'll be true because I've done it before and that's fine. But that's not gonna be the thing that, you know, doubles my business this year or triples my business next year. The thing that will double my business this year or triple it next year are the things that aren't that like, okay, that's great, and I'll take that as confidence because I know I'll have some cash flow from this thing I've already built. Awesome. Now what can I do with that cash? How can I be this, how can I be the smart guy here?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and you know, things, there are things that are happening now that will change things forever, right? There's always things that change during these kinds of situations. Totally. So analyzing them, looking at them, you know, unfortunately, some companies are not going to make it. They may not have planned correctly, they may have been stretched thin to begin with and don't have the resources to make it through a few weeks, a few months, however long this is going to be. And those, those companies that don't make it, they're going to leave gaps in, in our economy and in our marketplace for products and services that need to be filled. Keep an eye on that, you know, and companies that do make it, which is, you know, maybe most of them, they're going to need help. They're going to need, you know, like Safeway yesterday down the street, they were hiring people on the spot. You know, one of my kids buddies went down there, they hired this kid like immediately. They just need labor, right. And lots of companies are going to need products in the workflow, in services. Everything is going to be in high demand. Get ready, you know, do your planning now during this short term downtime to take advantage of the long term growth. That is, I guarantee I don't predict a lot, but I know that at some point, I don't know when things are going to turn around and there will be a big, okay, let's go. You know, whether it's travel, people want to go out to restaurants again, they want to go back and exercise and go to gyms again, you name it. They want to buy newer technology, whatever it is, you name it. And demand will be, will increase dramatically. I don't know if it's going to be in two weeks, I don't know if it's going to be in Six months. But now's your opportunity to be prepared again. Focus on survival.

Oh, we, we lost. We had. Yeah, we had a weird little connection.

Wow.

Yeah. But we're here. Focus on surviving. That's good advice.

Surviving and then thriving. Surviving and thriving. Both those things, you know, not just, not just getting through it, you know. And before we go, I do want to mention our podcast of the week. I want to keep on that trend. I think there's some great stuff. I may have lost you again.

No, we're here, we're here.

Okay, good.

Yeah.

Okay, awesome. So, yeah, one of the. A great podcast that I highly suggest is American Innovators and I will put a link in the show notes for you. It talks about, you know, just all kinds of innovation and things. They've really focused heavy on medical stuff and transplants, this, this, you know, last season. But there's a lot of great shows and, you know, that's one thing. This country is full of innovation and I think you're going to see a lot of it in the coming weeks as we figure out how to solve this problem with this, you know, virus that we're deal dealing with. And we get people the health care they need. And if nothing else, man, we know how to adapt and innovate and I highly recommend that show.

Yeah. All right. I think it's American Innovations, right? Is that what you. Thank you. Yes, you're welcome.

That's what it is. Yeah. American Innovations. Yeah, you're right.

Putting it in the show notes here, making sure everything's good. Yeah, man.

And when you, and when you listen to that show, the one thing you're going to hear at the end where they say, hey, if you like the show, please go, go and leave us a five star review on the podcast directory of your choice. We're still waiting, still ready for you to leave us that review. I know you hear it on every show, but it literally would take you about 18 seconds and it would be one of the best ways you could do, best things you could do to support the small business show.

It makes a huge difference. So thanks for doing that. Like between now and when the music ends, you've got this, you can do it and then you can, can go change the world with your business too. So we're all helping each other here. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to our sponsor linode@linode.com SBS thanks to you, Shannon, for driving the bus on this episode. And yeah, thanks everybody. We'll get there.