Coronavirus Defense: How Companies Can Protect Themselves & Thrive During Tough Times

Today we are going to talk about coronavirus defense. Basically how you can protect your business during unstable times, during an economic downturn. Obviously, you know, I'm not going to pretend to be an expert around, hey, I know a lot of things around the coronavirus. I'm a health expert. I'm going to talk about more so what you can do on the, on the business side of things to protect yourself. First things first, obviously, um, let's get the safety thing out of the way. If you have a bunch of people coming to your office, you don't want to do that. The biggest thing you can do, is social distancing, right? So this is going to be a big opportunity for remote working. The most important thing when you're moving to remote working is this communication. One thing that you can do from a business perspective is make sure that you have a cadence of the right meetings that are happening at the right time. So we like to operate on Traction, which is Entrepreneur's Operating System, and we do each of those meetings with the different teams that we have. Um, and those are 90-minute meetings. We do those on Mondays. You got to keep your one-on-one meetings going. We do our end of the week meeting too where we kind of, you know, we celebrate, we nominate people, we talk about announcements, we do our quarterly planning as well. All of this is going remote now for us, right? At the time of this recording, we're just switching all this to remote. So that's one thing, you know, move over to remote, be prepared to kind of make that change and communication, communication, communication, write a newsletter every week, you know, keep your team on track. The other thing you can do is stockpiling as much cash as you can and then taking advantage of opportunities because there's gonna be opportunities coming at you all over the place now. Advertising costs are going to drop. If you're advertising on Facebook, Google, Amazon, a lot of these costs are going to drop. I mean, the stock market is tanking right now. Here's your opportunity, right? People are thinking, oh, how can I put my money into stocks? If you have a business, think about how you can double down on your business. You have a formula that's working already. You have ads that you're getting for pennies on the dollar. You're getting 50% off, 75% off on ads. If you're, if you're so lucky to do that, triple down, go, go in as much as you can, but you want to make sure you have enough of a buffer where you can take on You know, maybe 6 to 12 months of expenses. What you don't want to do is you don't want to lay off people because if you lay off people, that takes away momentum. So you want to make sure you're protected and you have a shield. If you're creating a margin of safety, what you're doing is you don't have to worry so much about having food on the table. You can worry about being greedy when people are fearful. So Warren Buffett said this in his, I believe it was in his 1981 shareholder letters, you want to be greedy when others are fearful, which is right now. This is a very fearful time for most people. Also, you want to be fearful when other people are being greedy. We're coming out of an 11-year bull market right now in the market, in the market. What you can do is you sat on the side for a while, you have protection, which allows you an opportunity to be aggressive, not just on the advertising side, but think about it from a mergers and acquisitions perspective. Maybe there's some companies you've been looking at out there where now because they don't have a buffer, They're struggling to make payroll, they have to make layoffs. You can buy their company for cheap, you can partner up with their company, you can work out a deal, 'cause you now have leverage. You're playing a game of leverage at the end of the day. There's other things you can do too. Companies are gonna be laying off people, here's your opportunity to hire people that you couldn't hire before. These people are now gonna come at a cheaper price. These other companies out there that are laying off people, you can look at them, double win, right? You can hire their people, not only that, you can potentially look at acquiring their company. Before hiring them, if you can buy the company, You can get the people too, by the way. It's not like you buy the company, you get the people for free. It doesn't work like that. You still have to pay the people too, but I'm just saying everything is, is, is going to become discounted more and more. You have to be aggressive. Here's the other thing I'm going to say. If you are a leader of your company right now, whether you are a manager of the company, whether you are an officer, whether you are the leader of the company, you have to think about becoming a wartime CEO. What that means is everyone is at war right now. We're all at war. So I would recommend reading this piece by Andreessen Horowitz. Just Google A16Z, so the number A16Z, wartime CEO. Look into what that actually means and be prepared for battle because this is what we're in right now. The people that haven't prepared for war, that aren't ready for it, they're peacetime CEOs. We're not in peacetime anymore, which means you're going to see a lot of carnage, a lot of bloodshed, a lot of companies that overleveraged that shouldn't be around right now. They're going to disappear. A lot of people are going to be out of work. You want to take care of your body too. I mean, this is a, this is a scenario where, you know, specifically what I'm talking about now with the coronavirus defense, You want to take care of yourself, not to take care of just you, but to take care of other people. That is your responsibility as a leader. That's your job, right? Someone I spoke to recently said, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna quarantine in the office. Hahaha. That's not really funny. Like, that's— this is, this is serious stuff right now. Like, as much as I've been texting my entrepreneur friends, as much as we don't want to do this, as much as it's gonna hurt business, it's the right thing to do. We're going completely remote. We're evaluating things on a case-by-case basis. I'll share some tactics with you. We're giving people, you know, it's small in the grand scheme of things, it's small, but we're giving people a $300 stipend to go buy supplies that they need. Um, we're telling people to quarantine 21 days. We're canceling all travel. A lot of the things that I was supposed to speak at, events that we're hosting, those are all gone right now. Major sports, we're talking about, you know, European football or just worldwide football. Uh, we're talking about the NBA, the NHL, the MLB. That's all canceled. Like that's not what matters right now. What matters is saving lives. I'll put it to you this way. As a business owner, you should think of it like this. As a business owner, you should be freaking excited right now. As a human being, you should be incredibly worried right now. So there's two, it's not exactly, it's completely different. It's, it's, it's, it's this and this, right? It's, it's, it's, it's night and day. If you know how to separate the two and you know how to capitalize from a business perspective and you worry about your loved ones and you take care of yourself and you have an emergency fund, you have emergency supplies, you should be fine. You're going to get through this. You're going to come out much stronger than other people because also of the fact that you watched this video. All right. Okay everyone, before we go, we have a bag of special goodies for you. Go to singlegrain.com/super to check out our pro version of our podcast, which includes a free trial. It has all these goodies to help you grow faster. It's going to help you check it out. See you inside. So don't forget to check out the next video over there. Let me know what you think in the comments. What am I missing from coronavirus defense? And, um, don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.