COVID-19 High stakes - One small business versus one giant pandemic ....

This is not a tale for the faint-hearted. Indeed, any story with that kind of title requires a strong stomach. But read it to the end, if you can. It's a story about overcoming fear, a sort of fear that I had never experienced before, where I reeled from nausea to sweaty palms to cold sweats daily. It's one about dogged determination, or on second thought, it was more of a crazed Red Bull extreme hamster wheel, which in hindsight came at a pretty hefty price, being my mental health.

 It’s also a cautionary tale because, through it, I learnt the biggest and most humbling business lesson thus far in my career. And finally, this is a story about me finding compassion in myself and others, as people who didn't have to went above the call of duty to get us over the finish line.

Compassion trumped COVID-19 in the end and saved my business during the first and second wave. But I fear a possible third where there might be little kindness left in most of us.

The Fear Factor Face-Off

It was about just over a year ago that the nightmare slowly began to unfold, first in China and then Europe. That first brutal wave that blitzed through northern Italy was my wake-up call. Looking back, I wish I had heeded the red flags about three weeks earlier.

Nevertheless, that was when I had my first jolt, straight to the pit of my belly, of nauseating fear. I was seeking intel from all sources – international suppliers, fellow distributors, that doctor from Milan I met a few years back at that congress. Anyone in my network who seemed to be at the coal-face and who could shed some light on what was coming. The message from the north was uniformly dire: "brace yourselves". I watched as hospitals in Europe became over-run with all things Covid and how the treatment of every other disease or ailment had to stand down, cancer included.

I knew that there was no good reason for South Africa to be spared. I had to act. However, there was no playbook for “how to pandemic-proof your business”, and certainly not for a small South African business like ours. I could see the train wreck coming, almost undoubtedly catastrophic, and I did not have a plan.

Days (and then months) of Dogged Determination

 There was Plan A (retrench?) or Plan B (salary cuts?), both equally awful, but I was going to do everything in my power to stave off retrenchments. March 2020 turned out to be a good month as customers began stockpiling in anticipation of the first wave in South Africa. But I knew that to give us the longest runway possible, we had to take as much pain as possible upfront. The livelihoods of fifteen families depended on me getting this right. The weight of that responsibility bore down on me.

 The conversations that followed with each employee were gut-wrenching. Everyone in the company agreed to a salary cut, ranging from 10% to 50%. We each took some pain for each other. It was a massive ask, from the bottom up, without any guarantee of repayment of salaries or when salaries would normalise again, and yet we achieved 100% buy-in. As a moment that I often think back on, it's one of true humility in the face of my team's sacrifice and commitment.   

 All eyes were on me and management to pull us through the following months. I have never been so fierce nor fired up in my life! Tick tock, I didn't stop.  

And then everything as we knew it changed ...  

Elective surgeries vaporised overnight, even within the oncology context. Patients feared coming near hospitals, delaying screenings and diagnostic procedures, treatment and even surgery. Our surgeons couldn't operate even if they wanted to as hospitals' COVID emergency protocols dictated they radically reduce theatre capacity. It was a page by page carbon copy of what was playing out in hospitals the world over. The virus was priority number one, and everything else fell off the radar. Life and business as we knew it had inextricably changed, but for how long?  

Tightening of belts is a horrible euphemism and doesn't do justice to the austerity measures imposed on all of us, both from a business perspective and in our personal lives. Every cent was turned over thrice times before being spent. I was holding exchange rate vigils on almost an hourly basis. At €20:R1 roughly a year ago, I was a sweaty-palmed mess. There was shameless grovelling on my part vis-à-vis my suppliers and service providers. There can be no room for self-pride or any other pretence when livelihoods are at stake.

 Asking for extended payment terms and apologising later for missing them sadly became my modus operandi for business survival. Our debtors' clerk was hunting down every last Rand like a possessed rottweiler. We were capped at the knees with no end in sight, and I was in search of silver linings and grasping at straws.

Business / Life Lesson 101 – if it’s too good to be true, it probably is

The lure of PPE as a lifeline seemed logical, based on the facts that we had at the time. And I thank Annie Duke for her book "How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices", which has probably spared me inordinate hours of self-flagellation in this regard. Sadly, like many others, we became another "tenderpreneur" casualty, one massive failed tender and a warehouse full of masks later. The lifeline became the noose around my neck; the innocuous garden snake turned boa constrictor.

 It was my rear-naked-choke moment with no option to tap out at a time when we could least afford it. Boy, oh boy, this was a bitter pill that mentally I couldn't swallow. I withdrew into my laptop ten hours a day and found a dark hole called "work" where I grieved for myself, my family, my business, my planet. I was hanging onto my mental health by a frazzled shoestring. 

 The salve – my compassion equation "??+??=[??+??]????"

This is something I coined myself. I like to think of it as one of my few but true positives that came out of this pandemic.

It goes something like this: ??+??=[??+??]???? = 1 unit of ??. Let me explain: first off, one’s heart must be in the right place, then one needs to add ?? = 1 unit of compassion. A unit of heart goes hand in hand with a unit of compassion. One can’t have the one without the other. However, together when doled out, without seeking anything in return, they come back infinitely more.

To the cynical, it may sound corny, but I lived, breathed and believed my compassion equation during 2020. The more I gave, the more I received, more often than not of a non-financial nature but so emotionally rewarding. My small gestures paled against the compassion shown to me by a critical supplier and our freight forwarder. They walked on coals fending off angry requests from their finance departments to keep the lights on for us. I would mention names, but I hate to think that these individuals may get into trouble as their behaviour, I am sure, did not align with the corporate cultures they are a part of. But I guess that's where the ?? component factors in. It was the two or three individuals concerned that made this happen.

What will the third wave look like in South Africa? - All bets are off.

As I said, it's hard to conjure up silver linings when one’s reality is simply seeking out means to survive. Hope feels like a luxury and denial, well, that's not a clever business strategy. So, where does this leave me (personally) and my business? I feel stark naked on this big beach and can see this tsunami shaped thing off in the distance on the horizon. People around me are making bets – some saying it's the loch ness monster, but that's high stakes and smacks of denial. They can't see what the scientists or the epidemiologist see. Nope, the odds are that it's the third wave. The only question remaining is how big is that thing and how quickly is it moving towards my beach?

 At least this time around I will not be a doe in the headlights. Instead, I will be naked on my beach with eyes wide open and will face this monstrous thing knowing what I know and have learned over the past year. I should feel like this is a positive because logically, this means I should be better prepared. And most certainly, as a business, we are way better prepared. We have worked hard at adapting to the "new normal" so that we survive and find a more resilient place in our little world.

 But as a mom, wife, friend and colleague, I am scared. I am not sure if I have the emotional energy to do this last year again and again. Because yes, there may well be a fourth wave and even a fifth. I feel like the little choo-choo train that has now officially run out of steam. And what about all of the people that I care about? I am pretty sure that they are as exhausted as I am. I don't believe that mentally we can endure this indefinite COVID bump and grind, wave after wave. The world is fraying from end to end psychologically.

 What if my compassion equation is a dumb-assed illusion? Maybe I created it in my head as a coping mechanism? The pandemic fatigue has worn me down to such an extent that my equation feels fake, like a thin veneer of something good from the past. Is the scrap of kindness that's left in each of us enough to overcome this global COVID-19 induced me-and-mine first mindset? Hope might not be a business strategy, but I hope compassion may still trump as a fundamental human survival strategy. It's one of the few true arrows we have left in our quiver to unite us all against this virus. ??+??=[??+??]????