Opening back Up.

As the nation ponders and plans to re-open the economy and emerge from the Covid-19 lockdown, there are many discussions about how this should happen and what the new normal is for businesses.

How do we keep our people safe? How do we operate and re-ignite profitability and growth? How do we hire? Do we have to contact trace our people and daily check their temperatures? So many questions to be answered and CEO’s have the unenviable task of opening up and running their companies in the midst of this all.

I don’t think our nation and its small businesses have ever had to re-emerge from a policy driven shutdown caused by a global pandemic. There is no precedent or blueprint. Over the coming months, we will certainly learn what works and what doesn’t.

Our company - P1 Ventures - has had the distinct privilege and blessing of staying open and working during the lockdown. As a partner and supplier to many critical industries such as Energy, Aerospace and Military/Defense, we were granted the precious classification of an essential business. Our backlog is strong, our work essential and our people are spared the chaos of unemployment. 

However, as an engineering and manufacturing business, the majority of our people don’t have the flexibility of working from home. Some of our administrative staff, such as finance, HR and marketing, were able to shift to working remotely, but our factories had to remain open and products continue shipping. Our situation, given the news that was emerging and the numbers of contaminations and deaths scaling, was a complex one. We were making changes and adapting daily. In the early stages of the unfolding pandemic, I was frankly scared.

My fear peaked when the White House and its Coronavirus task force announced that deaths could reach between 100,000 and 240,000 people. Wow. That’s a big number. Statistically, that meant we potentially could lose people in our own business. The weight of that reality hit me hard and early one morning. I sat in my office and pondered what we should do. Of course, we had taken the necessary precautions. We split working shifts and social distanced our people. We were disinfecting frequently. But with those projections in mind, I asked myself if I am really putting my people first.

 As you can imagine, as the data and newsreels flooded in, with new information being discovered and shared daily, we didn’t know where this pandemic was going. But we had to remain open. We had to remain safe and we had to embrace this new normal and formulate a way to run our business that simultaneously facilitated safety, productivity and growth.

I made the decision to be radical about safety and boldly use this time to create a new managerial blueprint for generating growth.

As a result, we successfully operated seven days a week, keeping nearly 100 people fully employed (and working overtime), completed every major shipment successfully and serviced our customers with excellence. These outcomes were not the result of a single strategy, but the combination of several operating principles and a fully engaged team dedicated to running a tight ecosystem of health, safety and productivity.

I have recently been asked by several groups to share my thoughts on re-opening. In these discussions, I noticed a sense of anxiety and worry for many CEO’s. I shared our recent experiences as a company as a small example of how to operate as the economy opens up. We have had to navigate working physically in factories as the pandemic unfolded, while balancing safety and productivity, and were able to get through it - thank God - without anyone getting sick or missing work.

I’d like to share what we learned about operating in this environment for the many CEO’s that are now facing this journey. Typically, I don’t subscribe to lists of things to do, but instead prefer principles that can be applied to your unique context, for desired outcomes. Hopefully our experiences and principles can provide insights for you and give you the peace the open with confidence.

Culture of change and adaptability

As a CEO in this pandemic era, cultivating a culture that is able to change rapidly and adapt to shifting circumstances seamlessly is crucial. In the past, I often faced criticism as CEO that I changed things too quickly, thereby creating the perception that I was ‘all over the place.’ I justified our changes in the name of strategy and experimentation, aiming to optimize operations and profitability while adjusting to market changes swiftly to ensure we stayed relevant as a small business. Prior to covid-19, we had a lot of practice with change and adaptability. Did I execute these perfectly as a leader? Of course not.  

However, in these particular times, when the future is unknown, change and adaptability are quickly becoming the norm. As the pandemic was gaining momentum and government policies were changing daily, in March we embraced our culture by making quick decisions and implementing them within hours, fluidly generating full scale buy-in and adaptation by a 100 person workforce.

Jocko Willink talks about how this works within Navy Seal teams. Yes, there are commanders and task unit leaders. But as the battle unfolds and new data and perspectives emerge, whomever on the Seal team has the best vantage point and data to make a decision makes it, and everyone, leadership included, falls into line and executes the next move. Fluid adaptation driven by rapidly changing circumstances in an uncertain and dangerous context. Or, more relevantly, running a business with many people during a global pandemic where health and safety are at stake.

A necessary foundation for a culture of change and adaptability is empowerment.

Giving everyone a voice by empowering them in the organization to share insights and improvements on how to operate during a crisis time. Their data, perspective and experiences could be the needed input to inform a critical decision. This requires ego-free environments. Leaders must check their pride at the door when it comes to managing a culture of change and adaptability. Prior to our government creating lock-down and public gathering policies, one of our entry-level people suggested keeping all visitors out of the plants. Suppliers, customers, recruits, family-members and anyone else that wasn’t on payroll. This may seem like common sense now, but his suggestion was floated in late February. We quickly assessed it, agreed to it and implemented it within 24 hours. It was 3 weeks prior to NYS shutting down businesses and who knows how this simple decision, suggested from an entry level team member, could have impacted our outcomes had we not acted on it.

 As we re-open our economy and businesses across the nation, I encourage you to cultivate a culture of change and adaptability. Respond quickly. Implement flawlessly. We have had seven operating guidelines emerge from our workforce during the last few months that have proved to be invaluable.

Pandemic time communication   

This principle has been beaten to death. I’ve sat through a number of Zoom webinars as a panelist and observer since this pandemic started. In every case, communication comes up as a major initiative or focus point for CEO’s. On one call, the notion that we were even discussing communication as an innovation was criticized, suggesting that we should always be communicating with our people. On a certain level, this is true, but it missed the larger point. It’s not about communication in and of itself, because as CEO’s, we are always communicating. It’s more about how we communicate during this crisis.

Peacetime communications are centered around vision, values, mission, strategy and can be simple, concise, and well thought through. Peacetime calls for consistent, future focused communications catered to their intended audience. What you share with employees (maximizing profitability, for example) is not necessarily shared verbatim with customers. 

Pandemic-time communications are about including every stakeholder (employees, their families, suppliers, customers, boards, banks and other partners) in your messaging, showing empathy, transparency and frequency in what you share. For example, when we were deemed an essential business, we curated a communication about staying open and what we were doing to keep our people healthy and safe so we could continue shipping product. This single communication went out to all employees, their families, suppliers, banks and customers - it wasn’t customized to individual stakeholders. We showed empathy for our people and friends, were transparent about what we were learning in real time and demonstrated that we had a plan to stay open, safe and productive.

 I believe this will now be the new normal. Frequent, empathetic and transparent communications that engaging and including all stakeholders through central messaging.

And showing humility in the process by acknowledging we don’t have all the answers but are willing to adapt as new information becomes available.

Community Focused

There is a powerful Christian principle I try to live by: love your neighbor as you love yourself. This fundamentally suggests that we are to give to, meet the needs of and serve others unconditionally and in the same way we would meet our own needs. It’s a tall order. But this principle comes alive during times of crisis. As the pandemic was escalating, many of our people were nervous, understandably questioning whether we should remain open. There were concerns about the health and safety of loved ones and each other, rightfully so. This is where we, as leaders, have to shift the perspectives of our people from inwardly to outwardly focused.

This can be hard. We live in a meritocracy that celebrates the individual. As the crisis was unfolding, we sanctioned a series of communications in the form of weekly podcasts, all-hands meetings (socially distanced) and emails that continued to reinforce the fact that we were blessed to be working during these times, especially as the unemployment numbers topped six million, ten million and then on to fifteen million and above. We profiled the reality of how many people were suffering from unemployment, with many small businesses shuttering, and many getting sick and losing hope.

We initiated a ‘Love Your Neighbor’ program to shift the focus of every team member from themselves to focusing on our community and those who were suffering.

In times of panic, it’s important to have your people focus on helping others. It provides perspective and gives momentum and purpose to their work so they can bless others because of their own blessing. This is why I have journeyed on ten mission trips since 2003 to Africa, Eastern Europe and other places, to ground my own perspective and shift my own focus to the needs of others. It has helped make me a better leader.

You may be thinking to yourself, “We always give back!”. That’s likely true and very admirable. But I'm talking about making giving a central tenet to your work and culture, tying every employee’s work and efforts to contributing to making someone else’s life better, every day. It’s a seismic shift in being community-focused. It’s not triple bottom line stuff (which is amazing) or impact investing. I’m talking about shifting the behavior of every employee, every moment of everyday into a mode of focusing on helping others. Living other-centered. Celebrating the fact that their productivity impacts cash flows, which impacts our ability to bless others. I call this level of community focus Integrated Compassion.

Here are a few examples of what we have been doing to love our neighbor during these times:

1.     Weekly meals. To support local restaurants and small businesses and their employees, we choose a new restaurant each week and purchase meals from them for all of our employees and their families. We’ve spent more than $10,000 since early April and will continue doing it because we’re passionate about helping other small businesses get back on their feet.

2.     Grocery cards. We partnered with churches in the Capital Region and purchased $100 grocery gift cards for families in need. Every Friday, myself and others hand deliver the cards and thank them. I scheduled 3 hours every Friday afternoon to deliver these gifts and our people became passionate about helping single mom households, hurting people in their communities and blessing others. We’ve had the privilege of giving $5,000+ in grocery cards since early April.

3.     Making masks and shields. Our young engineers repurposed our 3D printers to making plastic frames for face shields and distributing them to organizations collecting them and getting them into the hands of medical professionals that needed them. We ran our printers 24 hours a day and made weekly deliveries. This initiative created a momentum in our business to identify products that we can make, on an on-going basis, leveraging our engineering and manufacturing capabilities to meet some of the needs in our communities. We are dedicated to making this an on-going practice.

Loving your neighbor, with integrated compassion, is becoming a new normal for us. As other CEO’s open up and get their businesses operating again, I highly recommend getting your people to be outwardly focused, creating a healthy perspective and giving purpose to their efforts.

Create an offensive strategy  

Never waste a crisis. The cliché of clichés. It’s true, but way overused and over simplified. This pandemic has created so much hardship for small businesses and CEO’s that it can seem difficult to go on the offensive. Making payroll, rent, mortgage payments and dealing with cancelled and/or postponed contracts. It can be overwhelming and paralyzing.

However, it is precisely during times of crisis that CEO’s should go on the offensive to capture more market share and create new customers. 

 As the pandemic worsened, and once we had our people settled into a safe routine, we shifted our focus and efforts to the front end of the business. We became aggressive. As an industrial technology and manufacturing company, we hypothesized that manufacturing would re-shore (move back to North America) at scale once the economy normalized. Supply chain risks and the interruptions that persisted over the last few months (try buying a workout bench) would mandate that stable, uninterruptible and local supply chains would rule the day. 

We quickly cast a vision of doubling our quoting opportunities (from $2m per month to $4m+) knowing we had to adjust how we attracted customers. We invested swiftly in automating, digitalizing and scaling our marketing efforts. We hired a film production company to virtualize our factory tours and are putting together a video series on our company’s history, culture and future vision. We subscribed to HubSpot and are running daily LinkedIn direct messenger campaigns while also moving to YouTube.

Since launching these efforts, we have added opportunities and orders from Dubai, Ecuador, South Korea, Austria and several parts of the United States. We still have a long way to go, but are on the offensive and developing new marketing capabilities as a result. The point here is the need to create an offensive strategy that works for you in your context. As you open up, sprint out of the gates with a unique strategy that takes advantage of some of the opportunities this unfortunate crisis has created to add market share and new customers.

Be Present        

Lastly, as your companies start opening up and coming back together physically, as a leader, you must be present. Demonstrate calm, confidence and lead from among your people. There will be many questions about health, safety and what the new normal behavior will be in the workplace. As we were progressing through myriad changes over these last few months, I knew we didn’t have all the answers and needed to adjust as necessary. But one thing I could control is being present. Being on the shop floor, talking to our people, showing them that although I may be scared too, I was with them in the trenches and working alongside them. 

I also tried doing this effectively with investments we have and boards I sit on, diving deep into those relationships and showing I was available. One of the companies whose board I sit on and in whom we are invested went through a difficult transition so I was on the phone with the CEO 5-7 times a day, seven days a week, helping formulate a path forward. I was present for advice, guidance and to brainstorm and test new ideas.

Conclusion

As a CEO navigating this pandemic, it can be scary as you contemplate how to keep your people safe and how to get your businesses operating again. As an essential business that had to operate physically across multiple factories while the pandemic escalated and scaled, we were blessed to stay productive and keep our people safe. 

I’ve shared the principles above with the hope that this will give you some peace to know that although we all face many unknowns in the coming months and even years, there is a small business in upstate NY that has been navigating these changes safely - thank God - and can provide a small blueprint as to how to open and stay safe during a global pandemic.