Running a Fledgling Business Amid a Crisis

(March 14, 2020) As we enter the state of emergency caused by the coronavirus pandemic, I’m having a severe case of flashbacks. The year was 2001, and my web marketing (as we called it back then) business was barely two years old. The year before, we’d survived the dot-com bust when many of our contemporaries perished. That year was a tough one, a time when I had to make some tough decisions just to get from one month to the next. I was just starting to see some sales interest again, when one of my employees came into the office and said, “Turn on the TV! The guy on the radio said a small plane flew into one of the World Trade Center towers.”

Of course, this turned out to be the 9-11 terrorist attack, and all of us sat around the office that day, partially glued to that TV and partially staring dumbly at our computer screens. As the news came in about different attacks elsewhere, we wondered what was coming next, what our fate would be. Most of my extended family also lived and worked in the New York City metro area. I wondered if they were OK, and I couldn’t reach any of them to find out. I vacillated between feeling numb and feeling panicked. I completely questioned our purpose: “Who could even think about something as trivial as online marketing at a time like this?” I tried to keep my head on straight and my outside demeanor strong, but I really didn’t know what was expected of me at a time like this. It was a crisis of unprecedented proportions, and I’d never run a company before.

Let’s also remember the early days of the Internet. There wasn’t any ready-made talent. Everyone I hired, I had to train from scratch. I invested my time, my knowledge, my passion, and my own money in teaching these people how to do the kind of work our clients needed. These people weren’t just my employees to me, they were my students. And like any good teacher, I cared deeply for them.

My little company did survive that crisis. As I think about what we’re facing now and look back on those days, at least I feel I have some wisdom to share with young businesses about to face their own major crisis. Here’s some of my advice:

• Realize that these times are going to test you. It’ll feel like MMA. Get yourself mentally ready.
• You’re going to have to make some tough decisions, and the toughest ones will be about your people. Have compassion. Remember that it’s nothing personal – you’re just trying to keep your business afloat.
• Prioritize – Back then, Congress didn’t pass any kind of stimulus package for us or our workers, and I ran a service business. Without my people, I could provide no service, but without customers, I didn’t need to provide service. I needed to retain and service my customers. That meant, looking at my client portfolio, what aspect of our services needed the most doing, getting real about which of my staffers were essential to providing those services and which were not fully utilized, and basing my personnel decisions on that.
• Be creative – Because I couldn’t afford to keep paying about half my employees, I made deals with them. I sat down with each of them to figure out if I laid them off, would they do better on unemployment than if I kept them on salary part-time. If the answer was the former, I asked them if as they looked for new jobs (as was required by terms of their unemployment insurance), if they would keep me posted on their status. Rather than lose them altogether, perhaps I would be at a point where I could bring them back on a part-time basis that worked for them and promise to re-hire them full-time as soon as I was able. My promise was my pact, and that pact pushed me to rebuild.
• Look for new opportunities among the ashes – Between the dot-com bust and 9-11, I could see the writing on the wall. Keep diversifying. Don’t take work from fly-by-night operations or startups that had terrible business models. Look for partnerships to feed the pipeline. Pivot if you have to. Perhaps I would have learned these lessons regardless of the disasters, but those disasters certainly expedited my learning curve.
• Keep networking – As crazy or as hard as that might seem, now is the time to build new relationships. These relationship may even help you keep your business alive during these trying times, but if nothing else, you'll be using your time productively to work ON your business during a time when you might not be able to work IN your business. (And you can still network virtually -- you are reading this article on a virtual social network platform after all!)
• Find and offer support – I don’t think I could have survived those days without the kind of support I found from others. Some were just compatriots who were in the same boat as I was and could commiserate about our woes. Others came in the form of local business officials who explained economic programs, grants, and other already-available offerings to entrepreneurs like me. I got moral support from friends and family who wanted to see me succeed. But I also truly enjoyed giving support to others who were also struggling. Somehow the giving helped reduce my own stress and made me a little more conscious of the blessings I had in front of me.
• Believe in yourself – The adage, “This too shall pass” took on new meaning for me back in those days. I wasn’t really sure it would. I didn’t know what the “new normal” would look like in a post-9-11 world. The thing I absolutely could not lose sight of, however, was that I had to own every decision made about my fledgling business. Even if I sought the advice and assistance of others during that time, no one made the final call but me. No one had as much at stake than me. I had to be willing to accept that perhaps not all of my decisions would be the right ones, but I had to believe in myself and my capacity to make more right than wrong decisions. I was the leader of that company, and everyone I dealt with had to believe that I believed in what I was doing.

My business did survive and went on to thrive. The years 2005 – 2007 were our strongest, and we also survived the 2008 Great Recession. In 2013, after 15 years of running that company and surviving many economic and societal peaks and valleys, I chose to move on. It was a decision that once again forced me to believe in myself. I have zero regrets.

Today, I offer my support and empathy to those startup and fledgling business leaders. I’ve been in your shoes before. As I’ve posted before, how can I help you?

Hollis Thomases provides fractional content leadership and production for fast-growing travel technology and mobility companies. She develops and/or collaborates on content strategy, editorial calendaring, content production, content distribution, business communications, and sourcing/managing relevant internal and external talent. Request access to her private online portfolio through LinkedIn or by emailing [email protected].