We’re ten weeks in. If your business strategy hasn’t changed, you’re too late.

I’ve spent much of the last ten weeks feeling guilty. 

No, not guilty because I’ve been roaming around without a mask or crowding public beaches. I’m still locked down. I have asthma thanks to a hospitalization from pneumonia a few years ago. I’m well aware that lung-related illnesses that don’t kill you also don’t make you stronger: My three year battle to get my asthma diagnosed and treated isn’t something I’d wish on anyone. Nor was the pneumonia. And pneumonia-like symptoms are considered a “mild” case of Corona Virus. 

I’m certainly not feeling mom guilt. Holy smokes. I’m doing more for my kids than I ever have before. And I’m indulging them much more than I have before. I let them have more screen time-- I bought them a Nintendo just before lockdown, something I told them weeks before would never happen. When they throw a fit, I am more likely to drop whatever I am doing and hold them than put them in time out. There is one new-normal rule in our house, one thing that is absolutely not allowed: The words “no fair.” No one in this house has a right to say those words compared to what is playing out around us in the wider world. 

No, my guilt is a form of professional survivor’s guilt: Guilt that my business is healthy and growing right now while so many others are suffering. Chairman Mom is a digital first community for working women, in particular working mothers. While others scramble to build digital communities and cobble together ways they can “solve” the biggest problems arising from this crisis, we were already working on them for three years. 

And still, there are ways in which our business had to change immediately, and maybe, permanently. Even a business that seems designed for a time like this had to recognize that nothing was designed for times like these. 

Our growth strategy this year was to fund thousands of dinners in women’s homes all around the world. Post-lockdown, we immediately set to work on how to salvage a lot of that strategy but make it relevant for virtual meetups. What I’m really proud of is how slowly we went; how we didn’t assume the same things that would work IRL would work on Zoom. We have scaled our virtual events more slowly, which doesn’t make sense if you consider how much easier it is to open a Zoom window versus open your home for a dinner party. But it does make sense when you consider the gargantuan load that was just put on our woman’s shoulders, how much less time she has for anything, how actually we were asking something much greater of her. Opening a Zoom window now is a substantially bigger ask than opening your home to a dozen strangers and feeding them pre-Corona Virus. 

That’s one small example. There are others: A growth strategy based mostly on corporate sales has turned on a dime back to consumer. Who we are hiring and why, where we invest and why, what I spend every moment of my day on. It has all changed. 

And again, this is a digital-only company that seems perfectly suited for these times. If you have not already dramatically retooled your company-- especially if that company is a startup-- you are too late. That may seem obvious. 

But there’s a nuance emerging that is even more interesting: The Band Aid vs the New Normal. 

In the immediate days and weeks after Shelter in Place orders came down, smart leaders were making immediate shifts. Maybe it was a co-working space rolling out a digital strategy, a gym throwing online classes on Instagram, local restaurants switching to general stores. Whatever you do, do it rapidly and make sure it is relevant right this second. 

But now, we are ten weeks in. The Band Aid is getting soggy and the ends are frayed and putting more Band Aids on top to reinforce it isn’t a strategy. It’s dawning on so many leaders that there is no going back to “normal.” There isn’t going to be a vaccine for years, and the rush to open the country backup will lead to more infection rates. The politicians endorsing that strategy have even acknowledged that. Many colleges aren’t going back in the fall, and many public and private schools may not either. Twitter, for one, announced it will never tell employees to come back to work. They can work from home forever, if they want. 

Restaurants can’t remain emergency general stores. People can’t keep paying fees to IRL businesses out of loyalty, or maintain support for laid off employees with Go Fund Me-s. 

If there was pressure to find a Band Aid in the days after the lock down began, the need to find a new way to exist in this new normal is the new existential threat that businesses face. One of a cut that won’t heal and endlessly bleeds out. If you are only now applying the Band Aid, it’s too late. It’s time for the permanent reset to what will likely become a new normal. 

I’ve been watching another example of this with NeedHop, a company that was spun out of Chairman Mom just as this crisis was beginning, that again, had serendipitous timing 

NeedHop is about arranging valuable 1:1 conversations around shared life experience. The original prompt on the app was “What’s your problem?” But in the wake of the pandemic, we knew what everyone’s problem was. The team rapidly pivoted to “What do you need?” and people with emergency situations were asking for and getting specific help. But helping people meet emergency short-term needs wasn’t really what NeedHop was about. It was NeedHop’s Band Aid. 

This week NeedHop launched a brand new feature which, we think, makes the platform perfect for the next stage. You can now offer paid 1:1 phone (NOT VIDEO!) calls to people who need your advice/experience. (You can download the app on Android and Apple and start earning $1 a minute right now!)

It’s hard to be a startup during a time like this, especially one run by an underrepresented founder. I am reading deep-pocketed VCs in interview after interview advise companies to have at least two years of runway in the bank. “Oh! Great idea! I’ve been saying no to mountains of cash that were totally available to me all this time…” 

It’s about as helpful as when VCs sagely advise that you “hire great people”. 

But there’s also an advantage to running a startup right now, and it’s the advantage startups always have and the reason they perform so disproportionately well in times of recession: Startups are the cockroaches of the business world. They can adapt more quickly, build more quickly, throw away what worked yesterday with less regret and reinvent themselves overnight. That isn’t just what the best businesses need to be doing now, it’s what every business needs to be doing right now. 

(An award-winning journalist and serial entrepreneur, Sarah Lacy is the co-founder and CEO of Chairman Mom, a judgement-free community for badass working women.)