A Small Business Leader Under Pressure
COVID-19 has put the world into a state of chaos. As a small business leader, this situation has provided an enormous amount of opportunity to learn. It has also provided a great deal of additional pressure.
Each and every day, I have the ultimately responsibility for over 20 employees. All of those employees have families. So, in many ways, the choices that I make day in and day out will and do have financial ramifications on my employees and their families. As we face a situation where we may need to close our doors for weeks, being able to support those employees and families becomes much more difficult. Many of them cannot endure a week without pay, let alone a month.
Now, government programs are aiming to help. That is great, however, that aid could still be many weeks away. So what happens if I need to close the office doors tomorrow? Well, ultimately, that question has lead to many, many days of planning and running scenarios. If this happens, then we do that. How many payroll cycles do we have the cash to see through? How many bills can we pay now vs. later? How skinny can I get on margin to help push sales up for as long as possible? How long can this storm last before it puts our business in the ground? All fair and pertinent questions of which many answers cannot be reached at 100% certainty. Also, just to note, we had business continuity plans in place prior to this outbreak. Not all of those plans however, contemplated mass shutdowns. A tornado doesn’t close the state and a fire doesn’t eliminate every other building in the county.
With all this planning comes additional pressure. What if I miss something in the scenarios that could have given us an extra week? What if I wouldn’t have bought that last round of inventory just yet? While I’m the first to admit I do not have all the answers, that doesn’t stop every single one of our employees from looking at me expecting that I do. This is the case most days anyway but now the stakes are higher. The world is scrambling and scenarios change hour to hour. The pressure to adapt and think on my feet is immense. That isn’t my biggest source of pressure though.
As the leader of our business, I have a lot of people counting on me. As a father and husband, I have a few people counting on my in a different way. To run the business requires me to leave the house on occasion. As a leader, I will never ask someone to do something that I am not willing to do myself. So, if the office is open and I ask others to go in, then I need to be there myself. While we’re down to ~two days in each week, those two days are two days of additional exposure for me — and additional exposure I bring home to my family.
Where and how do I draw the line? Shutting down puts over twenty families at risk of serious hardship. Staying open, even while practicing social distancing, increases exposure for the staff and for me and my family personally. And, while I could just hunker down and not go in for a month, how do I call myself a leader if that is the path I choose?
At the small business level, and as I suspect big business too, the responsibility of a leader to protect the business, the staff, and all families involved is enormous. But at the end of the day, as a leader you need to act like one. Be smart, be strategic, be responsible, and be decisive. I didn’t make it to the top by accident as I suspect others in my role didn’t either. Trust your gut and use the data that is available. At the end of the day, some results may be out of our control but in my case, our small business isn’t going to fail because of my lack of trying.
