Revenue Collapse, Remote Isolation, and a New Kind of Pressure

In late 2019, I provided a friend with a list of all the courses he had been through with us, compiled on our business letterhead, that he could submit to DPOR (the organization in Virginia that handles trades licensing) with hopes of some of that time counting toward the classroom hour requirement tied to the registered apprenticeship program he was working through. He had spent the first twenty years of his career in the restaurant business, with experience managing stores with as many as 200 employees. He wanted more time with his family so he stepped away from that and enrolled himself in a program at the location tech school. That said, he opted not to bother with the basic math course and a few others that were geared for folks in or just out of high school, which left a gap in the number of required classroom hours he needed to be considered for a journeyman license. I’ve never been willing to sit through a class just for the sake of sitting there so I completely agreed with his logic, especially since he had previously handled profit and loss statements for businesses doing $20 million in revenue, so I was happy to put together that list and see where the cards fell. DPOR counted all fifty hours he had been involved with us in leadership development.

Not only did that help him check a box in his journey, that led me to reach out to one of the folks at DPOR I had worked with on registered apprenticeships while I was still in a full time human resources role; if they’d count the hours for one person, I couldn’t see any reason they shouldn’t for others. In January 2020, before everything else I just detailed began to unfold (good and bad), we met with a few folks from DPOR and mapped out plan for having our coursework formally approved to count toward registered apprenticeship classroom hours - not to compete with the trade-specific skills our amazing tech schools teach, but to help fill gaps like my friend experienced and to provide support for the folks in those trades as they took on leadership responsibility. That conversation and the steps we needed to take to fulfill their expectations challenged us, but I wouldn’t really consider it an adversity. What we didn’t realize at the time, though, was that working through this process held several seeds we’d uncover and begin to intentionally nurture in the months that followed.

On March 11, 2020, we received the first call postponing some of the on-site leadership development we had booked. Soon after that, we heard from Carly’s team that the Wounded Warrior Project work that was scheduled to be held in San Diego in early May was also put on hold. As two weeks to flatten the curve stretched into two months, then two quarters, all while we were prohibited from doing the work that would have paid our bills, we put every ounce of time we had into building out the back-end of our business. We identified a bonafide software where we could host a digital version of our lessons and track engagement (tied to our January conversation with DPOR), we built a new website, we became approved recertification providers with the Society for Human Resource Management and the Human Resource Certification Institute, and we put several other systems in place we may have never had time to (or at least dedicated time to) otherwise.

Whether we saw it as an adversity at the time or not, that January conversation with DPOR (stemming from a simple a favor my friend asked me to help with), held the seeds to each of the things we worked through in those first few months while the world stopped turning and all our plans evaporated. That kept us occupied for a while, and it served as the foundation for so much of the back-end of our business tools we offer clients nationwide today, but it did absolutely nothing to pay the bills. In fact, it required significant investment upfront. We had a bit of a financial cushion to support us, but it was wearing thin. Without that clear purpose for who we wanted to serve and how we wanted to do it, and our closely held core values driving us each step of the way, it would have been very easy to throw in the proverbial towel and take whatever employment we could have landed. Make no mistake, that wouldn’t have been difficult; we saw more people looking for any way possible to avoid work at that point than to find it.

What would have been ever easier was falling into a bitter spirit of resentment, at the hand we were dealt that was effectively squashing the momentum we had worked so hard to build, at all the politics involved in every aspect of what became a global pandemic, and even one another as we became more and more concerned about how we’d pay our bills. Global disruptions amplify every previous pressure; owning the ripples and maintaining self-control prevents resentment and keeps the partnership (and business) intact. But with our values becoming more of a foundation for every decision we made, and that purpose fueling us, we pushed through. We’ll look at what the remainder of 2020 looked like next. First, though, take a moment to jot down a past system-wide disruption’s effects on your work or personal life. Honestly note your contribution and how it helped you hone one of the leadership attributes we looked through this process.