When the World as You Know It Stops and Plans Evaporate

Beginning in November 2017, Cindy and I had both stepped away from full-time employment. Less than 18 months prior, our combined salaries were nearly triple what we had earned as recently as 2012. When Cindy stepped away from her position and into the world of self-employment, it was based on a significant values-disconnect. When I followed her just over a year later, it was more about being able to fully dedicate our time to pursue bigger opportunities. The challenges we faced just prior to that in hosting an event despite institutional conflicts were indeed tough to navigate but mainly served as lessons for how we could avoid similar issues later on.

Around the time I submitted my resignation that included the offer to stick around for two full months in hopes of identifying and training my replacement, I had a conversation with a client I had supported intermittently for about a year at that point. In several conversations, this client had made comments about me considering an everyday role with them. I had kindly deflected that each time, saying that they didn’t need me all day, every day - because they didn’t. They had between 25 and 30 employees, and it just wouldn’t make sense to take on the salary I would have needed for it to work. But when I chose to step away from my HR & Safety Manager position into our business, I floated a part-time W2 idea with them that would give them the support they really needed and provide me and Cindy with some steady income while we pushed forward in our business. As I mentioned before, November of 2017 ended up being tied more to those two businesses than building our own. I juggled 15-20 hours each week in that new part-time capacity while supporting my previous employer through partial days for most of the month, all while maintaining the plates we already had spinning for ourselves and juggling the family situations I mentioned before.

If I’m being honest, 2018 and 2019 were a blur. We invested heavily into certifications and licensing, we hosted events, and we did everything we could think of to be top-of-mind with our existing clients and to get in front of every business we thought we could add value to; as far as I was concerned, that was every business within a two-hour radius. We had been dialed in on Hill’s sixth leadership attribute, The Habit of Doing More Than Paid For, for so long that we were putting the law of sowing and reaping to the test - and we were indeed beginning to see potential for a harvest in our business. In 2018, our full-day leadership event was at capacity. The 2019 event sold out six full weeks in advance. Through all that, we built strong relationships with our existing clients and we were landing on the radar of some we never thought would know our names.

As we flipped the calendar to 2020, we had some amazing opportunities booked and new potential clients reaching out each week. The momentum was nothing short of amazing! By early March, we were rolling and couldn’t wait to see what the rest of the year would hold. But even after all the independence we had reclaimed and all we had done to clarify the values driving us, bad situations can arrive as total external disruption - opportunities and revenue streams vanishing overnight with no warning or control. I’d bet you know the timeline all too well, and I’ll map out how it unfolded for us in detail next. Now, though, I want you to reflect on a time when an external force - whatever that may have been - restricted what you could control. Think about your immediate emotions and one early sign of the larger disruption.

The Temporary Return to Keep the Lights On

I’m forever grateful for the opportunity I had to maintain the part-time position with that small company through 2018 and 2019. The 15-20 hours I spent with them each week helped build systems many smaller businesses never establish, but it also provided us with a bit of stability while we built momentum in our business. That momentum quickly grew into something neither of us ever really expected - or imagined.

When I filed the initial paperwork to establish the business, I pictured providing some light support to a handful of small, local companies; companies that likely wouldn’t have access to much of what I experienced over twenty years in a large, global manufacturing organization. I never pictured the interaction we were beginning to have with other large, global organizations. All I had ever seen during my two decades inside that kind of corporate environment was top-down initiatives through something called “global supply chain” contracts, which typically meant someone at the home office had a friend at the company they picked for a service, then forced those of us at the facility level to work with. Since our business was just us, and we didn’t have those high level corporate relationships, the thought of playing in that space never crossed my mind - until it happened.

Turns out, relationships matter! And so did our boots-on-the-ground experience when it came to connecting with the frontline supervisors and managers we delivered training for. We weren’t reading from a script or regurgitating something we had read in a book, everything we built into the lessons we shared was based on experience either or both of us had lived. That opened doors we never expected to even knock on.

On March 10, 2020, we delivered the first of what was scheduled to be four on-site sessions for a large manufacturing organization, which was coincidentally just a few miles away from where we hosted that second event in the fall of 2017. Immediately after that session, we drove to Alexandria, VA to meet with Carly Fiorina and her team about work we agreed to do with them in supporting the Wounded Warrior Project in California a few months later, then we closed the day in a meeting with gentleman who owned a large construction company just outside Washington DC. 

As exciting as all that way, there was a bit of uneasiness in the air. I remember shaking hands with Carly like it was yesterday, but it wasn’t really a handshake. That was the same day the media announced what we now know as COVID 19. We joked about being unsure as to whether we could still shake hands, if a fist bump would be more appropriate, or whether we should opt for just tapping our shoes toe to toe. That interaction with her was in jest, but the days, weeks, and months that followed were anything but a joking matter. A packed schedule with more opportunities lining up by the week was all put on hold within the next few days. “Two weeks to flatten the curve,” they said… 

Leading into March, I had started working through plans with the small business I had been supporting to hand off much of what I had been doing. We built a plan to ensure others on their team could maintain the systems I had developed, and identified the end of May as being when I would step away from the 15 or so hours I was with them each week. Let me be clear: I haven’t been willing to watch a news outlet of any kind for decades; they’re paid to sell advertising and don’t give two shits about you or me. I wasn’t willing to allow all the noise they were creating to interfere with the momentum we had built in our business, and I stuck with the plans we had put in place.

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 completed with Dove Development & Consulting, 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. 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.

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.