PPP is more than
just a Payroll Protection Program, it is a chance to Pause, Plan and Pivot.
There are any number
entrepreneur/investor idioms being thrown around about how to run your business
in a crisis: fix the plane while flying is the one being tossed our way.
We are in the midst
of the third cataclysmic economic event of our company’s life -- We raised our
first round of financing just weeks before the dot com bust, launched our
business nine months before 9/11, and then we purchased a business that sold into
the financial markets just months before my CFO came to me and said, “Lehman
Brothers can’t pay their bill.” I told
him he was nuts.
Years ago, during
one very productive time a member of my team asked: “We feel like Lucy in the
chocolate factory, when do we exhale?”
There is never a
break, the machine keeps producing candy, the clock keeps ticking, but now we
are being given a moment to breathe, sharpen the saw, check the compass, fill
the tank.
The PPP program,
while not perfect, for many companies is doing exactly what it set out to
do: help businesses keep their employees
while they reassess and recalibrate in a market that’s been deliberately shut
down. And I think it’s a perfectly good way for the government to act at this
moment without precedent.
There are lots of
arguments regarding government help for businesses in times of crisis, but what
is a business to do? Currently the
government requires us, for the public good, to move from our office, set up
our employees to work remotely, and try to sell our wares in an economy that we
are deliberately contracting.
So the crie de coeur
of an entrepreneur is to pivot. Change
directions. Make ventilators not cars,
hand sanitizer not gin. But not everyone can and so instead of crashing the
plane this program says we’re gonna give you 8 weeks to pay your employees,
bring back those you may have furloughed and figure out how turn to navigate.
The government here is
acting as a partner and saying, “Look, we’re gonna shrink your market and
squeeze some of your customers and maybe even your margins, but instead of
figuring this out in mid-flight, we’re gonna build a runway for you in the middle
of the ocean, let’s see what you can do.”
When the program was
announced we didn’t give it much thought because our first instinct is always to
turn inward, toward the team, our group of advisors, never to the
government.
But we’re a midsized
company. We’re not too big to fail. We’re
too important to fail.
Too important to our
employees. Too important to their
families, to their children and their parents and their mortgage-holders and
their insurance agents and their car leaseholders and their pets and their co-workers
and our office leaseholders and our health insurance company and the hundreds
of partners, customers and vendors who rely on the protection of this paycheck,
from us.
This plan was
conceived to help small companies and their employees. We’ve been given the space, now it’s up to us
to get back in the air and soar.
