PPP is a chance to Pause, Plan and Pivot

 

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.