We Don't Always Get It Right. We Always Make It Right.
As a self-capitalized, youngin’ founded, scrappy startup, we often make mistakes. Sometimes, we make small mistakes that we can correct with scotch tape (or just scotch?). Other times, we make catastrophic mistakes that have impacts on our team and family. Interestingly, we’ve never made a mistake when it comes to protecting a community - I’m not saying it won’t happen, but I’m saying in a dozen years, it hasn’t happened.
In response to Coronavirus, on March 20th, 2020, a day that I hope I’ll never forget, we had to break the news to almost 100 folks on our team that their jobs were not secure from that day forward. The week prior, I declared bankruptcy in hopes that pausing our debt would provide us enough relief to make it through Coronavirus in one piece. I was wrong.
Our lawyers indicated there were laws about how to lay folks off, and I said “law or no law, we’re out of money. We can’t keep them if we can’t pay them”. I really want to go on about how it was the worst day of my life, but that wouldn’t be right. The reality is it was the worst day in many of their lives. In the midst of a global pandemic, the worst economy the team has ever been a part of and the first quarantine any of us can remember experiencing, I had told them that not only do they have to stay home (President’s orders, not mine), but they don’t have the opportunity to take their minds off of the circumstance through work, nor do they have an income to ensure they and their families can buy the critical essentials, toilet paper and all. I apologized from the deepest place in my heart, but it didn’t make it okay, it didn’t make it right.
Those who know me, know that I can see the light in anything. My greatest accomplishment is finding the good outcomes in the worst possible situations - personally; abandonment; adoption; death; great loss; miscarriage. Professionally; active shooter events; pandemics; earthquakes; wildfires; tsunamis; hurricanes; tornadoes; death. I have found a positive solution in each of these scenarios and somehow, I’ve found a way to share that with others, build enthusiasm for that outcome and reach it.
In this particular event, I was fairly sure that I had met my match. That is until almost 30 days later after a few good cries, a lot of bad scotch, and some unfortunately timed Netflix series - TigerKing, etc.
Today, I’m sharing a new path forward - a positive outcome from what I have done to the team that was here in March, 2020. A shining light that I’m calling on our team to look forward to. I hope I’m not the only small business owner who is heading in this direction (I do wish only one of us had to suffer so greatly to get here, though).
We’re building a fund for employee health, safety and wellness. The fund will include:
60 Days of payroll
1/2 of each employee’s salary
The purpose of this fund will be to ensure that the next time this happens — regardless of the cause — we can make it right. Rather than distributing the news that jobs are abandoned without notice, we can guarantee jobs for a period of time and go further to provide our own version of a stimulus that in this case would have been so incredibly valuable for each of our team members.
As a startup founder, I give myself — and my team — permission to fail. I cherish that permission and fail regularly. That said, I also believe that as a startup that intends to stick with it, we have an obligation to correct things, sometimes equally substantially when they go wrong. I hope this fund, what it stands for, and the future capacity it will create causes us to be able to make it right.
My team has heard me say this time and time again, but it’s time I say it more publicly: We don’t always have to get it right, but we do always have to make it right.
