BONUS: Thriving on Chaos: How To Lead Your Ecommerce Business During Uncertain Times

What's up everybody? Welcome to another episode of The Ecommerce Influence Podcast, my name is Austin Brawner and today I have a very special episode for you guys. This episode today is going to be a bonus episode and it's timely. We've had a lot of changes in the last couple of weeks, everybody is talking about the same thing.

One of the few times when the whole world is actually working on the same problem which is containing this Coronavirus. And so I decided today what I wanted to do is, normally every single month I have a live training, private training for members of my community, the Coalition, and also Brand Guild members.

And normally it's just for members only, but this month since we've had so many changes and the topic that I focused on this month for them was really, really relevant, which is how to lead your eCommerce business during uncertain times, I want to release it to everybody. So what I've done today is, you're going to have the podcast recording of the live training that I did for my members only.

So the title is Thriving on Chaos: How to Lead Your ECommerce Business During Uncertain Times. And it's about 40 minutes and it walks through things you should be thinking about right now if you haven't thought about them already. And also ultimately what to do if ... Everyone is in different positions here, some people, their businesses have grown. Some people, their businesses have stayed the same, and some people, their businesses have dropped. I've talked to people whose business has dropped as much as 80%. So today I cover really what you should be thinking about in all of those scenarios.

And yeah, so I wanted to release this for you, I hope you guys enjoy it, I hope you get some value out of it and I would love to hear back from you guys if you do find value. The best thing you could do is to share it with a friend who might be going through the same thing. We're all in this together right now. It's a really interesting time. We will definitely, it's a time to journal because we're not going to forget this time.

So without any more discussion, I'd like to start the presentation. I am really excited, I've been working all week on this really. I said, I want to be a resource, I want to do a lot of research this week and try to figure out the best way to tackle this and be here for everybody as really this community is kind of coming together and we're seeing, fortunately in the eCommerce community, there's a lot of people that are doing okay and others that are doing really well.

There's also people that are really impacted right now by this virus. So I wanted to be a resource. I wanted to bring something together and bring some value. Today, this presentation is for leaders of eCommerce businesses and anyone supporting their clients. So that means business owners, marketers, freelancers, consultants, agency owners.

If you're an eCommerce entrepreneur or you support them, what I'm going to be talking about is for you. And in the next, I would say 30 to 45 minutes, this is what we're going to talk about. First, how to lead, and not manage your way through this crisis and come out stronger on the other side. We're going to talk about the three things that really I'm thinking about and I think leaders should be thinking about right now, and some simple actions you can take to inspire your team.

We'll be talking about how to think about cash management during this crisis and really all crisises and why you can use this and must use this as an opportunity to build a rock solid financial future for your business. I'm going to talk about why playing offense is going to become a lot more important than playing defense in the next coming months and how to do that, we should be thinking about. And talk about how to react if your business hasn't been impacted by the Coronavirus and how you can ethically use this to your advantage. And it's an interesting thing because there are a lot of businesses I've talked to, or at least four or five that are booming and they're trying to figure out what to do.

We're going to talk about how to bring your team together during uncertain times and build a resilient remote culture, which is quite a bit different than being in person. Talk about what to do when you're advertising that has been working well just doesn't work anymore. I also talk about how to turn this time of uncertainty into a time of abundance and opportunity for your business without exploiting anyone. So my promise to you today is that you will leave this training with a clear plan to lead your business through this crisis and be better prepared for uncertainty in the future. Here are some of the expectations for today.

Now, none of us are really certain about anything right now, there's a lot of stuff going on that has really been unprecedented in our life. And so we're all going through struggles with everyone else. So we're all in this together and a lot of what I'm talking about are predictions and the ways that I'm thinking about it. Number two, you really must believe that you can grow your business without taking advantage of people. I think that this is really, really important.

You can still grow your business during this time and do it while serving your customers, serving your clients and not taking advantage of people. I'm fully committed to being ethical and everything I talk about today about continuing to grow and thrive during a chaotic time is not going to be about taking advantage of people or taking advantage of unethical opportunities, it's all going to be focused on ethical growth.

And the last thing, which is really, really important, just because the world is going through a crisis and very likely into a recession, it does not mean that your business and that you have to go through it, especially the recession part. We're all going to be in this together through this crisis, but any crisis and any recession, you don't have to participate in it, you can build a business and focus on things that allow you to thrive throughout it.

So as you're following along, if you have any questions, pop them in the Q&A tab, and I'm definitely going go through and have a bunch of time for Q&A.

So there's three things that you should focus on right now. It's number one, taking care of yourself, your family and your employees is by far and away number one. Number two, making sure you don't run out of cash. Really, really, really important, that's number two. Number three, make sure to be open to the opportunities that will come your way. And I'm emphasizing this, they will come your way through this time.

I see the biggest problem right now is that there's leadership is lacking from the top down in the United States and across most of the world, but my vantage point is in the United States, leadership is lacking. There are not clear things, clear guidelines about what you should be doing, and there's not really inspiring leadership anywhere for people to be following right now.

I think the answer is, it's your job to be the leader in your community and within your business, within your family. And that starts really with taking care of yourself, putting the oxygen mask on first. Super, super important. And this is a really stressful time for everyone. Self care is really, really important. Stress is an issue right now, I feel it. You look at the news, you look at Twitter, you look anywhere and there's a lot of stuff going on that, it's pessimistic, it's scary, makes everyone nervous.

And for me I know that most importantly it's important to take care of myself before I take care of other people. And that means continuing for me, continuing to exercise. I've been putting in a home gym, all that means is a yoga mat and some kettlebells right now to try to do something, going on long walks, trying to limit my intake of news.

Whatever you know works for you, even if life is disrupted, make sure first and foremost that you are doing those things, it doesn't matter. It starts above all things, taking care of yourself is the most important thing right now. With that, making sure you have a really good work from home setup and have some time to think. It doesn't need to be as good as Jeff Sheldon's desk here.

This is Jeff, Jeff has been a client and a friend for a long time, he's got the most incredible desk ever. This is work from home setup. It doesn't have to be like this, but it should be ... Take some time right now if you're transitioning to working from home to spend time getting the things that you need, external monitor, put it in a closet or a bedroom, wherever you need to be to have some time to think. It's really, really important.

Number two, take care of your family before all these things, everything else that we're talking about the business doesn't matter until you take care of yourself and your family. The three questions I'm asking is everyone safe? First and foremost. Does everyone have care? I've been working with my parents too and advise them on ways to protect my grandparents. They both live alone and we probably all feel this way right now. They need some assistance.

And so we've implemented a hand washing protocol for the caretakers that are helping them told my grandfather I'd help order Amazon from him because he's nervous. He's over 80 isn't know exactly, he doesn't feel comfortable going outside to down to the store.

And we're going around this week and we're talking to our neighbors and just making sure that the elderly neighbors around us have enough food. So that's the thing that we're taking care of and that we're working on. Last one is, do you have enough food? It's seemingly not slowing down and if you're not in lockdown yet most likely will be at some point soon.

So we got two weeks of food at home and I feel pretty prepared to just stay and work from here. I got a text group with close friends who are all supporting each other right now. If we were going to ask something, we can always go help each other out. So that's been helpful.

Next up is taking care of your employees. Uncertainty is at an all time high right now. I don't remember a time that there's been as much uncertainty is right now. And because of that, communication is absolutely so important. And being transparent we see when I say is a breakdown in leadership, there is poor leadership communicating with us right now telling us what and when you look at some of the messaging we're getting, it doesn't seem clear about what's going on and messages has been changing.

So first and foremost, taking care of your employees being very clear about what's happening. Most important safety if you haven't done this yet, get every nonessential person working from home as soon as possible.

Make sure they're set up to succeed with work from home materials. This is a big deal. If you have been working in person and then you switched to a remote culture, it takes some time and there's some learning process that goes through that. Couple of things to make sure everybody's got desk external monitor, external keyboard, mouse, all of these things are really, really helpful to improve and boost productivity.

And with that make sure to check in that they have a productive setup and mentally are feeling good about the transition. I always say, "Hey, once you get your desk set up, send a picture." That way you can kind of get a good feeling if somebody's got a good setup. If they're moving from an office to like we're working from the kitchen table and their kids are at home, it's not going to be a good setup for anyone.

If you have people working in the warehouse, make sure you have a plan for keeping them safe. Now I think the best way to do this is to appoint someone to be the leader of this. My dad works in television production and so the way that they ... And everybody's close working close together in a kind of a truck where they do a lot of video editing and that sort of thing.

What they did is they appointed one engineer to be the person who is responsible for disinfecting, cleaning everything up and enforcing hand-washing protocol. I think that's the best foot to go about it. If you've got people working that are essential to the business, make sure one person is appointed the leader and they're responsible for disinfecting, keeping things clean and going from there so that you can continue running business and everybody feels comfortable with that.

Transparency number two. After you talk about safety, I think the most important thing is to be really clear about how this is going to impact the business. And it may be early on and you may not know exactly how it's going to impact the business, but being clear that you're thinking about that and that it's something that's on your radar and that you address it head on.

Pessimism is infectious you got to address it and there are probably people on your team that might be afraid they're going to lose their job like today. I actually talked to one of my founder friends and he said they're doing well. They're fine, but there was three people that literally thought they were going to lose their job today because there's been so many layoffs happening. So address it and be clear about what's happening because you don't want stories being brought up in people's heads about what's going to happen.

So I always say, make sure you are transparent about what might happen. If you're in a good place, share that. If you're not in a good place, don't try to hide that because people are very smart and can pick up on if you're telling everybody that, "Oh, things are going to be okay." And you're secretly quite scared about what's going to happen because your sales have dropped.

It's much better to be transparent and get people on the same page. And remember the way that you think about your priorities yourself, your family work and your employees, it's going to be the same. Everybody's got their first priority right now is going to be themselves, their family and work. So make sure you really address things with empathy because this is a really bizarre time and I think everybody's feeling that there's so much uncertainty and you never know what really people's circumstances are.

If they've got loved ones that are sick or elderly people that they're really worried about just make sure to have empathy right now it goes a long way. And the last thing I'd say is just talk about how long you might have before changes need to be made. And we're going to go into this a lot today, but if you don't know how long you have, that's fine. We're going to go and do it. But if you do have an idea like how long you can run without sales or without the current drop in sales, talk about that to give people a picture of how long you guys have.

A couple of things we've done. We postponed upcoming profit summit events until September. We are continuing remote work. It's been easy for us because we already are a remote company. Also canceled all travel until June.

But there hasn't been a lot of changes for us except postponing all events and speaking events and that sort of thing. If you are transitioning to work from home, we have an incredible work from home training. January 2020 it's in the Coalition talks about our process for optimizing a team and running it remotely.

So we have a full like work for a sprint process for remote work, for getting things done in two weeks, sprints. It's really, really effective. We've been doing this for like seven years. So if you have it, if you're transitioning to work from home, I highly recommend in the coalition going to the training it's really, really helpful.

So big problem right now if sales are down, you may run out of cash. So the answer right now is to spend your time creating a plan that is the most important thing. And to paraphrase somebody else that I was reading, this weak, "Cash for your business is like oxygen." It's a guy named Keith Cunningham wrote an email this week that was inspiring to me. You rarely think about it until it cuts off and then it becomes your highest priority.

The biggest mistake people make is waiting too long to figure out how much cash or think oxygen you've got left and you want to go deep into this as soon as possible because once you spend cash, it's not coming back, it's gone. So if you're having any issues right now, you got to go in and focus on painting a clear picture of where you are.

Now let's go into this, this is going to be kind of going to fund some fundamentals, but regardless of your business, you always want to have a minimum of three to four months full expenses in the bank. Now, some of you might not be here, right? You might not have that, and that's why you're on here trying to figure out what to do and that's okay. We're going to go through a plan of this, but going forward, right?

Yeah I've learned this the hard way. I've been through layoffs before. It doesn't feel good. So I always keep a minimum of three to four months full expenses that means that we could have zero sales. I could run the business for three months without any changes. I sleep a lot better at night. It allows me to operate during times of uncertainty with a longterm plan.

And if your business is cyclical, you need to expand that I would say up to even 12 months. If you have a very cyclical business, it needs to be way more than three to four months. For us, we are standard month in and month out recurring. We know pretty much how much money we're going to make the next month before we go into it. That's why we keep three to four months. But if you're a cyclical, I would keep up to 12 months in the business. And if you're not there, we're going to go into what to do now because some of you might not be there.

So the first thing to do right now if you're struggling is to create a clear picture of your cash situation. Now, how do you actually do that? I'm going to go through this. I'm going to talk about forecasting and what you can do.

So first things first, you got to determine your current cash balance, so where is your money, how much do you actually have. That's relatively quick. Determine your amount of accounts receivable that you can actually collect quickly or is it overdue. You want to figure out how much you've got, how much is going to be coming in, if you've got accounts receivable.

You want to project cash flow from operations, assuming that whatever the current environment you have remains the way that it is for three to four months. So if you look at, let's say you're down 30%, well then let's project with 30% down for the next three to four months and see what that's going to happen. Now if you're down 30%, you're in a lot better position than somebody down 80%. And that's not in the travel or event space, you could be down easily, 80, 90% right now.

So if you're down 30% or 15%, think of that as a blessing. Then you want to project your cash burn rate, that means total expenses, what I'm talking about, how much total expenses on a monthly basis you actually spent. Then break them into two different things, variable versus fixed expenses. Variable, you've got the opportunity to change, fixed, you really don't. Look at some of your payments, so whether you've got loans or landlords or vendors and see if you can extend or delay any of those.

Next step, you want to identify sources and amounts of additional financing that are available. And this can either be from the line of credit, additional banks. I'm going to talk about financing a little bit more. We've got to get resource in the coalition as well. We've been pulling together all these different resources for how you can get financing during this time, how consider your personal funds available. And then also any money, friends and family that you could raise.

After you do that, look for any unused assets that could be liquidated. You may have, I mean most, if you're in our space, you probably don't have a ton of like hard assets but technology, stuff like that, you might be able to liquidate for cash. I would look at your personal burn rate, figure out what you're doing monthly and see what can be curtailed to preserve cash for the business.

So if you take a small salary cut, that's a great place to start. Trim the fat from some of your expenses, like that goes without saying. And again, if you're not down with sales, you don't need to do this. It just really comes out, all we're trying to do here is figure out, get a picture of what things are going to look like.

If you've got growth plans and you're down or expenditures you know you're going to be going into, see if you can delay them. And again, that just happened for us. We had these events that we are about to announce and move forward with promoting. We just said we're going to delay because of the timeframe. I think we were able to negotiate, and I think it only costs us like $300 to reschedule.

When you're done with that, make a summary of all the changes you're going to have to make and how they're going to result, what's going to happen for your business over the next three to four months. Just kind of make a plan and then create a communication plan with your team about how that impacts them and what that looks like.

What I like to do is forecast the next three to six. And back to this communication plan, it's really, really important that you're clear and you are really trustworthy and you share what's actually going on and give a clear best case, worst case, average case about what could happen.

So with that forecast, within this, you want to forecast the next three to six months and we have a really tremendous forecasting tool again in the coalition. And I'm going to link to all of this underneath the training. There's a forecasting tool you can put in the upcoming year and adjust your forecast. And so you can figure out what's actually going to happen when you start doing projections based on some of the changes that have happened.

So that will be linked. And we have a training about forecasting as well, super helpful to make that easy. If you're not in this, you can also, there's a cash flow tool in Excel, you can search for like small business cash flow and that'll come up as well, super helpful. But the reality is if you can't make it for a few months, you're going to need to drastically change the way you're thinking about things.

So as you do this and you go through this, really going to take your pause and ask yourself the question, do you have a problem? Investigate to see if anything's broken, if nothing's messed up, and I have a lot of clients like this that nothing's really broken, don't mess the things, just keep things rolling.

They're really three options. Sales are up, that's fantastic. If your sales are up that's ... If you're in the health space, in the food space, this is huge, you can continue what you're doing, and I would say explore goodwill opportunities to help out others who are less fortunate. I've got clients who are struggling to keep things on the shelves and it's just been a supply chain issue at this point.

And that is, they have a lot of opportunities and they also have a lot of goodwill opportunities, and I'll talk about that a little bit later about how you can dive into this.

For some of you, sales are going to be the same. Now, if you're not impacted by this, keep things going. I got an email earlier this week and they're like, what do you think, we're trying to hire a marketing person, but we don't want to put the post up right now because we're afraid that of the optics.

In my opinion, the best thing you can do is have empathy and lead the way and continuing to do business the way you're currently doing business. If you're hiring, there's going be a lot of people out of work. I looked at joblessness numbers and there's a lot of people filing for unemployment.

The best thing you can do is continue to grow your business and continue to hire people and help other people who have lost their jobs. So please continue to do business. Have empathy and recognize this is one time the entire world is focused on one thing, and so reflect that in your marketing, reflect that in your hiring.

Now, if sales are down and if you're here on this webinar, it's possible, it's because your sales are down, I believe you need to play defense initially and then move to offense as quickly as possible once you figure out how you're actually doing and you've made the changes you need to make.

I think it's really, really important because I don't think enough people are offensive minded and a lot of people right now are rolling over and capitulating thinking, "Oh, it's going to be so bad."

It doesn't have to be. You can make changes. You have a competent team, you are a competent entrepreneur. You can do so much more than you even feel capable of. And that's why I think it's important to move.

You start by playing defense and then you switch to offense. What do I mean by playing defense?

What I mean is reduce costs. So if you figure out from this, from your analysis that you need to reduce costs, you got to execute on it. If you say, well, we need to cut costs by 20%, your number one priority as a leader is to do that. And first step, pause any advertising that's not ROI positive in 30 days.

Now, some of you guys are killing it right now, like I have clients that have the best, they're getting CPAs of $3 and other people are having the worst weeks in years. Regardless, it's a really good time to look at what's actually moving the needle. If you're not able to make money right now, it's probably the market. It's probably not ... A lot of you guys have had advertising that's worked over and over again, prospecting is really hard right now for non-essential items.

If you're selling some sort of a luxury good, it's very challenging and I think it's important to remember that it may just be the fact that the market has changed and you may be able to turn it back on after a little while, but for the time being, pause anything that's not ROI positive.

You can call your landlord, if you do have a landlord, and ask for a rent abatement. What does that mean? That means, just basically a suspension or a delay of payments for a certain period of time. If you're getting killed, focus on that. That's really important thing that you can do, much easier for them to negotiate with you than have you have to leave and find somebody new right now. And you can even say, Hey, let's push it, I'll push back three payments and extend our lease or something like that for three more months. What do we need to do? Just try to work with them.

I'd also say, reduce any unnecessary costs. Look at your account, see if you can downgrade to maybe a more basic plan on certain things you might not be using and look at the essentials. Again, like the essentials are typically going to be like email. Email is a huge driver when it's low cost.

Last thing, take a salary cut if necessary. I talked about this a little bit earlier, but if you need to, take a salary cut to keep things rolling. Other ways to play defense, it's secure financing. There are plenty of options right now. A lot of of really cheap money, so there's SBA loans. We've got a whole section in the Coalition, like I said, outlining all the financing options that we found, SBA loans. The Amex business is allowing people to push back payments for two months without any interest. There's Disaster Relief Loans. Brex is doing something interesting.

So if you've got ... We're going to have links in here below to all the financing options, and there's a lot out there. I'm seeing people get really, really cheap, cheap money to be able to keep things going. Again, like a lot of good businesses are going to get hit and there's no reason why they can't just get alone and keep moving forward.

So other options, if you're running an inventory, now is the time to find other suppliers because we don't know what's going to happen. Like if your supplier is working right now, there's a good chance that in the future they'll be wiped out for a while. So finding secondary suppliers in other countries that aren't facing this thing at the exact same time is really, really important. If you know your suppliers in Vietnam are cranking along, expect them to have trouble in the future. And so arbitrage and having multiple suppliers in multiple countries is super, super important.

That's going to be the difference for some businesses, for people to be able to keep things going. If you had China exposure and then you had also luxury, good exposure back to back, you're getting hit really hard. Once you've done that move to playing offense. I think this is the most exciting thing for me right now. And something that we're really focused on.

Rule number one right now is you've got to be open to the new opportunities that will come your way. They will come your way 100% they're going to come your way and it's going to be exciting right now it's very pessimistic. Great opportunities are coming your way.

And my goal for myself right now is to start each day calm with an open mind to new opportunities that's what I'm focusing on. I think it's a great way. It's free of some of the news free of some of the doubt. Start each day, calm with an open mind to the new opportunities that will be coming your way.

This is something that hasn't happened before in our lifetime, but every crisis ends and there's new opportunities that come out of it. So there's opportunities right now to increase revenue. You can roll out innovative products that will continue to meet the demands that people have right now.

Now I've already been super inspired by what's been happening. So this company, Snack Nation, they rolled out in a week. So they've got a company that they send snack products to offices. So when they realized people were going remote, they rolled out Snack Nation to remote. So you can boost morale and energy with delicious snacks and coffee sent directly to your employees really, really cool. Right?

Innovation is super inspiring and I've seen this, I've seen Adobe rolled out creative cloud to a bunch of college students. Give Local so a friend Justin started this company called Give Local, which is, you can put gift cards to local businesses and it's really easy in Austin. All these restaurants are here. You can go in there and they're not making any money, but it's something that's been inspired this quickly by innovative people.

I've seen anti Coronavirus t-shirts. Instead of fretting about our postponed events, we created this webinar. We said, "Hey, we got to be a resource." I've decided to dedicate really the next few months and however long it takes to helping everyone here get out of this stronger and better off. That's my goal. And for a lot of you, this is going to be a place that you can really dive into and meet demand for all the things that people are still doing.

It's a little bit weird, but things are going to turn back on once this is over and, but some things will still be the same. So anything from home offices work from to support work from home people, all of these types of things are really great opportunities.

Besides that, focusing on retention efforts when sales are down. If your business has been growing, it can be hard to focus on standard operating procedures and retention efforts. There's never been a better time to work on automated emails, SMS and standard operating procedures. I believe this wholeheartedly.

When you're super busy it's hard to dive in and go through the nitty gritty, but you can take this time if your sales are down a little bit and make sure that you're raising up the floor, meaning that the minimum sales are increased because you've gone through our email intensive, you've gone through our growth guide, email it, growth guide in the Coalition and you're implementing all these things. So that when sales ramp back up, you've got automated emails and SMS messaging.

Next month we're doing a training with Mark Arruda. He sells $100K a month in sales from SMS. Implementing this stuff while sales are down is the best thing that you can do and it's going to help you if think longterm, right? Like rather than getting freaked out about what's going on right now, build for the future so when the future comes, you can better take advantage of the sales that will be there.

That's what I'm focusing on and those are the two things that I'm trying to do right now. So if your business is continuing to boom, you have some opportunities, some goodwill activities. Now this is what I've been thinking. If you're doing really well, there's an opportunity to do even better and give back at the same time. There's some really cool examples out there.

Sweetgreen is offering free salads to healthcare professionals and UberEATS is delivering them for free. Great, great ideas, great for people, great for publicity. I'll give you some examples. If you sell cereal, you can donate meals to kids that are out of school that typically rely on the school lunch program. If you are in the health space, right? If you're in the clothing, like workout clothing space, right? You might be doing decently well right now because I'm not sure, maybe things are down.

It's always hard to tell if people are like buying stuff for work, from like working out at home. Like I did purchase a bunch of stuff to work out at home. So but if you're doing well in that space, find a cause, donate to it and promote it to your audience. Because right now there's going to be a lot of people that want to help and don't know what to do.

So you can take the lead and help them, help you make a difference. I think it's really, really important. And doing it without focusing on the publicity, but with that publicity will come. And the reality is right now, eventually this is going to pass. We just don't know when and that's the biggest challenge.

Already we've seen a lot of positive news coming out of the other countries and that's you look at China, South Korea, Japan, and they're about a month ahead of us, China is, and they're seemingly doing quite well.

So the big thing I'm thinking about right now is that the scary thing is we don't know when it's going to pass. So you've got to think longterm. But you got to be prepared for the worst and expect the best. I expect the next two months to be kind of crazy and then things to roll back pretty close maybe not entirely to normal, but close, right?

Like we've suppliers that are back to work in China and they're sending inspirational messages. Things are going pretty well over there and we got to hope and expect that they're going to be that way here. Couple of things that you can think about, e-Commerce is going to be in a much better position than it was before.

I believe this, that longterm, if you're an e-Commerce entrepreneur, you're in the best business you can be right now. Look at what people are doing, right? What are people are doing? What do you plan to do because of the Coronavirus? Well the third highest answer was shift shopping from physical stores to online.

This is a great time and it's going to continue to force those habits for people who are older, they're going to be purchasing more from online. So longterm, I'm like extremely bullish. The main thing is getting through the time right now and have enough cash to whether it so that you can get out on the other side. You don't want to be one of the businesses that are going to go under.

Businesses are going to go under. I heard already from two clients this week that two competitors are there is we're going under now they are looking at this and they're like, wow, this actually is big for them. If they can keep things going and they're going to, because they're both really solid companies and solid entrepreneurs, they're going to come out in the other side with less competition doing really, really well.

Warren Buffett says "You never know who's swimming naked until the tide goes out." And it is true. A business went out of it. One of my clients competitors without a business a week after this. So they must've been in so much debt, they couldn't handle it and you're going to see this over and over and over again. The number of layoffs right now are outrageous. So I'm thinking longterm right now.

My thought process is 100% longterm made sure that we're good short term. And now I'm thinking offensively, longterm. I've been spending some time each day as the market's going down investing I figured there's no way to like pick the bottom, but I'm maxing out I risk and working on that.

And got to continue to do that going forward. Right? Nothing is changing we've seen these cycles happen before. This is a bizarre way to go into it, but these cycles have happened before and you always come out on the other side better off. So I'm thinking longterm, but with that, nobody really knows what's going to happen right now.

We're all just trying our best and there's an incredible opportunity for true leaders to step up. And I encourage that to be you. I encourage you to be that person. I think this is an incredible time to be an entrepreneur. I really do times of uncertainty, unveil opportunities to people who are open to them. And I mean, like I said, I've already seen some on the most innovative clients coming up with ways to solve problems that we're facing right now.

And if you are doing that, if you are continuing to provide value and solving issues and solving problems, business and life will go back to business as usual and you will be better off for it. This crisis is going to separate the people who are truly entrepreneurs and the ones who are not built for it.

Because it's been pretty darn easy the last few years and now it's going to be a little more challenging. But if you go through and you look and open yourself up to the opportunities, they are going to come your way, it's going to be exciting. Keep the cash in your account and keep moving forward.

Next month's training, I'm excited about it. It's called How to Sell $100K+ per Month with SMS marketing. I talked about Mark, Mark Arruda he runs Constantly Very Gear. He's currently selling over $100K per month SMS. He's driving more revenue than email and he's got really three pillars that he uses for SMS. He's going to be sharing with us.

It's going to be great to be April 14th same time a fantastic training. Mark is a super sharp guy and I'm really, really excited for what he's going to share with us. Super practical stuff. Truly actually like what he's implemented in his own business. So that's, it hope you guys enjoyed this.

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