Navigating Economic Downturns as a Business Owner

If you're like us, and prepping for a potential downturn as an operator or business owner — this one's for you. A few years ago, our team was running a traveltech company when COVID hit. In about a week, we watched 40% of our revenue disappear. Our pipeline was gone, we had to let people go, and every call we got on felt like it could be the one where everything fell apart. We got some things right. We got a lot of things wrong. And we learned more about what it actually means to run a business in those 18 months than in everything that came before. This time period doesn't feel as aggressively pessimistic as it did in 2020, but turbulent markets are never a good thing. This Operator Edu session is us opening the playbook from that period — the real one, not the cleaned-up version. We'll walk through how we led when we didn't have answers, where we cut and where we held the line, how we talked to our team honestly without sending everyone into a panic, and how we are applying these learnings to our current portfolio companies. As always, SMB Angels (www.smbangels.com) endeavors to share relevant insights from our operating experience. Feel free to subscribe to the newsletter.