How are you preparing for COVID-19? What actions are you taking?

March 13, 2020

by an investor from Western Washington University in Key West, FL 33040, USA

Operators: How are you preparing for the Coronavirus? What actions have you taken? What are you doing to help slow the spread of the virus?

Personally, I have been stocking up on essential supplies and inventory for two weeks now. I am expecting/worried about potential supply chain disruptions when everyone starts to get sick. Luckily, I was stock piling cash for some planned investments and am now in the very fortunate position to have very strong liquidity heading into this crisis.

However, I'm starting to think more about my moral duty as a business leader - both to my employees and to my community. While there are currently no known cases here, and most people aren't taking it very seriously (yet), given the amount of tourist traffic I find it hard to imagine it's not already here. I'm starting to think about what sort of preemptive measures we can take to help slow the inevitable spread within our community. Whether that's shutting down or something else. However, I'm afraid of how my customers (who all expect and pay for weekly service) will take it, how my employees (hourly laborers) will handle it, how I can help take care of my employees during this time, etc. Is anyone else thinking about preemptive measures? How are you planning to take care of your employees if you're mandated to shut down?

Anyways, I thought it might be helpful to share ideas and planning strategies during this very uncertain time... Would love to hear what others are doing to prepare.

Reply by a lender
from California State University, Sacramento in Seattle, WA, USA

Decided to take the time to comment. As you can imagine the last two weeks, with the last week in spectacular fashion, have us quite busy to say the least. Speaking from the Live Oak Bank lense, today we're still getting new loans approved and closing loans (Conventional and SBA). But as you can imagine a lot of our day/efforts now are helping our existing business borrowers navigate these uncertain times and figure out bank lending/servicing (and where applicable SBA) resources available to best help our clients survive this immediate shock and the potential longer term impacts. Day by day, client by client. I have provided the link below to the SBA Disaster Relief website for existing business owners. It's an SBA direct lending program. https://www.sba.gov/funding-programs/disaster-assistance. Pass along to any business owners that you know. The Searchfund ecosystem from the searchers to the CEOs to the investors to the niche professionals/service providers appear to me to be trying to balance 'being open for business' and being good citizens and leaders. I'm honored to be part of this amazing community. I've been lending for 33 years + and this is all new. Speaking for myself, I'm going to try my best to rise to the challenge with as much humility, humanity as possible. Let's put all our smarts and leadership to the test because I know we can do this,even if on most days it's going to be really tough out there. BE safe out there and look out for one another. redacted if we can be of help.

Reply by a searcher
from Pepperdine University in Baton Rouge, LA, USA

Luckily Ohio is used to severe weather leading to potential business interruptions. 100% of our staff has work from home capability and we immediately pulled the trigger for voluntary work from home (WFH) once local transmission was confirmed. We use tools like slack, Jaam, Jira, Asana, Genesys, Dropbox, and employee laptops to facilitate this flexibility. Then, as soon as schools closed, we made sure to communicate WFH time lines so no one would worry about child care concerns from potentially being called back to work. We communicate with daily updates and made a website so employees can check in anytime. Management has a standing call so we can confirm news and coordinate actions. Some people are just scared so we’re taking great care to communicate in relation to emotional needs and set up a hardship line to HR just in case.

We view it as our moral responsibility to do our part to flatten the bell curve on the infection rate (through WFH) so that the capacity of the medical system is not exhausted should the bell curve peak early on. Rationing health care would be a worse case and horrible outcome. In general, people struggle to conceptually grasp an exponential curve and that it can go from 50% to 100% in the same time it took to go from 1% to 2%. Taking action early has the most impact but it can also feel like you’re overacting. But hey, leadership often feels like that, it’s our job to stare into the abyss and make tough calls on the best and often partial information we have at the time.

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