Hi.
Welcome to The Founder’s Mind! I’m your host Adam. Thanks for checking out the show and following along.
Welcome to The Founder’s Mind! I’m your host Adam. Thanks for checking out the show and following along.
Full Episode Notes Available Here
Adam [00:00:00] You're on The Founders Mind and we're talking to Scott Case, who is not only the founder and CEO of a company Upside Business Travel. We're going to talk about the impact that he's navigating given the times. He's also the CEO and co-founder of the company that sponsors the show.
Adam [00:00:17] So a lot of gratitude for Upside in general, but also in how you've been communicating to the world about what's going on.
Adam [00:00:27] The data you're putting out there, the messaging you're putting out there. So thank you for taking time during this hectic, crazy, new, rapidly evolving world.
Scott Case [00:00:41] Yeah, I'm happy to do it.
Scott Case [00:00:46] I know how hard this is for for any founder and I know how hard it is for first time founders without the chaos. You know, I often talk about startups being roller coasters in the dark, going on Space Mountain, you know, brief flashes of insight and clarity followed by plunging depths of darkness. And this is a little bit like that same roller coaster of being on a giant platform in the Gulf of Mexico during a hurricane. It's endless. Right. So the whole thing's rotating around. You're in the dark and the things you get brief insights and and then you get new information at such a high rate, you know, that you have to process it all and make decisions around it quickly. And you're planning cycle has gotten incredibly short. You know, you can't think quarter to quarter anymore. You've got to be thinking. Last week, I got to tell you, it was like four hours, six hours planning cycles. I couldn't manage anything longer than that. Felt like this weekend I started to get some clarity. You could see a whole week ahead. And I was like, oh, shit. I could see a whole week. So much happier this week, I was like wow! I got a whole week in front of me, even though I don't know how it's all going to play out. You've got to have a week. You know, I detected early on that this was going to be an issue. That's why some of the earliest posts I put out on LinkedIn. Like you got to assume that you're going to have a 50 percent or more reduction in your revenue. So what are you gonna do about that? And I was surprised a lot of the responses I got were like, oh, shit, I gotta be thinking about that. Yeah, you do! But if you're a first time founder, you're looking at this in your headspace. It's like, well, how bad could this be and what might happen? And I'm going no, you don't understand. When this goes, it's going. I was obviously in the game when the dot com meltdown happened. And you saw companies folding every three days, layoffs every two or three days. There was a website called Fucked Company. And instead of Fast Company it's called Fucked Company, they're still out there. And I think their archives are still available. And what they did was they basically had a post from employees whose companies had failed like that day. And they would they would say what happened. And this was happening like literally every day for weeks on end. I know what that felt like. I could see what's happening there. And that was a very narrow industry piece. This is pervasive across the globe. Everything's connected. And, you know, our data is flawed, which as a startup guy, I'm used to dealing with information that I can't trust. But it's like all of the information is really you can't trust it. You throw out all your forecasts. You know, two weeks ago, I sat with my team. Now, that was almost exactly two weeks ago. And I just thought.
Adam [00:03:37] Let's talk about dates. Like, what date is that?
Scott Case [00:03:40] It would have been, we shut down on the 13th. So fourteen, fifteen sixteenth of of March. I I sat with my team and I said, I need you guys to think about the forward going scenarios with two constraints. There is zero business travel for the next six months. And we have a 12 to 18 months recession, that's significant. Now I would have thought well shit, those boundaries have got to be like as bad as it could be right? Like let's start there. And I remember some of the conversation are like, you really think it's gonna be that bad? And I'm like, yeah, I think it's gonna be that bad. And so they went and they created some scenarios around it. And I said, all right, look, let's actually look at the whole picture of this. What happens to the macro economic frame, what happens within our industry, what are our other players do? It was a really powerful exercise that's been very helpful in us thinking through and making decisions day to day. Because we actually wrote down like six or seven pages of what the world could look like under those two constraints. And what it gave us was a picture to say, okay, if that's what it is, then these are the kinds of decisions we need to make right now. We don't need to wait for new information to disrupt us. We can just start, just go with it. That was why even in the run up to that, saying we're going remote. Let's go now before it gets worse and before we're forced to, because at least we can control it on our own. So control the things you can control has been our theme and our message over and over again. We had to put new processes in place almost immediately. So every day we do a five to 15 minute stand up with the entire company on Zoom eight forty five in the morning. It's laughable. I had some people saying to me when I first made that decision to do it like the Thursday before we closed the office, I got feedback from folks like eight forty five in the morning. Like, do you really think we need this? Well, now I've got most the feedback. I think this is so great. I have a target. I can wake up in the morning. I didn't know what that was going to be, but I just knew we needed to eyeball each other at once every day. And as an engineering and technology company, we have stand ups all the time for our team. So this is a giant stand up.
Adam [00:05:58] I mean, I think you brought it up earlier. And I just want to jump in. It's the things that we did when we were in the office. And just as the general we, was designed around a completely different working rhythm.
Adam [00:06:12] Right. People are commuting, people are adjusting to being in the office. People are settling in. You know, people walk by each other in the hall, you know, or they're sitting next to each other at their desks.
Adam [00:06:23] And it is true that there are things that we can do that are Band-Aids or novelties. And you alluded to that earlier. But it is going to require different strategies and different tactics to keep that rhythm, and I think that's such a great, the sort of the change in response from the team. Eight forty five are you sure? Really? Why? To whoa, I need this and this creates a rhythm. And that's something that we've been talking about actually in my family are what are the routines that we're developing in a much more intentional way? You know, I'm self quarantining, social distancing from my parents house. We've had family dinner every night since the 16th of March. I mean, like we're going on 10 days, everyone in the house is at dinner and it's been such a beautiful routine. You know, and I think that this is an insane roller coaster. My sense and feeling and I think you share the same is this is going to get a lot more intense before we generate real clarity. In developing those routines now voluntarily, like your company did, its empowering.
Scott Case [00:07:37] Yes. We're going to have to create all those new routines. And this kind of disruption is multi-dimensional. Most of us get to live our lives where shitty going on at work or something shitty going on in our personal lives. Rarely do those two things collide, but they often do. This is like everything, right? It's not just we are being impacted. Our whole extended families are being impacted. It's not just our business, our partners and all the other businesses we interact with are being impacted. So there's this network effect that's happening that creates a constant level of stress and anxiety that we have to manage too. It's a real medical health challenge and it's it's something we're spending a lot of time on is figuring out how do we shore that up? And what do we do and what mechanisms do we put in place? Because it's not just working remotely that's culturally new. It's working remotely in an environment where your interpersonal social interactions have been basically dropped down to almost nothing. You don't have the kinds of interactions. And as fun as this is to have this ability to see each other, it's not the same thing. You know? Anthropology tells us that we're used to being in groups like close together in person. And there's a reason we get on airplanes to do deals with people is to look them in the eye. Right. We want to meet them, want to shake their hands. We want to interact with them. We've created our humanity as a culture of sort of cultural references that are being massively disrupted right now. And to suggest that it doesn't have a psychological impact on us is to miss a big piece of what's happening in this puzzle. And I don't know what the implications are. Look, I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist, but I've been coaching people for 30 years. You're a professional coach. And this is a whole new territory for us because it's multi-dimensional. It's gonna be a long haul. So a big piece of it is how do we make this new normal, normal? Right. How do we have the routines in place? You know, I mentioned my daughter and her boyfriend are staying with us and they both have jobs. Different companies. They're on Zoom just like we are. They're doing their stuff. And this past weekend, they're like, if you really disrupt this, you got to write down a new daily plan for the week. The wrapper on your business schedule will be there. But, you know, when are you going to get up? When are you going to exercise? When are you going to take a break for lunch? You're going to build that stuff in and you don't have any of the ad hoc interactions. There's nobody wandering by and saying, hey, I'm going to take a walk to Starbucks you want to come with me? That's not happening. Those those light touch interactions. Those that, you know, I'm a high five guy. Like I have five everybody. And the fact that the week before all this got even more real. So maybe three or four weeks to go. So early March, you know, I was like l'll virtually high five you. Like, it was still like I want to do our part here. But, you know, let's see how this plays out.
Adam [00:10:47] Yeah. It wasn't as it wasn't as direct yet.
Scott Case [00:10:51] But I realized how important those social interactions are for me just as an individual person. And I also find it. I mentioned we have these eight forty five, we call them All Upside Daily Edition. So the whole company is on. It's mostly me speaking. I publish a set of of kind of notes for the day, what our priorities are. What's new information we've got. What's going on with the company. We celebrate a little. And then I click end meeting and I'm standing here in my office by myself. You know, at our company, in our business, when we all get together, we start every big meeting with everybody clapping. That's the way we start. There's no clapping on Zoom, right?
Adam [00:11:43] That would be painful.
Scott Case [00:11:47] Even if you did it, it doesn't have the impact. It's like, well, what's the mechanism? You know, today? Today's day 10 of our remote experiment, not unlike yours. And I found a clip of the Count from Sesame Street with the number of the day being 10. And so we open today with a one minute presentation by the Count counting up to 10. But we've got to create new culture and new routines. So I'll turn it back to you. We can talk about business decisions or how other founders have to be thinking about stuff, wherever you want to take this.
Adam [00:12:28] I think one of the big things that's coming up is that we're all learning, that we're all learning a lot and we're all hopefully learning at a rapid rate. And a lot of what you're saying is organizational learning. And in making changes and it's, I always find it so interesting because humans are highly adaptable. That's why we're able to even manage what's happening.
Adam [00:12:52] But we are also very change averse by default. Maybe you're not. Maybe some other entrepreneurs aren't. But like on average, we're pretty change averse. But we're being forced at a global level to deal with change on a daily basis.
Adam [00:13:06] And so all these things, the Count, the stand ups, you know, those are great indicators of leaning into that superpower that we have. I think from a business standpoint, I want to just start here a couple of days ago on Twitter. You posted a video and by far one of my favorite videos coming from any brands, let alone my sponsor and I shared it. It made me feel so proud to be sponsored by Upside where you said, I'm going to tell you something kind of ironic. My entire business relies on business travel and I want you to stay the fuck home. Don't travel. Talk to me about that because there are some businesses that are handling this externally very well. And I would put you in that category. And there are some businesses that are straight up shitting the bed and we don't have to call people out. It's easy to find them.
Scott Case [00:14:00] So I'll play it for the first week, we were all working from home. My wife had a routine of reading off the ridiculous emails she had gotten about how companies that she had done business with were handling the Covid-19 thing, including companies that are primarily purveyors of things like sunglasses or athletic wear. And I think that there's a tone deafness too. It's like, do you know what's going on here? My own take on it. Let me rewind a little bit and I'll come to where you are. So we should talk about resiliency. So I'll put that marker. So going back last week, the week of the 16th, which is ridic-, it's crazy to think that we're early 13. Twelve days into this thing from that standpoint. Last week was all about. Kind of survival mode at the human level. So it was very much inward looking to our people. We need to establish new routines. We need to get to a place where we can operate and support each other and create the support mechanisms for our people to feel safe and supportive with each other, even though there's still enormous uncertainty. And this weekend, I had an opportunity on Saturday. I was able to kind of decompress. I had to keep up with a bunch of things going on from a work standpoint, but I had some space to actually think and reflect. Despite the fact there was chaos going on all around us. And I woke up Sunday feeling much more refreshed. And I started to look at the world, said, OK, I think I can plan for the next week. So I laid out what I thought the next week would look like and what we needed to do as a company. And so I could communicate that to everyone. And that allowed our leadership team as well as the rest of the company to be able to march. And that's usually how we run. We usually set our goals out more than a quarter in advance. And everybody runs on their own. But last week, it was literally like day to day pull the lever, like me and my leadership team all having to do stuff intraday to keep things going. So once I did that, I stepped back and said, all right.
Scott Case [00:16:20] I really would like to play offense against this disease. I'd like to change the trajectory of this whole game. So my first thought was we're gonna need to inject cash into these small businesses. Not really, I mean, ours to some degree, but I was less concerned about venture backed companies like ours. Even though we need to figure out how to solve these problems. But I was thinking about those Main Street restaurants that used to work at like shit. So I cooked up a bunch of ideas, I start to pump them out to people that I knew that were working on what's now called the CARES Act. And I was like, maybe these are ideas that could help you figure this shit out. So that was my first move. My next move was this. I used to run something called Malaria No More. I was the CEO for five years and then I was on the board for five years. Malaria is a highly infectious disease. It's an epidemic. A lot of countries. And so I know a lot about this. And to give you a sense, if you're in an environment where the anopheles mosquito, which is the mosquito that spreads malaria and you have one person who has malaria, let's say in a village of 5000, within about 10 days or so, everybody will have malaria. If they're not protected in some way, their r number, which we're all learning about r number. The r number for Covid-19 or the virus that causes Covid-19 is about two and a half. So you infect two and half people with one, infected person. Malaria is like thirty. 3-0. It's like ten times as much. So it's highly contagious when it gets going. So I know enough about global health and infectious disease. So I stepped back and said, okay, what's going to matter here? Well, we're going to need masks, we need ventilators. We're gonna need all this equipment and stuff. We're gonna have to lock things down and as I went through the list of things that had to be true. I got to one. And it was,the biggest thing we need to do is, is to stop the spread because we don't have any other tools. So if we're dealing with ventilators and masks and all those things, the game's already over at that point. So, and since we don't have a treatment and we don't have a vaccine, we're left with what in the malaria space was prevention. They sleep under mosquito nets. OK. And what we did in malaria literally got a billion mosquito nets over about an eight year period. Literally three for every family over that period. They only last about two and a half or three years. So the three hundred I mean, it's crazy, but it suppressed the disease. So I thought, OK, what's the prevention mechanism here? You got to stop the spread. Social distancing, be remote, et cetera. So well shit. That's a communications problem. That's a marketing problem. I know how to do that. I can't build ventilators, although I did challenge my kids to try to build a ventilator with this shit we have in the garage just to see if it could be done. They didn't get very far. But then I said, well, it's a communications problem. OK. What's the issue? We need to break through and make this real for people. And so the whole idea I got, I ticked everybody off on Monday and then I grabbed our director of communications literally right after our daily meeting up. And I said, we got to do something very different today to do a one day experiment. We're going to spin off a bunch of things around. Stay the fuck home. Of course she was like, what? Look, we've got an opportunity here to change the trajectory of this. Let's just lean in on it, go aggressively and see what happens. I got off the phone with her. I popped my mobile phone out and I took that video and I said, let's just post this. She's like, really? I'm like, yeah, let's just push some of this stuff. And then we started to build some mechanism behind it. And but the whole idea was most entrepreneurs are this way. But I'm particularly at my best when I'm playing offense and when I can rally a team around something that is about winning nothing. And I don't mean it in a zero sum game kind of way. I'm happy to win just because it's me. Right. And it's a whole group of us. Look, we all went for a three mile jog. Hey! I don't have to race anybody. But I just say, look, we accomplished this thing. I survived the workout of the day. I know I'm sweating and I didn't puke. I mean, so for me, that was a big driver. All right. How do you decompress it? Understand what the problem is? Deconstruct the problem. Figure out there's a place you can do something about and then go act on it as quickly as you can. And since we had set the company part of it up to be as good as it was going to be, there was unlikely that me spending a bunch more time mucking around stuff. Once we took the teams off, it freed me up to both think as a CEO a little bit longer term and a whole week and then act on on something that I thought could change the context that we're operating in, which I'm just nuts enough to say, well, why can't I change the trajectory of how this goes? Which I think is why a lot of entrepreneurs and founders become founders - they say "I want to dent the universe." I don't know whether what what we did, and we continue to do some things this week, is going to have a big impact, a small impact or no impact, let alone drive an outcome. But it rallied a small group of our team to feel like they were contributing to something. And I think for the vast majority of people, it was a message I felt needed to be heard. And it was one-take video. It's not like I recorded, I had no script, I had nothing. It's just who I am. Which is how it got there.
Adam [00:21:45] Yeah. No, I mean, I think that it's evident in the video that it's, you should, go to Scott's Twitter. He tweets a lot. So you might have to scroll a little bit. But it was evident that it was raw and that it was just the facts like this is what's on your mind. And I think, again, there's so many examples of brands misfiring right now. And one of the things that you said is sort of going down the list of all the things that you think are important in responding to what's happening and finding where you personally and where Upside fit in and leaning into that. And it's something that I've been coaching a lot of companies on in the last couple weeks. If you're going to start making offers during a crisis, make sure those offers are deeply aligned with your existing mission. Then they will feel real and they will be something that adds value.
Scott Case [00:22:38] So the irony of this was here's this travel guy telling people to stay home. And it wasn't lost on me, but it was authentic to our brand, which is we believe that the reason people go on business trips is for them to be able to build their companies and their careers. That's sort of the mental model we use. And it's mission oriented. Well, right now, you know, I've gone on business trips. Your mission right now is really to, first and foremost, do whatever you have to do to take care of your company and their families and do everything you can to to kind of set yourself up to get through this mess. And the best way to do that right now and probably for the foreseeable future, is to stay home. Don't spread this anymore. We got to slow this thing down. And, you know, it was interesting, a number of our competitor set. Other people in the travel industry, you know, they've been talking about, well, this will recover and it won't be that bad. And I thought, you know, maybe that turns out to be true. Which would be great. And part of I guess, the other funny part about having a name of your company called Upside is there's only upside if it turns out I'm wrong and we don't have to stay home for 60 days. Fantastic. I'm not going to complain. If it turns out that instead of having zero business travel, we have some business travel. Great. But if we plan and we and we think about it in that way, you know, I don't want to run out of ventilators. I don't want to run out of masks. I don't want people to stay home because they have to. But it's like, if I'm wrong, good. You'll go out. Right. It's not that hard, even though as we talked about earlier, I think there's some psychological factors to it that are hard. But in terms of what to do. And I'll just share one other story. My brother runs a company as well. He's a founder of a company. He's based in Northern Ireland. And the U.K. has been about 10 ish days behind the United States. So I started talking to him. About 10 days ago and said, dude, this is coming, you should really start to plan around this for your business and for my niece was at college I was like you got to get her home. Just in Scotland. Like they're going to lock down travel. You're not going to get her back. He was like really? I was like, yeah, you've got to get her back. Right. And I'm not trying to be alarmist. Like, I'm the most chill guy. Like, I don't break my kids chops. I'm pretty flexible. And I was like, no, no, no, no, you got to go.
Adam [00:25:13] You got to work with the data you have also. That doesn't make you not chill.
Scott Case [00:25:16] And the experience that I've had, which is I've seen stuff go badly and, you know, after 9/11. Like planes grounded. Like you didn't know how long this was gonna come back. And, you know, we had this anthrax thing that happened after 9/11. I could see a lot of this playing out like this uncertainty, this anxiety. You want your people all together if you can figure out to get them together so you can worry about one less thing. And so part of it is just experience. If you haven't had the experience, you don't know how to process this information. And you know, if you don't know what exponential math is like, a lot of people in the world who that math that they took that somehow had exponents in it like they've never thought about it again.
Adam [00:25:58] But I think if I wasn't following startups and sort of the entrepreneurial community the way I do with the work that I do, I probably wouldn't have as tight a grasp on exponential curves. But just just following people in Silicon Valley and around the country who look at growth curves like that.
Scott Case [00:26:17] TThis is the hockey stick of death. This is the kind of hockey stick that nobody on earth ever wants to have. It's amazing. It is a hockey stick curve.
Scott Case [00:26:27] If you are, somebody ought to do this. Would be interesting to overlay Facebooks user growth, OK, or Instagram's user growth against this curve. This virus beats them all.
Adam [00:26:37] Oh, crushes them.
Scott Case [00:26:39] This virus kicks every fantastic tech company growth story right in the face. I mean, it is. Holy shit, right? So it's hard for people to grasp and process this. It's hard to say. What do you mean? I was saying for a while, we're gonna shut the air system down in the United States. And they're like, why? I'm like, there are human beings that have to like do shit in order to have planes fly. Like flight attendants? Like air traffic controllers. Guess what? They're going to shut whole places down. Oh, crap. As it is, being an air traffic controller is a pretty intense job. You can't just train somebody for it. They only work 20 minutes at a time because it's that intense. Something like that.
Adam [00:27:19] But in an ideal scenario.
Scott Case [00:27:21] It's just a big deal. So, you know, it comes down to something you said earlier about. You got to process all this new information. How resilient are you, how adaptable are you to it? And again, probably the biggest lesson for me in this has been how quickly can you create some space to be able to think? How do you create enough space to say, all right, I need a little bit of a I need a little bit of planning. I ned some perspective about this to understand what are my worst case scenarios? Need to be able to build some quick models on things. And that was why I put up that flow chart. I was like, look, a lot of people don't know what to do here. They ought to start thinking about it now. It's much better to think about it now before it gets to be a total shit show. When you're really panicking. That was, you know, the other thing that I was trying to think about, how do I help other founders get ahead of this, because there are a lot of people who aren't going to know where to start.
Adam [00:28:19] Absolutely, and I agree, and I think that those are conversations that I've had with early-stage first time founders is prepare for, and similar to what you said. You know, revenue down by 50 percent, prepare for sort of some financial scenarios. You didn't think were going to happen in the early stages of your business and prepare for some early solutions that are going to respond to that, including potentially decreasing your team size, decreasing certain activities. These aren't fun exercises, but they're important exercises to go through and hopefully. You won't have to use them.
Adam [00:28:54] But if you do, you're not going to be on your heels and to your point of sort of attacking the problem and being on offense. That's what preparation gets you when you start to have the breathing space for it. Thinking about the business and what Upside is all about from a revenue standpoint, business, travel. What are some of the things that you're watching closely within your business and industry? Because I think that that's another thing to help with founders thinking about what are you looking at on your team? At a team level, things like that.
Scott Case [00:29:31] Let's see, if I can break this down into some steps. The first step is to try to deal with and settle the acute problem you have in the moment. How do you deal with the current catastrophe? How do you set yourself up to put that in a box so that you're not having to live with it every day. You just got to put systems in place and processes in place to do it. Next you've got to basically figure out, again, what that scenario planning looks like. So how do you plot out? What are the likely scenarios ahead of you? Not just cash forecasts. That's a fundamental part of it. Well, what do you see the likely market to be? So I mentioned earlier. Let's assume we have six months of no business travel and 12-18 months of a recession. You've got to have some framework in which to operate particularly for your team to be able to operate. To be able to say, all right, what's the likely futures in this case? There's two things that we don't know right now that we have to contend with in the travel space. We don't know how long the lockdown is going to last and we don't know what the recovery looks like on the other side of it, how fast that curve is. So those are the two things that drive the economics of our business. It's very simple. We would get people to buy travel. They buy it from us. We make a little bit of money on it. And they go on trips and our business model not complicated. We buy travel from suppliers like airlines. We sell it to customers and we make a margin. There's a lot of cool shit around it, but as a business, it's a very simple business, and in fact, when I talk to our company, usually every two weeks when we do our all hands meeting, one of the first slides is reminding everybody, look, our business model is not that complicated, right? We need to get a lot of revenue on the top for people buying trips when we get that. We make a little bit of money off it. That drives us profit by driving us profit. We get to keep quiet. That's the whole thing. That's the whole business.
Scott Case [00:31:33] Now we're in a mode where that's going be zero. Well, now what do you do? And by the way, there's no one to sell to. It's not like, oh, there's a small pocket of people who are out there still traveling.
Scott Case [00:31:45] Let's go compete for them. Huh? No. And by the way, like some of our competitors still to this day, March 26, running ads about their product. They haven't changed the copy or anything.
Adam [00:31:57] That's wild. That's so crazy.
Scott Case [00:31:59] You're running digital ads. Nobody had the foresight to just turn those off. Like I could see TV. There's a bleed on it. Right. Or radio. Or maybe they can't shut it off. It takes a few days, but this is like anyway. So we shut ours up like day two. Good. We're done. We're not trying to get customers here. Then we turn it around and just said, how can we help other clients? All right. So deal with the catastrophe. Come up with some scenarios. Our two scenarios are: How long is this going to last and what's the ramp going to look like when we recover from it? So those are unanswerable.
Scott Case [00:32:30] So if you're being conservative, you assume infinity. So you have to say, well, maybe we have to pivot our company. All right. We're not in the business travel space anymore. Maybe you've got to decide to do something completely different. OK. What does that look like? Mm hmm. Is that the right answer?
Scott Case [00:32:49] Is travel never going to come back? So you've got to start to plan these scenarios that say you're in a totally different business. You're in a business that recovers very slowly. You need a lot more time than you thought you had. Almost every startup, certainly ones that are venture backed like we are. You've only got a certain amount of runway before you've got to turn the corner or raise more capital. Guess what? Raising capital in this environment's going to be very difficult. So that's probably not an option for us in the next 12 to 18 months, maybe longer. So as we work through these scenarios, we said, well, if we could figure out how to focus on driving a new kind of revenue in, could we bring in a different kind of revenue that would then allow us to offset some of our costs. That would give us the breathing room to let this play out, because then it could if we have time, we can wait for the lockdown visibility to know when it's going to go away and we can start to see the early, the green shoots of the return of of buying. So buy time. So the number one thing our team needed to do this week, we kicked the week off was actually it was last week. We sort of drew that. We said our number one goal as a company is to buy more time. So shrink all the discretionary cost as fast as you can. How do we get there? As aggressively as you can. You've got to buy as much runway as we can. And then we said, let's spin up a bunch of revenue ideas. One of them was we have a fantastic sales and marketing team. So we packaged up our capabilities and we went to town looking for companies that might be in a place where they were getting inundated and they didn't have the capacity to handle either on sales or on service. I amplified a LinkedIn article as of this morning, had about one hundred and twenty five thousand views on it. It was like, look, maybe you could rent your sales team out. We've been working on that and saying, well, could that bring in some revenue? You know, we got creative. We're in the D.C. Metro I said well. There's likely to be a whole bunch of digital needs around this that some of the larger contractors may not have the capacity to do. Maybe we could build some stuff that supported what was going on in the pandemic. You know, sitting here on March 26, we haven't locked down on those things. But that's a playing offense strategy in the scenarios that we can see right now. Whether those turn out to be good ideas, bad ideas or some other thing comes along that changes our trajectory and thinking about. I don't know, but the idea of being creative about things like you've got a fantastic sales force, how do we go and leverage it in some way is a way of offsetting some of that so that you can buy more time. And I can't tell you that it's going to work or not work. But I think as founders and as leaders, we need to be thinking that step ahead. So if I was still in freak out mode like I was last week, just dealing with the hour to hour shit, you've got no space to have that idea and said I needed that. Right. And then if you've got you know, one of things I've told my team is and this is a testament to them, but it's also the culture that we built is, you know, we practice resiliency all the time. So in a lot of ways, a lot of the experiences that our team have had over the last four years of being in the startup, of making a pivot in the business, of doing things differently. We're faced with a disruption that is many orders of magnitude greater than than any of those things. But the muscle memory is there to go, oh, I felt things like this before in our company. I felt that disruption. And probably one of the things that's quite funny to me as a leader is, you know, any time you make a change. People react to the change and like you said most people don't like change even if it's better for them.
Scott Case [00:36:42] As we've been moving now because the world is so chaotic, the changes that we're making inside the business in response to that look quite muted. It's just a very funny thing. It's like, oh, you mean the whole world's a disaster?
Scott Case [00:36:57] But I've got to have chocolate instead of vanilla. It's like I could deal with that versus six months ago. It's like I don't like vanilla. I like chocolate, whatever. It just changes things. So, our approach: deal with the acute catastrophe. Come up with some scenario planning. We identify those two questions. And now you go to town on figuring out, OK, well, we've got an unknown reality. What do we do to extend our time? And we know we're getting new information every day that's going to change some of the choices that we make. So we've made a commitment to make sure that we're not making really big game changing things like pivot the company until we get a few more data points in that tells us what we're doing. Sitting here today on March 26. Knock on wood. I feel very good about what our prospects are of the options that we have in the Plan A and B and C and all the way to Q. I hope I'm right, but I have no way of knowing. Maybe you and I could do another podcast in a month. We'll find out whether or how right I was. Or two months.
Adam [00:38:02] One hundred percent. I mean, I think first you and I love to think about things like this. And we know that we could talk probably for hours on end. So what we're going to do is we will have more conversations. And I think we've talked about this already with Season 2 on The Founder's Mind: Scott's take, which will take a bit of a turn towards managing crises, dealing with some of these challenges that founders are going through. And I think we'll leave it here for today. This was a great conversation, Scott. Thank you for taking the time. And listeners keep your ears open and ready for some more conversations with Scott in the coming weeks and months.
Scott Case [00:38:46] Also, thanks.
