What to Do When Cash is Tight, with Clate Mask

If you read the episode on Leading People Through Challenging Times, you’d know that I mentioned that I’ve been speaking quite a bit lately as business owners navigate through these unprecedented times when we’re dealing with the Coronavirus pandemic. The other conversation I had was with Clate Mask, CEO of Keap. Clate and I had experienced together and lived through some challenging times as we grew that business.

I wanted to extract some of the wisdom from Clate about what to do when cash is tight and how to manage cashflow. We had a great conversation about mindsets, creative ways to generate more cash and ways to think about preserving cash. We recorded a session for our community and I thought, “This needs to go to our audience as well.”

I know this makes the second episode two weeks in a row, a little unconventional but after this brief intro that I’m doing, we’ll cut over into the audio of that interview conversation I had with Clate. It’s about what to do when cash is tight. Many of us are dealing with how to lead people through challenging times. All of us are at least having to think about, “What am I going to do if cash becomes tight?” I hope the episode with Stephen Woessner and this episode with Clate Mask help you with those two important roles that you have as leaders of your business.

We’ll go ahead and cut over to that interview. I hope you get a ton of value out of it. Clate is not only a seasoned entrepreneur but he’s one of the world’s foremost experts in small business growth. He’s not only been there and done that but his business serves tens of thousands of small business owners. He has a great perspective on what it takes to be successful in growing a business. Enjoy that episode. Please reach out if you have any questions or need any help for me and my team. The email address is Brett@GrowWithElite.com.

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I’m excited to have many guests whom I don’t know and looking forward to spending some time with you along with the special guest we have with us in this episode, Clate Mask, who’s the CEO of Keap. Clate and I worked together for years. I know him well as a leader. He’s an outstanding leader. I’ve seen him manage situations and grow what was then Infusionsoft when I worked there. It is now called Keap. That company has been through ups and downs like every company.

We’re glad to have Clate here to talk about some of the things that we experienced. When lots of people and businesses are pulling back, that puts a lot of pressure on people’s cashflow. This conversation is dedicated to talking about what to do when cash gets tight. Welcome, everyone. Here’s our guest, Clate.

You bet. Thanks for having me.

I sent a few bullets your way, Clate but I’ll walk us through what they are. I want to make sure that everybody feels comfortable with what we’re doing. We’re going to talk about creative strategies and tactics for generating cash, how to think about loans, lines of credit or other things like that as we head into an uncertain future, and some practical tips and ideas for preserving cash.

Let’s start by acknowledging when people are thinking about what to do when cash gets tight, there are two main levers. Bring more cash in and more available cash in. The one that most of us probably grab more quickly is how we preserve cash and keep it from going out. Why don’t you talk about your experience being in situations where managing cash was an issue for you as you grew Infusionsoft to $200 million plus? Let me start this way. Were there times when cash was an issue for you?

Once or twice.

In what timeframe?

I’ve managed the company through two different recessions. One time when we had no capital. Another time when we had a little bit of capital but we hadn’t yet raised venture capital. A lot of times, people would hear and say, “It’s easy to manage cash when you have millions of dollars that venture capitalists have given you.” I’ve run the business through recessions when we didn’t have that. I understand the challenges and the tricky trade-offs that you have to make.

The experience that I want to share is not just what we did to manage the business through a couple of recessions but also what I’ve observed entrepreneurs do. One of my favorite things about Keap is that we get to work with entrepreneurs and see what people do and how people respond. We have a bird’s eye view of the way that tens of thousands of businesses operate and we see them as customers. We have a view and talk with small businesses every day.

My observations come from both the CEO of a company that bootstrapped and has built through recessions through the experience of a bird’s eye view of many customers and working with entrepreneurs. I’m an Economics major. Between my Economics and MBA, I have a little bit of a passion for how people manage scarce resources. That’s what economics is about, the allocation of scarce resources. I hope that I’ll be able to bring something of value and usefulness to the people. Everybody’s got different thoughts and emotions swirling inside of them so I look forward to getting into it.

Thanks for that, Clate. People read because they believe we might have some things to share. We’re going to rely on some of our experience. I love that you brought in the fact that you get to see lots of other entrepreneurs from your seat so we’ll bring in whatever we think will be useful. Let’s start with creative strategies and tactics for generating cash. How can we pull cash in at a time when it feels harder to get cash in the door?

Let’s start with that statement, creative strategies and tactics for generating cash. I want you to focus for a second on creative and generating. Most of the time, when people are in a situation where cashflow gets tight, the natural reaction is to clench up, grip what they have and become fearful. The first thing that I want to share in terms of the strategy is it’s more about mindset than any specific strategy or tactic. If the mindset around cash becomes super restrictive and scarce, it’s difficult to create and generate.

Creation and generation, whether we’re talking about cash, products or whatever it is in your business, requires us to be in a mindset. The very first thing I want to start with is you’ve got to conquer the chaos in your mind around this stuff. If you’re coming from a place of fear and panic and you’re trying to grip what you have, it’s counterintuitive but it pushes things away from you. That sounds odd but my experience has confirmed this to me again and again. We’ve got to stay in a creative, generating positive place.

That’s hard to do if you’re clicking refresh on CNN or Johns Hopkins University website every 30 seconds. Practically speaking, as we’re dealing with this virus, my strong encouragement to you is to check in on it once a day, at nighttime. We need to be apprised of what’s happening but looking at it every day is knocking you off the creative space and pedestal that you need to be on to work through cash challenges and business challenges that you’re facing. Brett, anything you want to say about the mindset and where we need to be to create and generate cash?

That’s invaluable advice and hard for us to go there. You said it. Our natural tendency is to pull back and guard. Wrap our arms and hands around what we have, not be creating or generating. You didn’t say these words but that lizard brain survival mechanism that we all experience naturally gets back to a place of being able to think critically, use our reasoning, problem solve, be creative and all of those frontal cortex things. You wrote this book with Scott, Conquer the Chaos. You have some great mindset strategies in there and a chapter on disciplined optimism. These are things that you’ve had to work on personally to keep yourself from going into that very scarce mindset that’s natural for all of these circumstances.

You’ve got to protect your mindset and stay positive. You’re an entrepreneur and the people around you can afford to hit refresh on CNN.com all day long. You cannot afford to do that. I’m going to be direct because I’m trying to help entrepreneurs get and stay in a place of creation. The water cooler chatter of most people is virtual. If you’re going to feed into social media and the fear and the panic, you are significantly undermining your ability as an entrepreneur to lead through this. I want to be direct on this point because you’ve got to preserve that entrepreneurial mindset to create.

I know it’s easy and natural to engage in that. You probably get around family members and social media and that’s the conversation. You’ve got to lead. When people go to that fearful place, you’ve got to find a way to acknowledge them, appreciate them and move to a more positive zone. If the precursor to what we want to share is to make sure that you’re preserving that mindset, you’re staying in a positive place.

Let’s get to some of the strategies and tactics for generating cash. We use the phrase generating because that is what we’re doing here. Sometimes the generation is with sales but other times, it’s not with sales. I want us to be clear about that. We want to focus on sales. We also want to focus on terms. What terms can you create that will generate cash for you, lead to better sales and attract resources to you at this time? That’s an important thing.

We’re going to talk in a minute about loans but let’s stay focused on generating cash, both in terms of sales and cashflow. The first part is in sales. Let me give you an example. There’s a lot of uncertainty. We created a promotion that says, “Your first month is free.” We created an extension of our free trial that says, “We know you’re thinking a lot about other things so we want to give you an extra fifteen days.” These are ideas that you’ll share.

Some people will do a discount or promotion. One of the things that I’m seeing across our customers is sales that are not just playing to what’s happening with the Coronavirus but are more specifically addressing the cash concerns that the customer has. They may, for example, offer a sale that has one part of the cash they would normally get continue but another part of the cash they would get, they can push out.

You might say, “That doesn’t get me the full cash.” You get some cash versus no cash. For example, we have customers who have a service component and a subscription component to what they do. They’re saying, “We’ll take the subscription component and provide all the services but you can pay the service component later.” Our customers are getting some cash in the door from their clients. There are different promotions and sales that you can offer.

Those are things that you may not get as much cash as you would’ve gotten 3 weeks or 2 weeks ago but you’re getting some cash, which helps you to get the ability to pay some of your bills and do some of the things you need to do. More importantly, you’re building a relationship with a client or a customer that can lead to further payments and cash down the road.

One of the mistakes people make and it’s a strategic mistake is when they’re going through a recession or an unprecedented event like this. Is this particular event unprecedented? Yes. We’ve had lots of crazy events that have happened in the past. We have industries, entire countries and economies that experienced those.

Let’s not feed into this notion that while it’s unprecedented, it doesn’t mean that we haven’t adapted and learned from things like this in the past. We have but one of the mistakes when we’re dealing with a recession or an unprecedented event is that we compare what we can do now in a sales situation versus something that happened in the past.

We need to not compare to the past. If nothing else, the last twelve days or so tell us that every day is a little different. Let’s not compare it to a prior day. Let’s give ourselves the ability to get a customer, get some cash and create a relationship so that we can serve that client and create value for that client so that they’ll want to pay us over time. What does that look like?

Cash Generation: Every day is a little different, so let’s not compare it to a prior day. Let’s give ourselves the ability to get a customer and create a relationship where we can serve and create value for that client so that they’ll want to pay us over time.

Let’s say you’ve got a wedding planning business. We were on Conquer the Chaos webinar and somebody shared, “We do weddings and events. Since no more than ten people can get together, it’s tough.” Let’s accept the brutal fact that that’s true based on the guidance we’ve been given and the vast majority of folks are abiding by that wise guidance. What might you do? You could offer a service to your bride who has postponed things or who may not be booking something but you can offer a service in planning and preparation that you may not have done before.

What you’re doing is creating a client, getting some dollars in the door and creating an opportunity in a relationship to serve that client and build value instead of saying, “There’re no events so I’m shut down for now.” No. There are things you can do to get dollars in the door and get a relationship that you can build. Before I go to terms as a way of generating cash, let me pause here about creating sales through promotions, different offerings, discounts or some way to get dollars in the door, even if a lower number but more importantly, getting a relationship you can serve.

You’re reminding all of us, Clate, that as entrepreneurs, when we first started our business, we had to get creative to figure out how to generate those first few sales. We may have built up a business that relied on fairly predictable customer acquisition processes and systems and we might have lost a little bit of our ability to go figure out how to get sales in creative ways. It’s a good reminder that this throws us back to right when we started.

We get to a place where our products and offerings work. We forget that we need to be scrappy when dynamics change for us. To generate cash, we talked about creating sales through promotions in a number of different ways, including modified offerings that we hold out to customers. The other thing we can do in generating cash from a sales standpoint is we change our terms.

One of the things we did when we were going through the prior recession is we allowed customers to make a payment for their service in 3 or 5 payments. We even went to twelve payments. Getting some cash coming in the door, even though it’s over a prolonged period, is one way to do that. You can also enable your customer to pay on net 30 or net 60, meaning you get the relationship and you are able to stay busy and productive serving that client even though you don’t necessarily get the cash in the door right away.

Everybody’s dealing with this same challenge, as we’re going to talk about in a moment, tips and ideas for preserving cash as you want to be on the other side of terms and have payment terms in your favor as a payer of those services that you have. I get that in an economy where everybody’s playing with terms, it’s a matter of being creative and finding a solution that works for your clients or customers. Terms are a way for you to get that client or customer in the door and be serving and working.

The last thing that we want is to be sitting around with our hands not working. Working to create value for a client, even though you may not get paid at the end of today but in a week or month is going to be better than not creating value. That generating cash through sales and payment terms is an important part of the creative work you’re doing to make your way through this unprecedented event and the resulting recession.

The other thing that I would say though is that this is the time to not be jumping straight to the sale. This isn’t going to generate cash immediately but here’s what I mean. A lot of times, we get so focused on the product or service we’re offering that we lose sight of what we’re really doing, which is we are serving a customer who has a need. If we can start serving that customer even before they have paid us, it might sound contrary to the notion of generating cash. The reality is that you can begin giving and serving, which will build trust and relationships or that customer wants to pay cash. Stop and think about what’s happening.

Most people out there are pretty clenched up in fear and yet they still have needs, challenges and problems that they want to solve. If we can get into a place of service where we’re giving and serving, that will many times lead to a paying client, either that particular client we’re serving or somebody they referred. I encourage entrepreneurs. In the mode of generating cash, there’s getting sales in the door and also extending terms. The third in line there is busy serving.

As you serve, even though that customer hasn’t agreed to become a client yet, you’re giving value and information. You’re helping. Let me apply that. What does that look like in a business? I’ll give you an example of our business. For a long time, we have shared the principles of Conquer the Chaos and Lifecycle Marketing. Those have usually been with customers. Conquer the Chaos is a book we wrote many years ago but we never created a way to systematically teach that to non-customers and give that information and help people.

One time we said, “This is a perfect opportunity for us to finally do that.” We created a webinar series around Conquer the Chaos. Scott and I do that each morning. We are sharing and giving. In the meantime, we’re building a following and getting people who are entrepreneurial-minded to recognize the things that they can do during this virus. That’s an example where we’re going to give information, knowledge and value. That may or may not turn into more business but it inspires us and keeps us invigorated as well as it inspires the people we’re talking to and helps them to think about their business a little differently so they can conquer the chaos.

Let’s apply it to the wedding planner. Let’s say that you can’t do any events. Let’s go to a worst-case scenario that none of your brides or the people that you’re working with want to take you up on a paid offer that would bring in a lesser amount of cash but nonetheless would create a client relationship. What could that bride offer to those folks who are in fear and are not wanting to spend money right now? She could offer a version of the planning service that she would provide.

Maybe she creates a certain planning kit. She begins to give that away freely and share that with brides and have them refer it to their friends. There’s a whole cottage industry out there to be made among brides who are beside themselves because their visions, dreams and plans of what they had for their wedding on May 25th, June 17th or whatever it is are up in smoke. They’re trying to deal with that. How might a wedding planner create something that would serve those people and potentially lead to a client relationship?

The point around generating cash is that you can do it in sales coming in the door or with terms but you can also do it with non-customers that will lead to and build a better business for you as you create and deliver value to those clients. Let me pause on that one, Brett. We’ve talked about strategies and tactics for generating cash. Anything we want to touch on further there before we go to thinking about loans and credits?

I have a question from Belinda. She said, “Would you improve payment terms to keep existing clients, like lowering their payments and spreading over a longer period? How would you handle existing clients wanting to, I’m assuming, leave?”

You can imagine we’ve had a couple of those conversations. We work with those clients individually and create a solution that’s right for them. We’ve found over the years, going through two recessions and a number of different situations, that simply turning off the charge doesn’t serve the customer. This might sound crazy but we’ve done and tried it. What we’ve found is that when a customer doesn’t put any effort or attention to the solution and the service we provide, we’re delaying the inevitable for that customer and it doesn’t help.

Instead, what we do, generally speaking, and this is something you all might try, is for a customer who needs that, we’ll create a situation for them where there’s some combination of additional services we provide and some type of credit that enables them to work through the challenge that they’re in and get on their feet. What we need them to do is work on their business.

The last thing we want in a tough time like this is for an entrepreneur to say, “I’m going to not do anything there for three months.” You’re going to come back three months later. You think that your business is going to be better but you haven’t done the work to make your business better. It’s so much more effective for someone who’s going through a three-month period or challenge. I’m using three months as an example of what a hypothetical timeline might be for the Coronavirus. We have no idea.

What happens to a business owner who spends the time to build a client outreach newsletter to take the time to put together an offer for their customers and automate that, someone who takes the time to automate workflow in their business, do the organization follow up and automation work, it makes them a far better entrepreneur. It puts them in a zone of creativity. It enables them to start to be successful with their customers instead of throwing their hands up in the air and saying, “I’m stuck. I don’t know what to do.”

We’ve had many conversations with the customers. We help them go through that mindset, understand what’s possible for them and get them into a productive place. It’s so much fun. We have a Slack channel called Conquer the Chaos where we share the ideas of what people are doing as they shift their minds and realize, “Wait, I can do this. I can create a virtual event. I can do a kit that I offer to my customers who are at home. I can send a promotion to my customers on this product I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I could do a broadcast to customers about this new thing I’ve created.” There are so many different things that people are doing.

One story that came up on the Conquer the Chaos channel was a Dojo who is a customer of ours. He has been a customer for a long time but he is like, “I’m stuck. My customers can’t come in to get my service where I teach karate so I don’t have any ability to generate cash.” We helped him understand how he could create a home study version like using Zoom, serve his customers and create some modified version to his monthly fee for those who needed it. He got into a mode of action, began to execute on that and saw how our software could help him carry out that program. We do work with customers who have those issues but generally speaking, we don’t just say, “Let’s take a break from the software for two months.” That’s not going to serve anybody.

I have 2 more questions and 1 suggestion. I’ll share the suggestion. It came from Daniel Fres. He was sharing how he innovated and that it might benefit other people. He said, “We had planned webinars. We usually get 8 to 10 people registering. Sometimes fewer. On Monday morning, we sent an email while working at home to learn analytics in our live webinars. Much to their surprise, they had 128 people register and 64 people attended. We have 99 people registered for tomorrow and 97 for Thursday. We did a special offer for these webinars. We’ll see how this plays out.” I love that he innovated and he was sharing that idea. Thank you, Daniel.

We have another question. This is from James. “Do you have any thoughts on how pre-revenue companies that are still in development, so aren’t making sales yet, can generate cash? In particular, we are at a stage where we’re seeking seed investment. With markets falling, typical seed or Angel investors are likely to be leerier of early-stage companies.”

I do have thoughts about this sale. That sounds very harsh but a lot of times, people who are looking for funding are too fixated on the funding and not focused enough on selling something that has value that a customer will buy. Find any customer who will see the value of what you’re offering. You might say, “I don’t have clinical trials yet.”

Cash Generation: Find a customer, any customer, who will see the value of what you’re offering.

There are things you’re doing in your research and development because what you’re doing is research and development. Paid research and development is called a customer or a client. Just because you don’t have it all figured out yet, you can find an early adopter who would pay you that will help you get to a point where you have better learnings and better capability to bring on seed funding.

Venture capital and seed funding are very difficult to come by in recessions. My direct message is that’s not the place you should be putting most of your attention. You should be putting your attention on how you take the R&D work you’re doing. Find someone who sees value in it and is willing to pay something for it. Find others that are like that and get customers that can help self-fund the path to outside capital.

Not everybody has subscription services or recurring revenue but for those who do, can you talk quickly about pulling in cash through annual contracts? We’ll then go on to the loan’s lines of credit.

I left off the piece of terms for existing customers. We talked about terms for new customers but for existing customers, if you’ve got subscriptions, you can offer discounts to customers who are paying you a monthly subscription. We have a standard approach where we’ll offer either a 10% or 15% discount for a customer that will prepay annually. If they’re paying $200 a month, they can save a chunk by paying annually.

What we did in the past and what I’ve seen a lot of people do is they’ll get more aggressive on that discount. The value of present-day cash is so important. You have some customers who will happily take you up on that. If you wanted to get more aggressive and offer a 20% discount or you might even go 9 months for the price of $12 if you wanted to get even more aggressive, these are things you can do to pull cash in when you have customers who have made commitments to you over time.

Let’s move to your thoughts around getting access to outside money through debt or lines of credit.

I’ll hit this briefly. Most entrepreneurs are pretty debt averse. That’s one thing I love about entrepreneurs and I am too. I don’t like debt. There is a time when debt is a smart way to invest in your business because when the interest rates get low, it gives you the ability to get a good return on the money you borrow.

We’re going to go into a period of likely record-low interest rates. I do think lines of credit are very effective tools to use. They give you access to cash but you don’t have to take the cash. That access to cash keeps your mind in a more creative space. It gives you the opportunity to execute things. It keeps you out of a zone of fear and concern about different obligations you need to meet. I’m a huge proponent of lines of credit.

I’m also a proponent of loans when the interest rate is low enough. Depending on the government entity or jurisdiction that you fall under, there will probably be unprecedented stimulus packages. I’m a big believer that entrepreneurs lead us out of recessions and governments can stimulate it. I’m appreciative of the stimulus that may come but I don’t rely on that. I believe entrepreneurs are the ones that can and will lead us out of recession.

When an opportunity is afforded and the government is making SBA loans available or your banks are making regular loans available at very low-interest rates, I do think it’s wise and attractive to take advantage of that. Especially during a time like this where there’s uncertainty abroad, it’s wise to avail yourself of lines of credit and some capital through very low-interest loans. That’s a different thing than when we are in a season where it’s a booming economy, interest rates are higher and/or you are dealing with something that’s very individualized versus what’s happening in the economy broadly. In this situation, loans and lines of credit are wise to consider and I would encourage people to do that.

Around preserving cash, one of the natural abilities of most entrepreneurs is they have not just a spidey sense. They often check their bank accounts daily. They’re connected well to the amount of money that’s there and they’re usually tuned in to where money is going. What have you found over the years that may be less intuitive around managing cash that helped you guys during some down times from a cash standpoint?

There’s a lot to this. They’re the standard things like negotiating agreements. You’ll find people are more willing to negotiate agreements now than ever before, probably. There’s using your creative abilities to persuade and negotiate on key agreements that will enable you to spread out payments and slow payments down. That one’s obvious. The other things are more about getting surgical in the areas where you have the biggest expense.

Cash Generation: People are more willing to negotiate agreements today than ever before. Use your creative abilities to persuade and negotiate on key agreements.

This is usually in terms of personnel, certain assets depending on your business type or you’ve got big payments on those and then marketing and advertising. Those tend to be big for people. People expense is the biggest. If you are a solopreneur, your people expense is also the biggest because you’ve got needs that you’re providing for. If you have employees, payroll tends to be the biggest expense that you’re dealing with.

I love the story of The Container Store, which is found in Conscious Capitalism. You’ve heard me talk about this book before but in Conscious Capitalism, there’s a discussion about it. The whole premise of Conscious Capitalism is that businesses are amazing entities that do good in the world for their employees, customers, shareholders, partners and everybody associated with the business.

This book, Conscious Capitalism, details an account of The Container Store which was dealing with a tough recession. I’m trying to figure out how they would be good to their people. They came up with a number of creative ways how to manage their expenses related to their people. They did furloughs and reduce pay. They did all kinds of shared services for each other and created a little bit of an economy inside their company. They did a lot of things to weather the storm together.

I want you to think about your people expense a little differently. The natural thing, when we get fearful, is we can’t make payroll and got to cut everybody. The reality is everybody’s in this together. This is a crazy time and people know that. Getting ahead of it, leading your people and finding ways so that you can manage your expense is a critical thing. I wanted to bring that out.

Another less conventional way of thinking about things and I touched on this a little bit with The Container Store’s example, is creating an economy around your company. For example, I shared with our leadership team, not knowing how long we’ll go through this recession. I said, “We should find ways where we’re spending money on vendors. In every possible way, let’s spend that money on people inside our ecosystem, partners and customers. You name it.” It enables the dollars to flow and pass inside the ecosystem in a way that is good for those who are a part of the community that we serve.

You might say, “How does that preserve cash?” It helps to change the flow of money inside of your community and enables you to weather storms that others might not be able to. Those are a few of the ideas. The biggest thing in terms of preserving cash is that you want to spread things out on your terms and negotiation. That’s where you’re going to find the quickest wins you can get. The biggest wins and the most significant ones are most likely going to be on your payroll. Those are going to be different ways that you might need to be creative over time, depending on how long this last.

I agree with you on the people expense and I’ve already talked to some of our members in our community who felt like they had to quickly make changes. I’m not saying they should not have done this but some have already let staff go and are contemplating things like reducing pay for their teams and looking for any examples.

Container Store is a well-known example you talked about there, which was mentioned in Conscious Capitalism. Kip Tindell, who was the CEO of The Container Store, wrote a book called Uncontainable. I believe that also mentions in that one if I remember correctly. We can’t prescribe percentages here but how would we go about determining what a pay cut might look like? How we you keep people together longer and pull them into the system? Do you have any thoughts about that, Clate?

You’re right that it’s hard to do that on a prescriptive basis across the board. You’re also right that sometimes you do need to let go of people. As hard as that is, that’s a reality. I’m not trying to say that that’s something that people shouldn’t do. It’s on a case-by-case basis. In terms of what pay cuts look like, we have to recognize everybody’s going to be trying to get through this time. If I remember right, The Container Store wasn’t just one pay cut. They went through it 2 or 3 times before they were able to weather the storm and get through the recession.

As a leader, you’ve got to be conscious of what’s going to work to keep your people engaged with you and help them to feel like they’re a part of this. What do I mean by that? It’s not like you’re going to get paid 10%, 20% or 30% less. We need to work together to get through this. It doesn’t do any good to make a pay cut and then have people be like, “I’m going to slack off.” It’s like, “We’ve got to work hard to push through this.” When you do a pay cut, you enable everybody to reduce their expenses at home in an appropriate way. It’d be unwise to prescribe a certain percentage but it’s also probably good to recognize it may not be one move. You might have to do it in 2 to 3 moves.

One thing that you’ve always been a strong advocate for it is worth calling out here, even if it’s not top of mind for you. It is the way your people are talking about problem-solving some of this. You know the math of your business as a business owner and what the runway extension would look like. If you cut by a certain percentage, you could make decisions unilaterally that way. There are scenarios and most of us on the call are in businesses, maybe 20 or 25 people fewer.

Some of you might be an exception but there’s a way to in and say, “If you go look at your personal finances and household income, what can you survive off of? If we had to pull way back, what would that look like?” There are ways to pull people in and help them be part of the solution.

When you pull in the cash-generating army of problem solvers at that level, they’re right there trying to figure out, “How are we going to go get creative? How are we going to get sales? How are we going to keep customers? How are we going to engage differently?” There’s an opportunity for leaders to hold people in.

You’re spot on. This is not something where the employees are all sitting on one side of the table, the business owner is on the other side of the table and the answers all come from the business owner. We’re in this together. This is a time when your method of leading your people and involving them in co-created solutions is critical.

To come full circle to where we started, the reason I said you couldn’t afford to allow your mindset to be in the place that so much of the public is you need to be creating solutions and you need your employees with you creating those solutions. If they’re clicking refresh on CNN every day, I use that as a figurative way of describing the place that people can be in that prevents generating and creating solutions. If they’re in that place, then you’re over in a corner trying to come up with a solution on your own. That’s tough to do.

On the other hand, if you’re leading your people and helping them understand how we’re thinking about this, what we see in the business and how we can adjust, as you do that and you engage them in the problem-solving, you’ve got a group of creative problem solving, solution-generating and cash-generating individuals that are working with you on a team. That’s a lot of fun to be a part of.

That’s a great place to come back to recognize that as a leader, it’s not only your responsibility. It’s critically important for you to keep your mindset in a positive place but you need to do that with your people as well so that you can come up with the solutions. The solutions are there in every business. They’re as bleak as it may seem or as frustrating as it may be but it’s there. There are solutions to be had but it requires a little different thinking. It requires a way of looking at it from a point of view that one of our attendees said in our webinar on Conquer the Chaos. “We have to change our point of view.”

That’s what’s critical as the leader, to help people see that. They can’t do that well if you’re in a place where you’re feeling bleak and dark. Do the positive focus and mindset work that we teach you in Conquer the Chaos. Scott and I have been teaching about mind over meaning. Don’t let the thoughts that you have about the situation become your reality. Those are just thoughts. We can change our thoughts. We can modify them and look at things differently.

I want to finish with a positive focus. I’ll share with you how I’m having an absolute blast leading the company, which I love. Many of you know that for a long season, while I was the CEO, I was not able to have the organization reporting to me, which was tough but I’ve been able to lead the company and it has been amazing. I’m having a total blast.

What I see after a month of being back at the helm is we need to focus on our purpose to help small businesses succeed on our mission and our values, specifically the number one value that we genuinely care about. I was talking about that quite a bit. Never did I dream that the economy would give us such a gift to genuinely care. It’s been amazing and fun to work with our people internally, serve our customers and partners and help them get into a positive and creative space as entrepreneurs to produce results in their businesses.

We’ve created a number of Keep Going programs, as we call them. It’s been a ton of fun to execute those and serve our customers and partners. I hope that you’re finding joy in the opportunity that’s in front of you. Entrepreneurs see opportunities whereas others just see problems. I encourage you to get on top of your mindset and recognize some of the ways that you can generate cash and sales. I wish you the best as you work through it. If you need a little boost, you can certainly join our Conquer the Chaos or Lifecycle Marketing webinar that we do each morning for our customers.

How do they find out about those, Clate?

We have a landing page that has the different resources that we’ve made available, these Keep Going programs but I’m sure you can find them if you go to our website.

I appreciate the time that you’ve made. We appreciate your insights and experience, Clate. Thank you.

Important Links

• Leading People Through Challenging Times – Past Episode
• Clate Mask – Past Episode
• Keap
• Stephen Woessner – Past Episode
• Brett@GrowWithElite.com
• Conquer the Chaos
• CNN.com
• The Container Store
• Conscious Capitalism
• Uncontainable