NTX Inno kicked off the first virtual event in our State of Innovation series – Crisis Innovators: Pivots in the Age of Covid-19 – on Wednesday.
Entrepreneurs, innovators and community members from across the Metroplex tuned in to a panel discussion with Andy Chen, senior VP of +1 Labs inside of Match Group and the product and development lead at Ship, and Merrilee Kick, CEO of BuzzBallz, on how they have been making changes and leading their teams through the current crisis.
Pro tip: If you missed out on the live event, you can check out the recording here.
Through the pandemic, Match Group has been rolling out new features and testing new models on its numerous dating apps to help keep people connected, yet socially distant, as lockdown orders across the country have kept many at home. On the other side of North Texas, BuzzBallz quickly retooled its production of ready-to-go cocktails to begin producing about 18,000 gallons of hand sanitizer, which it distributed to first responders and frontline workers at the onset of the crisis.
Here’s are few key takeaways quoted directly from the discussion.
What were your plans heading into 2020?
Andy Chen: Online dating, up until Covid, the experience was what we call asynchronous, meaning you can interact with other people and you didn't have to do it at the same time. That obviously changed during Covid because when people went into lockdown, when people went into quarantine, we really started thinking about how do you help single people - who during Covid are arguably some of the loneliest people out there - and how do you create live experiences for our members to have that felt like the closest thing to real life.
Merrilee Kick: Everything that we were planning to do started out in January, where we were going to go into Asia. We had kind of a five-country trip to visit international distributers. That stopped as Covid started. And we just kind of put that on hold, as well as some of the private label projects… We pushed those back a few months because of the uncertainty of what was going to happen. And the other thing was just hunker down and focus on our core business.
How did you pivot when things started becoming serious?
Andy Chen: We have the benefit of being a global company… We kind of got a bit of a playbook from that geography. The way I think about Covid and the impact on the business was less about fundamental disruption, but more of an acceleration of disruption that was already happening or that was already taking place in our industry. This whole idea that you can have a meaningful connection online, I think we proved in Covid that were getting really darn good at it. We made a lot of preparations around how are we going to enable people our users to have experiences… utilizing technology. And that’s a lot of what we’ve been doing across the brands.
Merrilee Kick: I was terrified. I was worried we were going to have to shut down. And I didn’t know whether alcohol was going to be an essential business or not. Luckily [the state] said that we could make hand sanitizer, which we did. And within one day, we overcame all the stuff that we had to do to buy the ingredients and getting going. In the end, we pivoted and made over 18,000 gallons of hand sanitizer and packaged it and gave it away for free to all the first liners. My biggest fear was even though were not shutting down and still producing, people are pantry loading… that was one of our biggest months ever was March, but because everybody was shutting down and laying people off and all of that the distributors who buy from us were bleeding their inventory and holding less inventory so that hurt us in April. But during that time my biggest concern was my people. How do I get PPE for my people?
How have you been coping and staying productive during this crisis?
Andy Chen: When we first went to move to work from home there was kind of a blurry period where life was just chaotic. I felt really unbalanced and I just started developing new coping mechanisms and new habits. And now, going back to the office is causing dissonance in my head. I think the first thing is working from home has allowed me is to spend a lot more time with family. We're not commuting to work, so how do we use that time? I’ve been using that time to spend more time with my wife, spend more time on my bicycle. And the other thing is just making sure that because, at least physically, we’re so distant from the rest of the team, I just spend a lot of time checking up and doing one-on-ones, and not only with just my team.
Merrilee Kick: We have some people on our team that work from home… but being a factory, we had the factory floor and all those people in production that had to be there. My job is to help smooth it over and make it as comfortable for them as possible and as safe as possible. As far as for me, it’s been day-to-day. It’s the same old day-to-day routine, I haven’t really changed my routine. If anything it has given me more careful concern about the people and their emotions. These are things we’ve never had to deal with before… We have to keep on living, we have to keep on working… we have to feed our families. Those are things that are very real.
The event was powered by Thomson Reuters, which has been helping small businesses across the country with its Small Business Covid-19 Resource Center. Attendees heard from Aimee Egan, general manager, small- and mid-market corporations at Thomson Reuters, who dove into some of the details within the center.
Check out some of their tips for navigating PPP, CARES Act and other stimulus loan guidance for small businesses below.
- Borrowers are not obligated under PPP to request loan forgiveness.
- On June 5, 2020, President Trump signed the Paycheck Protection Flexibility Act, which extended the loan forgiveness calculation period from eight weeks to the earlier of (i) 24 weeks and (ii) December 31, 2020. However, a business can still choose the eight-week period if it received the loan before June 5.
- If you offer to rehire an employee, the employee is generally excluded from the loan forgiveness reduction calculation if they reject the offer. This exclusion is also available if the business previously reduced an employee's hours and the employee rejects an offer to restore that employee’s hours at the same salary or wages.
- If your business receives a PPP loan, it can impact eligibility for other relief. For example, a business that receives a PPP loan is not eligible for the Employee Retention Credit, even if the business does not request forgiveness and ultimately repays the loan.
- As you weigh the benefits of maximizing your loan forgiveness amount against the short- and long-term needs of your business, consider the following:
- Depending on your situation, it may help your business to continue furloughs or other workforce reductions in the short-term, and pay back any unforgiven loan amount over time at a low interest rate.
- On the other hand, you may want to increase payroll costs during the covered period to maximize loan forgiveness. The loan forgiveness window begins on the first day of your covered period. You may want to:
- notify employees of your rehiring plans as soon as your PPP loan is approved so you can get a jump start on the rehiring process; and
- provide incentive bonuses to get employees back on payroll immediately.
- In either case, good recordkeeping is important for maximizing your loan forgiveness.
And of course, thank you to our founding partners and sponsors for making this event possible.
