Tomorrow night my first book launch party, for my first book – A LEAP YEAR of FIRSTS, is being thrown for me. Never having had a launch party I googled what to do at a book launch party. One of the points was to read an except from the book for your guests. Following was the excerpt I selected that represents the key turning point in my Leap Year. It was the prelude to a dramatic pivot…
“It’s 5 a.m. on Friday March 20th. I’m heaving, standing in my shower. I’m crying uncontrollably. I am about to perform an unwanted first today in my quest of my Leap Year of Firsts. For the first time in my life, I am going to lay off an employee. It isn’t going to be just one it is the entire company — all 45 of them. Many of these people have worked with me for many years — some for 40 years, others 25 plus, with the majority over five years. They are family. They have families. I care for them. I love them. I was them; I am them. I know the impact this will have on their lives, and it is not my fault. It is not their fault. It is the hand that the pandemic has dealt the world. I get it. I understand. That doesn’t make it hurt any less.
Earlier in the day, I had a tough conversation with my company’s banker. I let her know the predicament of our impending closure. I was transparent. I was practicing what I preach in times like these, honest communication. She was understanding and compassionate in offering additional loans to keep us afloat. I turned her offers down. Our future is uncertain. In good conscience, we can’t take on any additional debt. I don’t have faith we’d be able to pay them back. I can’t do that to my friends.
This moment and the sequence of events that produced this first today are best described in the subsequent Forbes Magazine article on our predicament:
“… Virtually overnight, his customers canceled long-planned events. ‘We didn’t need the Mayor of Philadelphia or the governor of Pennsylvania to tell us that we were a ‘non-essential’ business,’ says Baldwin. Under a city order, all of Spike’s regular venues and showrooms had been shuttered for a week before the governor’s stay-home pronouncement left Baldwin no choice: fighting off tears, he was forced to lay off his entire workforce that Friday afternoon at 2:30 p.m.”
My partners and I had gone over every possible scenario. We kept coming back to this unwanted first. At 2:30 p.m., I couldn’t even muster the energy to control the tears to communicate this news. I was inconsolable. My feelings and responsibility for them was stabbing me in the heart. I was a mess. I had to delegate the telling of the inevitable news to one of my partners. To make it worse we couldn’t even tell them in person. We had to set up a conference call. They were all at home due to a Coronavirus scare in our facility earlier in the week. I’m sure they had a clue as to what was coming. The afternoon prior, the governor had made a declaration that we were non-essential.
We received texts from the employees throughout the morning asking: What are we going to do? Our answers were consistent: We’ll talk about it at 2:30 p.m.
After my partner communicated the unavoidable bad news, more questions came — questions about their future, our future. Our answers lacked any certainty – either: “We don’t know …” or “We’ll do the best we can.” Despite our feeble replies, something remarkable happened. Several of them asked if they could still come to work next week even if we couldn’t pay them. Somehow, they managed a smile through the pain. Remarkable. Blessed.
I had started the year of 2020 committed to doing something EVERY DAY for the first time in my life. I was documenting these firsts in my first ever daily journal when the effects of the storm created by the worldwide pandemic hit. Never having risked my life climbing Mt. Everest I can only imagine what it would be like clinging to life on the side of that mountain during a surprise life-threatening storm. The tallest mountain in my life that I had to climb was the buying and growing of my awards business since my teenage years. I was 62 years old and a blinding storm in the form of the Coronavirus had hit. I didn’t know if my company would survive. I didn’t know if there would be jobs to return to. It felt like impending death. I was crying.“
Less than an hour later, that same day. the tide came in with an opportunity that presented itself during this chaos, that saved these jobs and the company. It allowed me to continue to do many more meaningful firsts during my Leap Year of Firsts.