Today at our staff meeting, I looked around and marveled at how much we've grown, even in this weird and unstable time.
Nevada has been very hard hit by the virus -- the casinos were earliest to close, which meant 200,000 people lost their jobs at one time, and the hits just kept coming... and don't get me wrong at all, I think this is necessary. You can see from our relatively low case rate that the closures worked, and the value of those lives can't be overstated, but still, it has come at a pretty high price.
I think we can all confidently say:
- Fuck cancer*
- Fuck Coronavirus
The virus slowdown gave me some time to pause and reflect on how we want our business to run, including, specifically, letting people go who were doing things that could be redistributed among the existing team. No one loves that, but we did have to make cuts, and the first cuts we made (after taking a dramatic salary haircut myself, of course) had to do with tasks we could either do ourselves (writing & social media) or that we could just not do at all for a while (reporting).
So when the Small Business Administration helped us out with a couple loans, we again got to re-evaluate what we were doing, and what we thought the business should do in the future... and the answer was VERY clear: We need to MAKE PRODUCTS and we need to SEND THEM TO YOU... FAST.
Specifically, we needed production and fulfillment people to help make and ship the products.
Over the past week, we brought on four new people:
- Ron (not to be confused with Ronny in Production) - New in Fulfillment
- Samantha - New in Production
- Rob (not to be confused with Bobby or Robert) - New in Production
- Robert (not to be confused with Bobby or Rob) - New in Production
(side note: isn't it a funny trend how many Rons and Robs we have? Just under half our company is named either Ron or Rob)
It's always awesome to see the results of your actions, so I want to give you a huge big THANK YOU for making this happen.
Thank you for buying Outlaw products, thank you for sharing us with your friends, thank you for your support and encouragement... it means a lot to a lot of people... and in our little cosmos, that's four more this week than two weeks ago.
* Anyone who has read our first emails to the end knows what I'm talking about.
