Reflect, Reset

In times of uncertainty, there are two paths — you can try to persevere and forget, or you can try to learn and grow. At Permanent Equity we choose the latter and would encourage you to do the same. With proper perspective, pain and confusion can be some of life’s best instructors. When reality doesn’t match our expectations, it tells us something important and valuable. Current reality helps us calibrate to future possibilities, often in humbling ways. It exposes risks we didn’t know existed, shapes our probabilities, and illuminates opportunities. Life is so much richer (pun intended) if you don’t merely grin and bear it.

2020 has been a year of ups, downs, and everything in between. There's never been a better time to pause, reflect, and reset. As we do so, here are a few questions that come to mind that may be helpful to your business as well:

- How have your relationships with customers, suppliers, and employees changed during these trying times? If they have improved, how can you build off of this momentum going forward? If they have deteriorated, how can you restructure and rebuild key partnerships that are strained? Are you having the conversations necessary to understand where your relationships really stand?

- What does your business's balance sheet look like? Are expenses causing unnecessary risk, or assets which could be better utilized?

- What steps can you take now to protect your business against future lockdowns? What can be outsourced, diversified, or made digitally redundant?

- When is your industry expected to recover, how fast, and how can you position your business to be in front of the pack as demand returns?

- What have you learned from your competitors during the pandemic that either helped or hindered their survival and how can you implement these lessons?

- What strategies have you observed in other industries that may be applicable to your industry, but haven't been adopted yet? What’s stopping you from doing so?

- What new customer demands are emerging as a result of the pandemic that are currently underserved and unmet? If you can’t think of any, give your best customers a call.

- What are the second order effects from the coronavirus in your industry, the consequences of the consequences, and how can you position your business to be ahead of the curve?
- How have the economic shocks experienced by your industry (demand, supply chains, financial, etc.) changed how you think about operating your business going forward?

In the immortal words of Yogi Berra, "it's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." In fact, it isn't just tough, it's impossible. Given the truth to Berra's witticism, it is important bear in mind that times like these are learning opportunities and lessons worth adding to the playbook for the future.

Marc Andreessen on productivity, scheduling, reading habits, work, and more (a16z)

+ "You know, we’ve both worked with executives where they were scheduled to the ‘nth’ degree. The three things you tend to notice with executives like that. One, they just never have any time to actually think. And that turns out to be a fairly important thing. Two, they have a hard time adjusting to changes in circumstances. In our business of venture capital, you get a lot of problems that come up. There is a lot of firefighting. It’s like those classic movie scenes when there’s a huge crisis and somebody calls out to their secretary “Cancel my schedule!”. Well, maybe you wouldn’t need to do that if you had some flexibility in your calendar. Then the other thing you’ve probably seen is the managers who are regimented to that degree end up being micro managers. You’ve probably seen examples of this where some of these folks end up in the weeds on everything. The good news is they’ve got the pulse of everything happening in the organization. The bad news is they’ve become the bottleneck."

U.S. states face biggest cash crisis since the Great Depression (Wall Street Journal)

+ "Nationwide, the U.S. state budget shortfall from 2020 through 2022 could amount to about $434 billion, according to data from Moody’s Analytics, the economic analysis arm of Moody’s Corp. The estimates assume no additional fiscal stimulus from Washington, further coronavirus-fueled restrictions on business and travel, and extra costs for Medicaid amid high unemployment."

The falling price of Manhattan retail space, by the numbers (Marker Media)

+ "Eighty percent: That’s the plunge below the peak price of retail real estate on the most desirable stretch of Madison Avenue in Manhattan, according to the Wall Street Journal. Specifically, the Journal points to the recent sale of three buildings for what works out to $1,340 per square foot — compared to $7,589 paid for a building six blocks away back in 2014. Data from brokerage firm Cushman & Wakefield displayed a similar trend: average Madison Avenue ground-floor rental prices in the second quarter of 2020 plummeted to their lowest rate since 2011."

The health of main street business (Homebase October Report)

+ An in depth look at small business metrics across US geographies highlights how warmer states are seeing business pick up while colder states are experiencing muted declines.

With no commute, Americans simply worked more during coronavirus (Wall Street Journal)

+ "From mid-March to mid-September, Americans spent 60 million fewer hours commuting to and from work each day, according to one estimate, as lockdown orders to curb the spread of Covid-19 forced many employees to clock in from home. But instead of pouring the reclaimed time into hobbies or happy hour, most funneled it into work and chores."

6 counterintuitive rules for being a better manager — advice from Lambda School, Quip & Facebook (First Round Review)

+ "“Management isn’t telling people what to do. It isn’t setting a vision and aligning the work around it. That’s leadership. To me, the best leaders are able to not just say, ‘Here's where we need to go,’ but are also capable of bringing people along, inspiring them, and making the ‘why’ behind that goal clear,” she says. “True management is the act of making the people around you better. Management is about investing in people, figuring out who they are, what they're good at, what motivates them, and then aligning the work a company has to do with their role and their growth areas.”"

How to stay creative when life is monotous (Harvard Business Review)

+ "Spend time in nature. A psychological study that looked at the impact of nature on creativity found that spending quality time outside improves people’s creative potential. Fifty-six people who went on a hiking trip took an assessment that measured creative potential using word associations. Twenty-four took the test before they began the trip, and the other 32 took it on the fourth day. Those in the latter group performed much better. Researchers ultimately found that spending time in nature improved creativity test scores by 50 percent."

Will bowling alleys survive the pandemic? (InsideHook)

+ "Bowling and the coronavirus have one thing in common. In both cases, Americans comprise a disproportionate number of the people involved. Of the 100 million annual bowlers worldwide, Americans make up an astonishing 70 million. Before the pandemic, the industry was raking in around $6 billion each year. A majority of states across the nation offered bowling as a high school sport. Highly successful professional bowlers were making well over six figures a year (believe it or not). Still, rewind just a few years back, and some reports were spelling doom for the country’s lanes, noting that revenue was down $10 billion since the mid-’90s and growth had lagged since the ’60s, when there were 12,000 bowling centers nationwide."

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