• In general- I was on a phone with a brand, one of our clients this week, and I was talking about how over the last five or six years brands have carried the influencer industry. You guys have given them content and advertising and publicity and all of these things and they have given money. This is a really, really scary time to run a business. Certainly, there's a lot of small businesses that are not going to survive this, but there's also a lot of large businesses that are not going to survive this. Having to close your stores down is catastrophic. It would be impossible to overstate how painful that is for the vast majority of brands that do have retail stores.

    I think any brand that has supported you, any brand that you have worked with, especially ones that you've worked with consistently, you need to be thinking about what can you do to try and help them through this crisis. How can you help them without money right now to grow their business? Absolutely, you should be looking at the small businesses, the restaurants, the bars, the nail salons, the people in your community, the indie brands that you love, and thinking about how you can support them. A lot of brands only have two or three months of runway in the bank. Runway is essentially how much time you have, if you stopped making money today, how long could you run your business? A lot of businesses only have a few months of runway in the bank.

    We're facing a very, very real situation where if this goes on for two months, you could see 50% of the small businesses in America not be able to survive. That's with no government intervention, but still it is a really scary time to own any size business. One, any businesses supported you, go out, reach out to them, ask how they're doing, ask what you can do. Don't even have to ask, just start posting stuff that makes sense. You don't want to shove product down your community's throat right now. This isn't the time for that necessarily, but you can do it in a tasteful way and integrate it and say, "Hey, I'm trying to support these brands because I know things are hard right now."

    For small businesses, get creative. A lot of these smaller businesses don't have e-com, so you can't even drive to their website. I have a friend, Luke Beard on Instagram. We've done a little bit of work with him. He's a photographer. I saw that he offered to shoot photos for any restaurant in his city, which was Atlanta, shoot any restaurant that needed photos for their takeout menu, he would shoot it for free. Obviously, that's something he generally would charge a decent amount of money for. I thought it was a small but really nice way to do that.
    I saw Jess Kirby pulled together a list of small businesses in her area and ways to support them. I've seen a lot of influencers talking about ways to support their small businesses in their community and you absolutely should be out there thinking about that because I cannot stress enough how real it is that the vast amount of those businesses could disappear in the next few months if we don't do something. Don't forget the big businesses as well. Don't forget those larger companies, they're not invincible and they don't have endless amounts of money and they need support as well. I think you probably don't need to support Amazon right now. They're probably fine. Purell's doing okay, but essentially other than that, most businesses are suffering really, really badly. So, yes, do what you can.
    Episode #191
    - Strategies for dealing with COVID-19