hello my name is Gary Shotton and I’m here as a part of Inspiring Better Business, IBBTalks, today I’m going to talk about economic slowdown I’m recording this in the middle of May of night of 2020 and those that are watching near that date will know that we’re not sure what the future is going to be like so it’ll be interesting to see from my comments here maybe I listened to it a year later because I’m telling you I’m in the middle of that there’s an economic slowdown in the United States there’s an economic slowdown all around the world and the question comes what do I do in the middle of that well I have some few key points and I certainly don’t want to convey the thought that I have all the answers but number one and my company we’ve tried to restate that what we typically do try to stay as consistent with the way we’ve been doing things that if at all possible don’t don’t make some radical changes try to trim things down a little bit in some ways but try to keep all the things all the wheels rolling maybe it a little less pace or a little less vigorous but we have regular routines we’re rescheduled regular meetings like a what we call an evaluation of bad parts every morning at Monday Wednesday and Friday at 7:30 we keep doing this we have a warehouse review Wednesday at 1:30 in the afternoon we keep doing that we can keep doing our reports we keep looking at the same signals we try to keep things as close to normal as we possibly can and that means we didn’t we chose not to dis route it to to stop our midnight hour night shift and bring everybody today’s because those people have a routine as we stay into the routine where we’re trimming it a bit but we’re not radically changing anything number two the question was asked by some people in East Africa that should we extend credit because there’s so many people that are in a desperate situation and I could stay busy if I just extended credit well I wouldn’t advise that personally because if that’s what you’ve normally been doing if you have a way of doing credit and extending credit and you were being away you’re here know that you’re getting paid back then that would be something you’re normally doing but why would you change what you’re doing especially extending credit because you have a chance of doing all this work providing all the materials and never getting paid or getting paid extremely late I’m not one that likes to extend credit without some kind of guarantee or assurance or extreme confidence in that in the customer that’s taken the goods away because when they’ve gone away especially something like a meal when are you gonna get the meal back it’s already been eaten you made some some new shoes or you you did some tailoring for a shirt or a wedding I mean these things will not come back to you and if you don’t have any kind of leverage to get it back you’ve lost that money it would be better not to have done the job than to extended credit in those situation yes there will be times that you have to trim it’s not something you want to do right at this moment we’ve not had to trim extreme trim but in the year 2009 I had 65 employees and the economy just dropped in about four-week period it just dropped and I had no choice and I had to take those steps and I did relieve I’d have used the word fired but they realized there was an economic turndown that 4:41 of my 65 employees I had to let go and I said I’m sorry folks this is something that wasn’t planned in our case we had what’s called unemployment insurance so they had some income coming the way our system works but it wasn’t a full paycheck and I had to take the position that I couldn’t play God I couldn’t be everyone’s source I had protect the home base it wasn’t greed it wasn’t protecting Gary but if I let the company go bankrupt then the 24 most loyal people I had the core they wouldn’t have a job it’s kind of the idea of you can’t keep carrying something you had a ship and it’s just overloaded you’ve got and the storm comes you know they tell me and I’ve observed I’ve never been on the ocean like that and with in the olden days it was clear that they threw things overboard they threw part of their cargo overboard well they had to lighten the load so I had to lighten the load at that time and I had to take people off payroll so I could get through it and then number four if it’s number four boy we watched every expense we possibly could watch I’m still laugh about it a bit but from those days we used to have paper towels we bought paper towels wash your hands wipe up on a paper towel Pedro the towel into the trash we change that and we’re still doing it almost so many years later 12 years later 10 years later that we have wash machine and we wash a hand cloth because we didn’t want the expense of the paper towels we we cut out every unnecessary expense and you know it was kind of a purging it’s things that we need to get rid of anyway we didn’t cut off as much we had to cut off some payroll but other anything that we could save a dime on or some money on we made those drastic cuts and we watched and that’s what we should be doing anyway we should never fall into a case of money as easy and we’re wasteful that’s not it there’s a difference of being wasteful and and but also during this time I’m actually being generous that’s not being wasteful if I’m wasting if I had food and I didn’t eat at all or if I could do something cheaper but in my case we have an opportunity to bless some local restaurants that are in trouble like us we eat them them regularly so I’ve been buying lunch for Monday to our Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday for the last five weeks I’ve provided $500 for each day for all of our crew to have a lunch at our office it’s brought in it’s fed to them so I’m not bragging I’m just saying I didn’t I’m still being generous because I’m a generous person I’m not bragging I’m just saying I’m a generous person so I didn’t stop my giving I might have to adjust it sometimes but in my case I’m able to reach out and help some other people so I hope these three or four or five things are helpful to you I hope that you can get through this time together and maybe most important don’t let fear control you fear is the opposite of faith in many ways fear will cause you to do wrong make wrong decisions it’ll cause you to to react to something not wisely look at the numbers stay out of fear well all these are here to help you hope this is a benefit thank you for being a part of inspiring better business