In Crisis We Find Opportunity

The question I have been getting a lot lately: How is COVID-19 going to affect CEOX? If you are a leader in your business you have likely fielded the same question and spent a lot of time thinking about it and planning for different scenarios. I have done the same.  

I started CEOX because it was a calling. I’ve told a few people this, but I’ll tell the world now: I didn’t want to do it. When I had first conceived of the idea, I was telling everyone I could about it in hopes someone would “steal” the idea. I laugh because so many entrepreneurs want to protect their idea and limit what they tell others, and I was doing the exact opposite. But no one stole my idea and I got to a point that I HAD to do something. I already had two jobs, I have a workaholic husband, and I have two young boys of whom I will always be the primary caretaker/teacher/cook. I knew launching CEOX was going to be a lot of work and potentially cost a lot of money, and I didn’t want to do it, but I knew that I would regret not trying to solve this problem.

I gave myself permission to work on CEOX at my own pace. I prioritized my paid work (I made a commitment and I will always live up to that, plus I love my other work), I gave myself permission to allow pop in pizzas for dinner a little more often, I asked for help, and I figured out how to make CEOX happen without spending a lot of money. That has all positioned me in a place where a little thing like a global pandemic is not going to destroy what has been built.

Six months after starting CEOX, I wasn’t following the typical path to success (pulling all-nighters, raising money), and everything was moving forward well. The reception to CEOX has been overwhelmingly positive, the list of CEO-ready women has been growing quickly, CEOX received its first paid search contract for a President position of a consumer products company and we had several amazing candidates that were in contention. Then COVID-19 hit and within a matter of days, we went from washing our hands more often and making sure we had Purell in our purses, to doing elbow bumps in the forms of greeting, to complete social distancing. And that company we were helping find a new President for? They laid off 50% of their employees, and I was suddenly homeschooling my kids. Boom! Shit was getting real.

I definitely don’t consider myself an optimist, but in this case, I found I wasn’t panicked or worried. Since I wasn’t highly leveraged, kept costs to a minimum and didn’t have investors to answer to, I knew I could simply keep doing what I was doing. I also realized there was an opportunity here. For CEOX it is a chance to double down on our efforts to build our list of CEO-ready women. In the past three weeks of self-distancing, our list has grown over 15%. We have onboarded our first CEOX Ambassador and are getting ready to onboard our second, which will significantly expand our reach. We continue to do outreach to venture firms and recruiters so that they know we are here to connect them to high-level candidates for their CEO positions when we start coming out of lockdown, and herein lies what I think will be CEOX’s biggest opportunity: leadership change.  

Without a doubt, this crisis is going to make or break many CEOs. I am confident women leaders will really shine (we are seeing a lot of this already). Now that we are all working from home, homeschooling our children, trying to figure out what to make for dinner based on random pantry items, monitoring our family’s health, tracking toilet paper usage, AND getting our work done, the women leaders are going to finally be seen as exemplary. Because this is what we have been doing our whole careers!! I have literally held my son’s head to keep him from coming into view on a video call while trying to pitch a deal. The satire video of the BBC interview where the dad was interrupted by his daughter really doesn’t seem too far off. Granted, the pandemic has made it all times ten, but we have so much experience dealing with this type of adversity. We are already used to balancing competing demands, juggling priorities and getting back to work quickly after being interrupted, that we are more than equipped to guide our companies through this. So a few months from now, it will be clear which CEOs excelled in times of crisis and which ones failed. That is going to open up a lot of opportunities for CEO roles and the women of CEOX will be here to fill them.