EW 024 – How To Profitably Pivot Your Business During A Crisis – How Founder Sean Hoff And His Team At Moniker Got A Big Win During Covid

Gordon Sheppard (00:01.272)
Sean, welcome to the show.

Sean Hoff (00:04.309)
Thank you, Gordon. So my name is Sean Hoff. I am the founder and managing partner of a company called Moniker. Our business does basically corporate retreats, incentives, and off-sites. We typically work with tech companies who are looking to take remote teams who are spread out around the world. They want to get together at least once per year. So we help them do that, whether it be on the beaches of Barcelona, or it could be, for example, taking a group to Iceland for an incentive trip.

where they're rewarding their top performers or top salespeople. It's a pretty fun business. So we're here today. Sorry, go ahead.

Gordon Sheppard (00:40.664)
Yeah, it's so fun to be here with you because our audience is gonna get a ton out of learning about this. I was on your website and there is a, do you want examples of our work? And normally you see like, I don't know, maybe five, six examples. I don't know if there was dozens on there of all these unique places and unique experiences that you've created around the world. How satisfying is it for you to create an experience for someone the way you've described?

Sean Hoff (01:06.401)
So that's why I got into this business. I actually started out my career in the financial industry. I worked at a bank and I worked for about five years in an investment banking division which had a president's club trip. And that was my first introduction to what we do. And way back then I was in my mid to late 20s. I didn't realize that this kind of...

realm of travel existed and it was really eye-opening when I did participate in my first trip. It just totally blew me away. And so as you can imagine, when I finally like, I think it was, I went on the trip for about three years straight and then that's when I made the decision that I, this is what I want to do. Like this is what I'm much more passionate about. This is what I get much more excited about. I made the decision to leave the bank and start Moniker and the whole ethos behind it was to create these magical experiences and memories.

for our clients and their teams to enjoy anywhere around the world.

Gordon Sheppard (02:07.31)
If I'm on one of your magical experiences and I know you can't tell me the whole thing, but I'm, I don't know if I see Los Cabos there or whatever, going to Asia, there's things, what happens? You set up the whole thing. And so it's sort of a seamless experience for my corporate team that gets to go on this trip. And then you would plan out sort of activities that not only stimulate their business, but also give them a chance to see the area, interact with each other, that kind of thing. Is that fair?

Sean Hoff (02:30.741)
Yeah, we're basically a hybrid between a fossil service travel agency to help you with the flights, the hotels, where to go, when to go, a tour operator to help you figure out what the day to day looks like, what are you doing in the morning, what are you doing after lunch or for dinner? And then the event planner side, which is actually meeting with you on a bi-weekly basis to plan the whole trip and then actually going on site for the execution to make sure that.

On site, the experience that all of the attendees get is seamless. Everything is covered and everybody gets home safe and sound.

Gordon Sheppard (03:04.686)
It sounds wonderful and you know it's funny these exotic places that I saw there that you've sent all these corporate teams. It sounds exotic but it also must be a lot of hard work for you and your team to pull these things off along the way. One of the things that we like to jump into having learned a little bit about you now is if you had to pick one of your biggest wins, I mean you started this company a while ago, you had to pick one of your biggest wins that you like to talk about and share. What would that be and how would you describe it?

Sean Hoff (03:30.017)
That's a great question, Gordon. So as you know, we're in the travel industry. And as you can imagine, probably one of the hardest years for anybody in the travel or hospitality industry was 2020 when COVID hit. A lot of people in our industry just had their entire business model flipped upside down in a span of a few weeks, ourselves included. And in particular, like our whole business revolved around

people being able to get together in person around the world. And coming from multiple countries, hopping on planes often, and then gathering at a hotel or at a resort or a property somewhere where they could bond, do some work together, do some activities together, and then have dinner together. Well, as we all know, that wasn't possible in 2020 and for a good stretch of 2021. And so we had to basically figure out what were we going to do to reinvent ourselves.

or go the way of the dodo. So the story goes is basically in March 2020, as everything was unfurling and everybody was still glued to their TVs to figure out what was happening in the world with the updates that were coming from the news. I remember this specifically, there was an evening a few days just before it all kind of happened. I was cooking in my kitchen and all of sudden my phone started just blowing up. It was vibrating nonstop.

And I looked at it and I had something like 42 messages and alerts. And they were all basically saying they were from friends and they were from family and then they were from coworkers saying everything going on. What are you going to do? What's going to happen? How does this affect this? How does it affect that? Like, have you turned on the TV? Have you looked at the news? So I flip on the news and this was the day that Donald Trump, who was president back then, declared that all travel to and from Europe was going to be halted.

And we had a trip three days later, which was taking a group that was predominantly spread around the US to Dublin, Ireland. In fact, I had already started to, my suitcase was open up in my apartment. I was doing some laundry and I was going to start packing that day because we were leaving a few days later. And so yeah, it was a pretty big, we didn't have the answer for what we were going to do. We spent the next two, three weeks basically unraveling and canceling everything and speaking to suppliers and trying to get...

Sean Hoff (05:55.905)
deposits back and reading through cancellation clauses and contracts and it was a whirlwind. About three to four weeks after all that happened, I got a phone call from one of our best and most long-standing clients and he calls me up to say, Sean, unfortunately we've made the decision that we're going to be cancelling October's retreat. And I obviously saw this coming, but for me I thought October seemed like a very, very far time away from March. Perhaps we should just

you know, wait another month or two to see what happens, to see if this blows over. Obviously hindsight's 20-20, it did not. And he said, no, I think we're gonna cancel, it's just, you know, I think it's a smart thing to do. But what are you guys doing in the virtual world? And at that point, I hadn't really thought about that, I hadn't heard about it. And honestly, at that moment, I was just like, wow, we just lost yet another piece of business. was some of the only remaining.

bookings we had in our calendar and the last thing I could possibly think of is what are we doing in the virtual world? I said nothing. He says, okay, well, I'm getting my team together for an all hands in about a month on Zoom. I really feel like I'd like to give them a laugh or something. You guys are usually very creative at this team building stuff. So if you come up with anything, let me know. And so that's kind of how we ended that call.

And then a light bulb went off in my head. I mean, it took me a few days to kind of like, you know, what is he talking about? And I remember at that point in March 2020 and April 2020, I was getting on happy hours and zoom games and things like that. And nothing was really that exciting. But then the light bulb moment happened where I realized that all of our clients at the end of the day, they worked with us because they believed in getting people to come.

They believed in the power and the return on their investment of putting their team together to get something out of it. And if we couldn't do that through hopping on a plane or going somewhere and gathering in person, and if the only outlet for us available was going to be Zoom or Teams or whatever it is, then that's what we're going to have to do. We're going to have to figure out how to make getting together online actually fun and engaging because this is...

Sean Hoff (08:18.155)
This is the only thing available to us. And so I remember back in high school, I did this little exercise in one of my, think it was a science class where it was, you're stranded on the moon, your lunar module crash landed. Here are 10 items that were recovered from the wreckage. Get together in teams of three, discuss what the benefits and possible uses of these 10 items are, and then rank them. And then we'll go through the answer key.

And I don't know why that came to my mind, but I remember it being a fun little survival exercise. And so I tried it out with our team a few days later, I like typed up my own version of it. And I split the group in Zoom into smaller teams of three. And I said, let's just see how this works. And people actually said that was actually really fun. That was engaging. Obviously like we didn't have great graphics. I used like a Microsoft Word doc.

But that's where kind of the gears started turning. was like, what happens if we can take simple things like that and start to make them fun with videos, get actors to record the messaging, create like websites where people drag and drop. And what happens if we can have curve balls that are thrown in every 10, 15 minutes? And then the gears just kept turning and we were like, what else would be fun in a virtual environment? And somebody threw out the idea of a murder mystery. And I said, that would be fun, but how do you possibly do that over Zoom? And so...

we started writing the script and this idea for like, well, what would that look like and how would that flow? We reached out to a friend of one of our employees who was, he came through the Queens University Theater department and obviously they weren't, they were performing on stage in Kingston, Ontario and that was shelved. And so we reached out to him and he said, look, we have this idea, we wanna do a virtual murder mystery.

We need eight actors, live actors. It's going to take two hours. And here's kind of how we see it going. We're going to do an intro. Your people are going to have a virtual argument. We're going to spotlight different faces as each person comes up. And then we're going to split off into different rooms and people will come visit and ask you live questions, which you will answer in character and then go back to their rooms with their, their teams, share what they discussed and then cross and go to a different room and start interrogating a different suspect. They bought into it. They love the idea and

Sean Hoff (10:36.385)
That ended up I think what started with one Really kind of guinea pig janky version of it was which was the first one we did for that that companies all hands one month later We got their feedback. We tweaked it. We started doing it for other companies I think we ended up operating something like 300 murder mysteries over the course of two and a half years. We got Interviewed by the CBC we got on the cover of the Wall Street Journal as the face of what virtual team building looks like

It exploded and it not only did it save our business like we went from obviously the threat of layoffs Our business grew during kovat. We hired we went from about seven eight people full-time, too I think by the end of it We were 12 or 13 people full-time just to keep up with the demand for virtual and all the things that we were rolling out but yeah, we were thriving and What was interesting for us was as a company?

what we were doing hadn't really changed. The job we were fulfilling for our clients was the same. They were looking for ways for their teams to connect, except instead of in person, it was virtual and they came to us because we were doing it in a more innovative and creative way than whatever else was out there. And so I really do kind of look at that, look back at that as one of our biggest wins because a lot of our competitors either folded or just went into hibernation mode and we came out of it.

over twice as big and just hit the ground running when travel started to come back because we, through the course of that virtual, we met something like five, six hundred new customers who we had now relationships with who we said, by the way, I don't know if you know this, but what we actually do is in-person gatherings. so they, when travel came back to the forefront, it was an obvious kind of segue into let's talk to you about your in-person get-togethers.

Gordon Sheppard (12:29.538)
You're a terrific storyteller. I can already see you out on the retreats. I'm sure where you've had your inputs or your inputs here. Also the flexibility as a leader of your organization to not get stuck and say, just hang it up. We're going out of business. You had the ability to sort of do the scramble pivot that was needed by so many companies during that time that survived through there. And not only did you do it, you thrived and actually grew the business. That's just remarkable. just, sorry, I have a drama degree from Queens University.

Sean Hoff (12:57.569)
There you go.

Gordon Sheppard (12:57.858)
So I'm so proud. That's quite a literal thing. It's, I mapped an MBA there about 20 years later, but it's so fun to think back that that was sort of the origin for you. And I can think maybe it wouldn't be hard to chat about some of those names. And I'm not sure if I'm from the right era in terms of who you sort of tapped for that, but how wonderful that occurred. It's so fun to hear about this thing and how thoroughly you've told the story. Cause what we get into now is what we call the anatomy of a win.

where we talk about the strategy, the work plan, the people, operations, and results behind the win. The strategy, I'm gonna say, you've already sort of stated two things. One, there's a scramble aspect to it. So it's not actually that you've got it planned. You've got to actually react. There's an element there. But you said there's a through line, either in what you might call your values or what your customers value, which fits in with kind of your vision, mission in a sense. And if you had to clarify that, were just, you were alluding to it a few times there, but this idea that they wanna get people together. That's their...

the big thing that I heard you were talking about. Does that make sense for the strategy?

Sean Hoff (13:59.103)
Yeah. So back to your first point, think necessity is the mother of invention. and that was, that was exactly what was happening. I think people in different businesses around the globe, no matter what industry you were in, people were figuring out you either needed to figure out a pivot or adopt, or if the status quo, wasn't going to work for me, work for you and your business, then there, there wasn't really much of a future, for you. So

For us, there's something I learned recently where it's not necessarily the actual work you perform for people. At the end of the day, companies are hiring you to perform a certain job. In this case, what is the job that we were performing for our clients? isn't even when travel was existing. They aren't hiring us to help them book flights and to help them...

find hotels and to make sure that the itinerary and the agenda is amazing and everything works out flawlessly on site. The job that we are helping them do and fulfill is basically making sure that we are helping them connect their teams in a fun and engaging way. It just so happened that back then the most fun and engaging way involved, you know, going to South America or wherever it might be. And so at the crux of it, that became kind of the ethos of

the virtual world is we cannot do that anymore. We cannot fulfill that job anymore in the real world or with travel or with flight. So we're going to have to fulfill that job in the virtual world. What tools are available to us? What can we do to make it more interesting or appealing than everything that's out there? And how can we take our own lens and spin it in a creative way so that like people who actually show up, we understand people when they saw another

calendar invite that was like a Zoom meeting or a Zoom team building, there was groans and eye rolls, but like our job was to overcome that and make it as exciting and fun as possible so that once people finished, they would go reach out to their company organizer and say, that was awesome. Can we do it again? What else do they have? And that really drove the whole kind of push. It was amazing for us as a company, like the job titles that we had heading into COVID, we had people who were

Sean Hoff (16:16.81)
trip planners, had operations directors, we had people who were researching proposals. And in the first few months of COVID, everybody put on a different hat. We had people writing scripts, we were making escape rooms using real estate technology, know, and you can crawl through a house in 3D to explore it using those cameras. We were building escape rooms that you could click your way through.

and solve puzzles. And there was somebody on my team whose job title was trip planner. And here they were creating like these elaborate puzzles using 3D models and renders. And it was incredible just to see everybody on our team rally around the same mission of creating something that would help people connect.

Gordon Sheppard (17:01.698)
Helping people connect, the core strategy of why you do your work. And like you said, it's not mechanics, it's your ability. There's a secret sauce in here. You and your team are providing that's way beyond those logistics and helps people to make that connection. Whether you're doing it again live or on Zoom like you're describing here now, that's really interesting. The second step in there, if we have a strategy, we need a work plan. In this case, the work plan was reactive. Like if we had to take the highlights along the way, you've already sort of built up a few highlights along the way. We did one.

It was janky in your words. We sort of made some reactions to that. We got feedback and then we got better and better and we iterated in a sense. It sounds like, it's funny, it sounds like a startup within your organization. You know what mean? Where you've got to get through that mode of delivering that online kind of service. Any other highlights from kind of the work plan timeline that you would describe along the way?

Sean Hoff (17:45.759)
Yeah, I remember after we did that for after our team did that first lunar crash survival game. I told them, okay, I want everybody to take the next few days. I want you to go Google as much as you can about what else exists on the internet. And we're to spend the next week or two trying everything we can. And so we were literally

being paid to spend our days on Zoom together as a team, trying other people's trivia games, other people's escape rooms, other people's whatever. did like as many different, whatever else was on the internet and being offered during the early days of COVID as like virtual team building, we tried it. And we were approaching it from almost like from a academic standpoint of like what works, what isn't, what are the tips we can learn from this?

What are the things that we definitely want to avoid? Like what is making this not fun? And so as we distilled all of that down, we started to figure out like kind of what the right formula was to make things engaging versus not. And then a big part of that was having a live human being host you and greet you and speak to you. Another part of that was keeping it relatively short. Like you only have realistically like maximum 60 to 90 minutes attention span when you're on a zoom call. After that, it just drags on and on and on. So we needed to keep it short.

We needed.

engaging graphics and visuals. couldn't just be somebody talking or here's a two-page PDF of text read here for the instructions. And so that guided us a lot. And then our team kind of naturally split into two. There was like one half that was like focused on the creative and the ideation and bringing things to life. And then we had the other half who was very much more the right-brain group who was like, okay, these crazy ideas are flying out of the right, the other side of the company. We have to introduce processes, protocols, process flow

Sean Hoff (19:37.711)
charts what happens first and then what and then how do we respond and what's what happens in this case what happens in that case and having both the yin and the yang there was incredibly helpful for us because I'm very much in on the left brain side where it's just like I've got an idea let's go let's just steamroll straight ahead and we'll figure out the rest when it becomes necessary but the the other half of our team was keeping the reins on it and thinking about those little questions like

What, how do we handle if there's 60 people in a waiting room and we're not ready to start yet? What messaging needs to go out? What happens like when if one of our actors cameras goes down, we need to have a protocol in place so that we can still get the clues out without disrupting the entire game. And I would have never thought of any of that or just it wouldn't occur to me until it happened. And I would probably retroactively said.

crap, we probably should have had like a solution in place, but I'm really lucky that our team naturally kind of fell into their zones of genius to fulfill all the things that we needed to think of.

Gordon Sheppard (20:39.982)
Wow. I can hear the literature in the background too. Jobs to be done is in there somewhere as owns a gene. Like you can hear your red in terms of what you're doing and what you're talking about. So we talk about strategy work plan, some of the highlights there. You got into the lab during the work plan, you iterated really rapidly. It sounds like too, in the way you did it and very dedicated. People, the people is the third step in the anatomy of a win, but you've described in spades. People took on new job roles. They jumped in. Do you know what mean? They jumped into the experiment. They obviously believed in the company.

But it sounds like what's interesting to me too is there's a through line here because they're a lot of the spirit of the way that what they carry their attitudes were sound like they were the same as when you were putting on your live events. They brought that enthusiasm and energy to this. How would you describe sort of the key people and their attitudes making this happen?

Sean Hoff (21:28.065)
I think when we started out, I think people were not necessarily skeptical, but it was like, I mean, come on, we're a travel company, you really think this is gonna work? But then as we started to gain a little bit of momentum, the buy-in was palpable. Like you could see that everybody was all of a sudden getting excited about this. They knew that we were onto something. They also realized that this was our survival at stake and all of a sudden like...

Not only were they didn't have to worry about getting laid off as they saw kind of the business that we were generating, but we, a big part of the people side of it for me was sharing in the wins 100%. So we had like tracking boards where we were showing like, here's what our burn rate per month is. Here's what we need to survive. Anything above that is gravy. and we started like sharing little things, like every time we had a new milestone, which we would set, there'd be like little gifts or little rewards milestone.

rewards that we would share with the team. were giving monthly updates about how we were doing as we took on more people. They would equally share in the wins. People got very excited and I would say that I don't think I've ever been part of a team that felt so cohesively.

all aboard in the same mission as I did during those like first four to five months of COVID. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that we went from a solid year of business down to zero on the calendar in a span of probably one month. And over the course of the next two, three years for a company that by all rights should have had zero on the books until travel started return, we generated...

think it worked out at like $2.7 million. And I think our team, it's not hard to rally around something like that kind of success story.

Gordon Sheppard (23:20.078)
That's phenomenal. Like talk about making something out of nothing during those COVID days. What a great story. But also what a great story for any company, anytime. We could say tariffs. could say, you know what I mean? In changing conditions, people would need to react and your team rallied and you found sort of a way through to make it even more profitable. I have to ask about you. There's something about you and your attitude.

to rally this gang, and I don't mean to pin it all on you, I'm sure it's a team effort, but what is it about you and your attitude during that time that was a contributing factor?

Sean Hoff (23:56.095)
That's a great question, Gordon. I think, I think my general attitude towards encountering like problems or challenges or obstacles is my first reaction is always, how do we get around this? What's, what's the loophole? What's the, the, the escape patch? very rarely. This is both.

A positive and a negative, if somebody tells me a no or I encountered a closed door, do I accept it? I usually will push, I'll try a different approach, I'll try a different alley, but more often I tend to say, no, okay, we've got the first no, I'm not gonna stop until we hit the sixth no, and then for sure at that point, like we can safely assume that the door is 100 % shut. But that was the same idea. It's not that I thought that, magically they're...

There must be an opportunity here and a solution. So let's just find it. It was, well, we've been handed quite a bushel of lemons. What can we do with this? And our team, like just your brain starts working in a problem solving.

way and it's like okay well what are the tools that we have at our disposal what are the options available to us what approaches could we take what are the different solutions that we could explore what is what are other people doing how is that working what's working well what's working not and so that's just how my brain is wired and i think the other thing that really helped was building on our success and the momentum of it was being very very transparent about like

what was working, wasn't. I was the one who came up with this idea and it completely flopped. And somebody else in the team came up with a different idea and it is absolutely running with it. So let's just go in that direction. And when the other people started to realize that we were all in this boat together, it became this like camaraderie and this environment of like...

Sean Hoff (25:53.215)
basically we're all rowing together in the same direction and everybody was aboard. I don't know how else to describe it, there's an image that comes to mind of servant leadership versus hierarchical leadership, where the hierarchical leader is sitting in the chariot while he whips the people in front of him to pull the chariot forward. And the servant leader is the one at the front of the pack and he's pulling the entire group with him.

And I love that imagery because it does give you this, like, if you're not down and willing to do exactly the same amount of work of what you're asking of the people that you're working with, then how can you possibly expect them to get on board with you? And so that really does help me well.

Gordon Sheppard (26:36.494)
Wow, we could stop the interview right there for the leaders that listened. I mean, that's just a wonderful, thanks for recapping that. I really appreciate the insight into sort of your attitude. We've heard, you in spades, we've heard all about the team and the things along the way there. We talked about the strategy, the work plan, people. Operationally is the sort of four step for the anatomy of women, but you've described a lot of the operations. There was like, we got to learn how to use Zoom better than anybody else. We're going to learn how to work with actors. We're going to change our job titles. We're going to create virtual environments.

Anything else on the operational side that you may not have highlighted so far that would be a highlight for that win?

Sean Hoff (27:12.877)
from an operational side, for us, was like, had to literally learn how to invent a whole new business. We never took credit cards before that. had to evaluate all the options for credit card processing. had to figure out how we were going to do that. We had to figure out, we had to test Zoom versus Teams versus all the other ones. And it was so much of, think, figuring out what works in our approach was ensuring that we explored every other alternative to no

conclusively what didn't work. And that is when we felt comfortable going in the direction of what we did. So full credit to our operations team for doing that homework and making us feel that we were following the right path.

Gordon Sheppard (27:54.959)
Well, and you've already heard that there's the process people involve. You mentioned that as well. And congratulations on, you did, you built a new business. I mean, it's just stunning. And you did it, I can't believe the speed. Cause you know, from that first sort of experiment that you did on Zoom, how soon did the customers start coming in? Was it within three months? Was it within six months? Like how did that, because you mentioned the 300 that you delivered, but the, was it within 90 days, 180 days?

Sean Hoff (28:21.073)
I would say our first customer, we did that first, the all hands for that client who asked. I think it was within probably two, three weeks what happened. We explained to the team right after it was done. So you were our guinea pigs. This was the first show we've ever done. If you liked it, please, please, please give us some feedback. We'd love to turn this into something.

but we know it can be improved on. And I think from there, like somebody's spouse worked at a different company and he went on and you know just gushed about how fun this murder mystery was. And then that spouse was like, well you know what, our team is looking for something to do so let's do it. And it just kind of went from there. I would say from after that first month, that first client, I think we were...

There was three of us who all of sudden put our sales hats on and I was taking something about five, six hours of sales calls a day for several months. It was brutal, but obviously.

Gordon Sheppard (29:18.39)
And, but it led to that 300 appearances plus, you know, plus all the activity, plus these things. The final step in the anatomy when we look at these conversations for me is we measure results, qualitative, quantitative. Quantitative, I've heard millions, you know, in revenue that led to kind of thing like attributable or contributing partly in terms of how that went, where he's expected to be kind of at a zero, which is remarkable. And then it set you up to also deliver these, your value proposition to people that may never have heard you.

heard of you before because you're able to deliver a virtual and then they got to know about you in other ways as well along with the great service that you brought to them in that world and they knew that that would continue the next time. So again qualitative quantitative results which what else do you measure when you look back on that?

Sean Hoff (30:02.529)
For me, the big thing was, was honestly, I looked at the team. looked at who, every single person who was there at the beginning of 2020 is still here, five years later. I love that statistic. I think that says something about people really felt that they were part of something that was more than just a job. That was more than something that was keeping them off Serb back then. The wage subsidy.

or the support. I think they were like, okay, I think I found my tribe. I think I figured out that this community has actually got my back and they will take care of each other come high water or whatever happens. And I think that to me is for me, the thing that I'm most proud of is that we, I made a promise, which sounded quite bold and retrospect was crazy to say that there will be no layoffs. will find a way through this.

And I kept that and I honoured it and here we are five years later. The original team is still together. Obviously we've grown since then. We're now 21 people. And I think there's when we get together in person every now and then we talk about that. I just had an email come up where it was like, you know, like, on this day one or a few years ago, do you remember this memory? And I circulated it with the original group that was part of the virtual thing. And it was just like a little chuckle about like how crazy that all was.

Gordon Sheppard (31:28.856)
Congratulations. I mean, that's got to be pretty satisfying. Entrepreneurially, as you go through the peaks and valleys, I mean, you left the bank you probably could have been at for a couple of decades if you wanted to stay there, but you didn't. You got out, you started a passion project because you knew you wanted to do it. You knew it lit you up. But then also, there's something about your leadership chops and then this whole team that combined. now you're on a, you can hear the purpose that you're all coming to work with, especially if you're maintaining that team. That's stunning actually, that you were able to maintain that team through that time. That's just incredible. If you had sort of one,

You know, if you're talking to a leader who is about to face down a big upset to their business and you could sort of give maybe one shortish kind of couple sentences to inspire them, what would you sort of pass along from your experience?

Sean Hoff (32:16.897)
I think one thing I picked up definitely during that experience, then as well throughout other challenges that we faced is things always look darkest when you don't, when you haven't had time to really process what the possible outcomes can be. So when COVID hit, everybody's conclusion was if you're in the travel world or your restaurant business, we're over, we're dead. And then taking the time,

just sit down, think about it, know, your brain starts thinking about what are the alternatives, the solutions, like what should we be doing or approaching? I think you'd be quite surprised at yourself, at the members of your team, no matter what their title or their rank is, about the ingenuity and also just like the perseverance that will come out of your own people to figure out a way.

a way out of this, a way around this, a way over this. And I think as well, like too many, too often, think leaders just think that it's their job to solve all the problems and to overcome the challenges. But for us, it's been proven time and time again. I will ask the entire team, like, does anybody have, like here's the situation, does anybody have any ideas? I'm open to them. And that has helped me.

Just get a different perspective so many times, and in most cases we end up running with one of those ideas because you've got a wealth of knowledge at your fingertips. Tap into it.

Gordon Sheppard (33:50.639)
How lucky for me that you spent this time here today to share your story. I know that so many of the leaders that listen to this show are going to get a ton from what you said and they're going to be able to get in touch with you if they're looking for an outstanding corporate retreat opportunity.