How I Built Resilience: Live with Sarah LaFleur

Hey, welcome to How I Built This Resilience Edition. I'm Guy Raz. So each week I've been doing live video conversations with founders and entrepreneurs about how they're building resilience into their businesses right now. And in case you miss them when they happen live, we're posting excerpts right here in your podcast feed. And today I'm bringing you my conversation with Sarah LaFleur, the founder of MM LaFleur. We featured Sarah on the podcast just a few months ago in February, but since then, of course, a lot has changed. MM LeFleur sells high quality, classic clothing to working women who don't want to think too hard about getting dressed in the morning. But since the global health and economic crisis, Sarah's customers, many of whom work in law, finance, and politics, aren't going into the office. So these days, Sarah's learning to pivot.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean it was kind of crazy how quickly things turned, you know? We knew COVID was coming, and actually, because we have a lot of partners out in East Asia and South East Asia, we even back in January, we knew that this was really affecting our supply chain and our partners. Um, we said to ourselves, like, this could really become a problem if it comes to the US. But I think we were honestly just a little naive at that point. And then come Monday, I think this was March twelfth or something. We had our best retail day and we're saying like huh maybe like COVID won't affect us. And then five days later, we closed all of our stores. And just even in all the scenario planning we had done, nothing I think prepared us for just how much worse it was gonna be.

Yesterday we had Jen Hyman on from Rent the Runway, and you know, one of the points she made is that most businesses aren't prepared for low or no revenue periods for an extended Amount of time. Totally true. I mean I you know the first thing actually we did is we actually Looked at our our insurance policy.

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