PPE Wars: What COVID-19 Taught Me About Business
A Chapter Excerpt from the Book Success Mindsets: How Top Entrepreneurs Succeed in Business and Life (#1 Amazon Non-fiction, USA Today and WSJ Best Seller)
The Calm Before the Storm
On a warm and sunny morning on March 11, 2020, I sat near the poolside café of the Sheraton Jumeirah Beach Hotel in Dubai. Facing the beautiful Persian Gulf drinking an Arabic coffee, I admired the Palm Jumeirah in the distance and watched the skydivers float in under canopy, touching down near the International Marine Club.
My cell phone buzzed; it was a message from a client. “We’re going to need to cancel our meeting,” it read. “Things are really getting worse here, and the borders may close soon. I suggest you get home while you can.” As I pondered what to do, my phone buzzed again. This time, it was a news alert: The World Health Organization declares the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic. “Well, shit,” I said, “I guess it’s time to go.”
I spent the next few hours canceling meetings and reworking airline tickets to return to Washington, DC. “I’ll probably be back next month,” I told the young woman as she checked me out of the hotel. “You know, when this whole COVID thing blows over,” I continued. Little did I know. My flight home was eerie; I sat in coach and had an entire section — about one-quarter of the plane — to myself.
After landing at Dulles, I experienced another eerie, twilight-zone-like moment. As I left the airport and drove toward the Capital Beltway, the regular bumper-to-bumper traffic was replaced with a wide-open road. I waited for zombies to lumber onto the highway, and I kept looking for Will Smith and the German Shepherd from I am Legend. As I sped home at a record-setting pace, my denial turned to disbelief. Hundreds of questions swirled through my head, but I was confident that I was prepared for whatever came my way because I had built a mindset for success.
The rest of this chapter in the anthology Success Mindsets: How Top Entrepreneurs Succeed in Business and Life was released by Simon & Schuster and Leaders Press. The chapter is an entertaining look into the real-life dramas, successes, and failures experienced by entrepreneurs in the race to bring critical PPE to the front lines of America when traditional supply chains failed. To read rest of this story and many others, a copy can be ordered here: https://www.amazon.com/Success-Mindsets-Entrepreneurs-Succeed-Business-ebook/dp/B09K4MZYDX
