A Conversation With: Curt Schilling, Former MLB Player

The coronavirus continues to have dire effects on businesses across the country, and the franchise industry is no exception. Franchisors across segments are strategizing new ways to support their franchisees, keep customers satisfied, help local communities and come out stronger on the other side of this crisis.

To that end, 1851 Franchise publisher Nick Powills and Charles Internicola, founder and partner of the Internicola Law* Firm, are covering the coronavirus and its impact on businesses through our A Conversation With webinar series.

In today’s afternoon webinar, Powills and Internicola spoke with Curt Schilling about how leaders can learn from the COVID-19 crisis. 

Here are some of the key insights from their discussion.

The Right Perspective

The topic of recovery needs to be thought of from the perspective of leadership. A company or team is only as strong as their leader. This crisis will be an enormous test for leadership, and it needs to be about people first and foremost. 

Employees should be proud to wear the uniform. People who don’t have pride for the company they work for are just ex-employees waiting to happen. 

The reasons businesses succeed — whether through hard work, diligence, core values or endurance — will never change. For example, great customer service is never going to go out of style. 

Focus is more important than ever. When you assign smart, focused people to the same task, there is nothing the team can’t achieve. The leadership of a company needs to be able to facilitate that focus. In terms of the labor pool, there will likely be an immense amount of talent looking for work soon. 

Moving Forward

When we come out of this crisis, the priorities will be very simple: get back to those principles that allowed the business to succeed in the first place. Sometimes, businesses need to go through a crisis to be able to build the strongest model. 

This will undoubtedly add another question that companies need to answer moving forward: How did the brand take care of their people during this crisis? 

There will now be an entire generation of young people who understand the importance of being prepared and always having money saved. No matter how carefully we budget, the unexpected will always come up. Companies will no longer be able to survive payroll by payroll. 

Fearless Leaders

Just because you want to, doesn’t mean you can. It is important that leaders are honest with themselves in terms of how they can succeed. Business owners need to take the right steps in order to get into the recovery mindset.

If leaders are worried about being disliked, they just need to make sure they are disliked for doing the right thing.