What We Learned From the PPP Application Process – Association Hustle Podcast Episode 230

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04/29/2020



 
On this week’s episode JP provides an update on The Moery Company’s business operation and what we learned during out application process for the Payroll Protection Program (PPP) loan.
 
 
 
 
 
Hello and welcome to JP Moery’s Association Hustle Podcast. President of The Moery Company, JP’s mission is to arm today’s associations with insight and strategy to thrive and a progressively complex and competitive business landscape. 21st century associations must move forward with a little bit of hustle and revenue development at their core.
Here’s JP.
Hey everybody, I’ve got a great story for you today: The Moery Company qualified and received a Payroll Protection Program loan last week. I want to share an update on the business operations and how this pandemic affected us and how we’ve responded.
We had a couple things happen last week. Our small family business here in Virginia received a Virginia 30 Day Fund grant, we had an angel investor loan us some resources, and the PPP loan came in. All of this happened within a 48-hour period. The process of this brought feelings of hope, frustration, gratefulness, and waves of other emotions. I don’t think there was any way the infusion of resources would occur without the help of many.
We pursued the PPP option in the same way we pursue new members for our association clients. We did it with professionalism, facts, tenacity and follow up. Without those things our company would likely be looking in from the outside at that program. All of these infusions added up to about $200,000 in cash for us.
We pursued the PPP loan and called our bank almost daily. We bank with Eagle Bank, here in the Washington DC area, and they were very helpful. However, there were times when we read information in the press or from other resources and it didn’t seem to be the same in terms of what we were getting with the bank. We were very tenacious with them, following up with our VP, and emailing our account rep. We had help with our forms from someone who had been successful in applying for another company. That made a real big difference because we wanted to make sure the information that we sent in was accurate. We stayed on top of it. I don’t know about all of the information that’s going to come out about big companies getting the loans, that’s for another day in another time.
My realization that at this time in place this was where the money was and the money is almost always in the system somewhere. In this case, the “system” had the money with the government and it was in a different place.
I recognized the money wasn’t in the traditional place that The Moery Company was used to getting it from. It wasn’t with new clients and we had limited opportunities in membership sales, sponsorship sales, and consulting projects. So, I had to go where the money was. I had to shift quickly to a new place to get resources and I had to do it. Here’s why: prior to this, we already put in place several savings decisions that we implemented and I was literally minutes from communicating with my team about salary cuts across the board that many of you and your organization’s have faced. My goal from the beginning of this economic freefall was to keep my team in place and all employees working at full salary. That is now a reality.
We will take a financial hit in the coming months, there’s no doubt about it. As sponsorship sales slow, and we change to new formats for sponsorship types, delayed strategic and membership recruitment cycles are going to lengthen and get longer. However, for the foreseeable future, we are intact with our team and delivering some of the best work in the company’s history.
I want to thank you for listening to this story because it’s really important that the program was available, we went after it, and we learned a lot by doing it. I also have always sought to be transparent, not only in this podcast, but in our videos, in our blogs, and in everything that we do. I’ve also sought to be transparent about our business and its trajectory. It’s usually a story of growth and expansion. In this case, the narrative is more about survival. And, in some ways, that story is actually even more gratifying.
I hope you are finding glimmers of hope and opportunity in this new environment. I don’t know how it’s going to end up but, I can tell you this, a lot of the qualities that you’ve used to be successful over your entire career are still needed right now. It just might be, in this case, a different place and with a different group of people. Keep your mind open to the opportunities. I think they’re out there and I wish you the very best in pursuing them.
Thanks for listening.
We hope you enjoyed this edition of JP Moery’s Association Hustle Podcast. We’d love to connect with you. Check out our blog at moerycompany.com and subscribe to our weekly newsletter. You can also connect with JP on LinkedIn and Twitter at @JPMoery, as well as The Moery’s Company’s Instagram and Facebook page. To purchase a copy of JP’s book, Association Hustle: Top Strategies for Association Growth, go to JPMoery.com.
 

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