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COCOV V E ID R A - 19 GE
Leadership Through Crisis
WRITTEN BY COURTNEY MCKEE
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his is a difficult moment for human beings across the planet. COVID-19 came on in a hurry, sweeping across our landscape. For people in the distilled spirits industry, it has impacted our businesses and customers, our supply and distribution chains, and wreaked havoc on our communities and families. We know from survey responses that half to two-thirds of the distilleries in the US are deeply concerned that this pandemic may cost them their businesses. We know economic relief has been challenging for many distillery owners to access. We can find literally a million stories about the challenges we’re facing at this moment. This will not be one more of those. I think what’s needed are stories of great leadership, stories that offer constructive tools for getting through difficult moments. I believe in their ability to shake us into different awareness, to shift our perspective and to offer practical guidance to navigating when the wayfinding is hard. To that end, I reached out to a couple distillery owners for a better understanding of the challenges they’re facing in this moment and how they’re showing up for those challenges. PT Wood is the owner of Wood’s High Mountain Distillery in Salida, Colorado, and Philip McDaniel of St. Augustine Distillery in St. Augustine, Florida. While both McDaniel and Wood stopped doing tastings and both began production of hand sanitizer at various scales, I found that the similarities between the two ran much deeper.
Decision Making There has been a surprising absence of a unified, global message and even an absence of a unified federal response to this pandemic. States have been left to fend for themselves, some to better success than others. I was curious to know where these guys were looking for reliable information and valuable sounding boards. As McDaniel shared: “I talk multiple times a day with my business partner and CFO, Mike Diaz. He is one of the brightest people I know and we collaborate really well together. Of course, I also talk with staff daily to get their insights and help on issues. They are amazing. I keep up to date with a variety of publications including [Wall Street Journal, New York Times], Forbes, The Brown Report as well as a number of podcasts that help keep me in balance. My current favorites are The Daily, WorkLife with Adam Grant and, of course, anything from Simon Sinek.” 52
For Wood, things are a bit different. In addition to running the distillery, he is also the mayor of his mountain town of Salida. For him, leadership takes on a really different meaning, including the resources he relies on. Wood shared that he’s been working very closely with the chair of the county commissioners board, an old river guiding friend of his. Together, they’ve formed a coalition of stakeholders who help advise one another. They’ve leveraged previous experience, such as the Decker Fire which started in the fall of 2019 just outside of Salida, to harness the US Forest Service’s incident management framework in dealing with the pandemic. They’re using primarily state and county information, with lots of community input, to both understand the current landscape and to make decisions about how to move forward. For both of these folks, there’s a lot of gratitude expressed for the individuals they’ve chosen to surround themselves with and who they rely on for solid decision making.
Problem Solving For McDaniel and Wood, the scale of the challenge is so great it’s difficult to even wrap their minds around. They’re doing what we all do with such big challenges: breaking them down into a series of smaller, more manageable obstacles they can tackle. For McDaniel, this breakdown has been less around time horizons and more around opportunity horizons. He shared “Honestly, right now we are in survival mode. As quickly as things are devolving with the economy — when has oil ever gone negative in value? — we are trying to take advantage of the current opportunities that can generate revenues for us. Specifically, making and selling hand sanitizer, donating as much as we can to local first responders and working with the other distillers in Florida to ask our governor and state leadership to relax laws governing online orders and direct-to-consumer shipping.” Wood and his county commissioners leapt out of the gate with care for their downtown small business peers by setting up a $25,000 challenge grant using economic development funds. Those funds went to the Chaffee County Emergency Relief Fund to be used as matching dollars for what he hoped would be about $100,000 in funds to support small businesses. As of this writing, that $25,000 has raised nearly $400,000 to support local independent businesses. Wood described his approach, stating, “I think there’s a couple of compartments that you deal with. What can I actually do today? Salida had a grind and pave project scheduled for later in May to improve downtown. Downtown shut down, so we moved the project to right now. We’re using a local contractor to do it so we’re pumping money WWW.ART ISANSPI RI TMAG.CO M