What March 2020 Proved

I want to tell you what it actually felt like to sit on the back steps of our office with my business partner Stan, staring at a spreadsheet that had stopped making sense.

Our company, Unbridled Solutions, ran large-scale corporate events. Conferences, leadership summits, national sales meetings — the kind of experiences companies fly hundreds of people across the country for. In a normal year, we ran tens of millions of dollars of revenue through that business.

And then in one week in March 2020, it was gone.

Not paused. Not rescheduled. Canceled. Phone calls came in constantly. Emails. Our pipeline — which had been full — emptied out in real time. Fifty million dollars of committed and projected revenue, dissolved. We had 200 employees. We had payroll in two weeks. We had vendors we'd committed to, contractors in the field, relationships we'd spent years building.

Stan and I sat outside and asked each other the most honest question two business partners can ask: what are we going to do?

The Answer Was Already Built

We had been building our storehouses for years. Both of us carried substantial cash value in our designed life insurance contracts — millions of dollars, collectively, sitting liquid and accessible. It wasn't in the market. It hadn't dropped 34% when the S&P dropped 34%. It was just there.

We tapped it.

We created what we called a COVID response fund. We used the capital to stabilize the business, protect payroll, and do something that surprised a lot of people: we gave money away. Clients who were struggling. Vendors who couldn't absorb the shock. People we worked with who had their own businesses reeling. The liquidity let us be generous at the exact moment when generosity was most needed and least available.

We also made a structural decision. We split the company into three tracks — offense, defense, and special teams. Defense was protecting what we had, managing cash, keeping the core team intact. Special teams was pivoting fast into whatever was still running — virtual events became our lifeline. Offense was playing for what came after, because we were convinced this would end and the companies that had stayed ready would win.

We laid off fewer than 10% of our employees. I watched competitors lay off 70, 80, 90 percent of their teams in those same weeks. Some didn't make it back. We did.

What the Policy Actually Did

I want to be precise here, because it's easy to make this sound like magic.

The policy didn't save the business. Our team saved the business. Our decisions saved the business. But the policy gave us the one thing you cannot improvise in a crisis: options.

When the world stopped, we didn't have to sell assets at a discount. We didn't have to go to a bank and beg for a line of credit — which, incidentally, banks were not extending in March 2020 to event companies whose entire revenue base had just canceled. We didn't have to make decisions from a position of fear and scarcity.

We had capital. We moved fast. We made choices we were proud of.

Here's the thing about liquidity that isn't locked in the market: you don't value it the most when times are good. You don't even think about it. You value it the one time in a decade when everything breaks at once and you need to move in a direction nobody else can move. That's the day it earns everything it ever cost you.

The Question I Ask Now

If your business revenue went to zero next week — not paused, not slow, zero — what would you do?

How long could you run on what you have access to? Not what you own. What you can access. There's a difference. A real estate portfolio doesn't help you make payroll in 14 days. A brokerage account that's down 30% costs you real money to liquidate. A 401(k) costs you 30–40% in taxes and penalties. A bank line of credit disappears exactly when you need it most.

What we had — policy cash value, accessible without a credit check, without market correlation, without a tax event — was the only instrument we owned that performed exactly as designed on the worst possible day.

That's not a sales pitch. That's what I lived.

Dana and I brought our daughter home from the hospital into a state shutdown, a business in freefall, and a week that would have broken a lot of people. The storehouse didn't make it easy. Nothing made it easy. But it meant we could face it standing up, with something to work with, and a choice about what kind of company we were going to be when it mattered most.

That's what March 2020 proved.