It might not seem like it in the scheme of things, but this is actually a hard thing to keep up with. I can’t tell you how fast the time flies by and then I realize it is time for another post. I then go back through the pictures of the last six months just to remember what happened and am always amazed and how much has occurred.
That said, I love writing these posts. I look forward to it every time I get to do it for you or your brother’s website. The reason is it reminds me just how much fun we have as a family, and makes me smile.
While the above is true, this has probably been the hardest six months in my life and many others in this world. We have been dealing with a pandemic that started just after your birthday, around mid-March, that has shut the entire world down. It is called coronavirus, or Covid-19, and it is a virus that has so far killed millions of people and infected hundreds of millions more.
Covid-19
Ok – so I am going to write this section so that it can be repurposed on Ethan’s website as well. Reason being that it will be long, and it is also applicable to you both. I think it’s worthwhile to have you both know the same story, but also what each was doing and how they did during the pandemic.
On March 9th I landed in Portland to visit my team there, at the time working for Vacasa (still there). There was this new virus that was just starting to make national headlines called Covid-19, or the coronavirus. At this point it was pretty much the first time hearing about it and there was very little known. All I knew was that it had come from Wuhan China, and at the time they said someone there had eaten a bat and contracted it. The virus was, at this time, spreading fast in Wuhan, but they had basically shut the entire region down to avoid mass spread.
I went into my executive meeting that day knowing very little. Our entire exec team had turned over at that time and so we had three new additions from OpenTable. This was my second time meeting our new CEO, but my first meeting the others in person. I remember one of the execs elbow bumped me (the virus spread through touch and was airborne) while the other shook my hand. At this time it was more of a joke than anything. I stayed in PDX that night, went to dinner with my team, worked from the office the next day, and flew back that night not knowing that it would be the last time traveling for a great deal of time.
When I got home everything went nuts. The virus was spreading rapidly, all across Europe and hitting countries like Italy very hard. Quarantines were put in place across Europe, and a travel ban to Europe was put in place by Trump, our current president.
NOTE* I won’t be able to do a play-by-play here as it would take too long to explain, so just know that there are plenty of things I am omitting and perhaps getting wrong. It all happened very fast.
Within a week it was a worldwide issue, which countries shutting down borders and putting in place stay-at-home mandates. My office, as was pretty much every other office in the country, was closed sometime in mid-March, moving us all to a remote work environment. States and cities shut down businesses that were non-essential – think restaurants, salons, movie theatres, bars, sports, etc. Only non-essential businesses like grocery stores, pharmacies and other businesses that the public required stayed open.
It would be impossible to capture how this changed the landscape of our society, likely forever. E-commerce food delivery services like Grubhub and UberEats blew up, since going to a restaurant was prohibited. As did grocery delivery either to your house or outside pickup. Streaming services like Netflix and Hulu saw a huge boom as people were at home all the time, and companies like Zoom emerged as market leaders as they offered video=conferencing capabilities that now everyone would have to rely on as they were now working remotely. All professional sports shut down, all movie and tv production shut down, all travel was shut down so no one was flying or staying in hotels. Everyone was pretty much forced to stay at home. The virus spread through interaction with others so no one could be near one another. It is like nothing that has occurred since the spanish flu, and it spared no one. It affected everyone, everywhere. As I write this we are still on lock-down for the most part. Still working from home, still not going out to eat, still getting groceries delivered, and still not seeing family members as it is not worth the risk. A vaccination is being developed at a rapid pace, but until that arrives we are bound to our homes.
This is taking a toll on the entire population and has changed life forever. I am going to get to the impact on you guys and our family, but I want to capture something specific that I went through as it was the hardest thing I have ever done in my career, and one of the hardest things in my life. I share it from a place of you never knowing it occurred, probably until now, but that even parents are emotional beings tackle some things are nearly impossible to handle. Growing up , at least for me, I always looked at my parents as not only infallible, but also as ready to handle any situation that comes up with objective means. I realized as I got older, and got to know my parents better, that this was not at all true, and now have many stories that in my childhood seemed like no big deal to me but only because they handled it with unwavering ability.
I work in the travel industry. I currently am a VP of Digital for a multi-billion dollar company that offers vacation rentals. Basically, instead of taking your family on vacation and stay in a hotel, we have a huge inventory of homes that owners lease out for vacationers. My job is to get those homes booked through our e-commerce site, vacasa.com, and out channel partners (airbnb, vrbo, booking.com, etc.). At it’s core, we sell vacations.
Covid completely halted our business. Once the state and city mandates, and later the federal mandates, rolled out, there was basically no travel allowed. You could not fly anywhere or travel anywhere without an incredibly good reason. Parents, siblings and other family members would die, and no one could attend their funeral because the risk of getting covid was too high. This lead to over 90% of our bookings getting cancelled in March and April of 2020.
With a revenue hit like that you have to make changes. Our company was also not in a stellar financial or cash position. In fact, we were in a terrible position. We had recently ousted our CEO and brought in a new one, and that was one of the reasons. We had enough cash to pay our owners their commission only through May, and all of our reservations just went off the books. When facing a position like that you have to create cash, and the easiest way to free up cash is getting rid of people.
Our exec team was meeting every day in response to this crisis, and doing our best to manage it. But knowing our position, we knew layoffs had to happen. We were each given a number we needed to reach, and then a list of our employees and told to get to that number. At the time I had a team of 108 people, and was asked to cut 30-40%. We also needed to turn this around in about 3 days and also keep it quiet from the company. In addition to this, all execs were taking a 25% pay reduction for 3 months, which would be paid back after the wave passed (if it did). I was making $210k at the time, so we were ok with this financially, but it was still quite scary.
So I spent two or three awful days deciding how I was going to make this cut. I went through the decisions day and night, and while some were easy others were insanely hard. It never left my mind either that whoever I cut would go into a job market that does not want them. Every company was doing what we were doing and their opportunities would be next to nothing. These people have families, bills, responsibilities and I was choosing to put them in a spot that would disable them from delivering against those things. It was also never lost on my how lucky I was to be the one making these decisions and not being on the receiving end of one.
Friday, March 20th was the day we delivered this news. I laid off a total of 44 employees that day. I did it over a Zoom videoconference.
Following the layoffs was a much needed weekend to reflect and try to wrap my head around things. I was working 14 hour days and dealing with things I had never faced in my life. I had fired people before either for cause or because their role was no longer necessary, but never in an environment like this or at this scale. I had actually traveled to Fort Walton Beach to let go of 8 people in January with a director of mine, only to then have to layoff that director. It was an incredibly difficult experience.
Then Sunday came around and we received an email from our CEO calling an emergency meeting for Sunday night. We all knew this couldn’t be good. We joined, and long story short were told that the cuts were not enough and that we would need to go deeper – this time eliminating up to 70% of our teams. The caveat, and only silver lining, was that we were going to furlough and not layoff. In three months we were expecting to bring people back, but we all discussed and knew that we have no confidence in that estimate. They were also being furloughed without pay, but would keep their health insurance. So with that, I went back to the exercise of doing a deeper cut knowing that I may never bring these people back.
The other item was that we were not moving to a 50% salary reduction for execs, and a 25% reduction for those that made over $75k. I am not sure what inflation will do to salaries by the time you read this, but as I write this making $210k in Boise is far more than enough money to support a great lifestyle. But with this we were going to $110k, and with no guarantees that I would even be able to keep my job. I had not, until this time, ever worried about job security – but I was frightened. We buttoned up our finances, starting eating leftovers (you mom always makes fun of me because I hate leftovers and love takeout), no more takeout, canceled all unnecessary subscriptions, deferred our mortgage six months, started discussing every expense and so on.
On Friday, March 25th 2020, I furloughed another 52 employees without pay. I did it over a Zoom videoconference. 96 of the 108 people that existed previously were now either let go or furloughed, leaving the team at 12 employees.
At this point not everything was shut down just yet. In April all of the businesses I mentioned above would close their doors either temporarily or forever. The night of the furlough it finally hit me what I had done. I went to a bar to think about it.
I had sent 96 people home to their families to tell them that they have no more income during a time where they could not find a job, and that there were very little prospects for them to find work in the near or even long term. I started thinking about moms and dads having to tell their kids about it, how the things they had been promised are no longer possible. Married couples (which the other spouse may also be in the same boat) sitting down to figure out how to pay the bills. I thought about if I was the one that had to come home and tell you guys that we might have to move to a different home or go to a different school as a result of this. I also thought about how lucky I was, and that made me feel even more grief – and that me even being allowed to be sad or grieve or whatever was selfish in its own right. I was not the one going home delivering this news, I was the one causing it to happen. Why do I deserve to be upset over it? Not much gets to me, I am an “it is what it is” type of person – but this was genuinely the first time in my life that I felt overwhelmed and didn’t know how to handle it. I got back in my car, I drove home, I parked in the garage, and I started to cry like I had never cried before.
I don’t know what the relationship will look like with your mom and me when you read this. It is a long time from now, and marriage is something you work at every day. But I will say that night she was exactly what I needed and helped me through it. We sat on the couch in the den while she held me and I bawled like a baby, unloading on her an amount of emotions I have never done with anyone before. She just listened. She has always encouraged me to be more emotional and open up more often, and that night she got all the pent up emotion she could handle. I do not know that there will ever be a tougher thing that I have to do in my career, but I pray not.
This was the story I wanted to tell – what comes next is happy and unexpected. In May the travel market began to rebound as people wanted to get away. We had our biggest month as a company ever in June, and we brought back the vast majority of those who were furloughed. We even hired back a few that had been laid off as we tried to recover. Since then business has been incredible, I was paid back the money from my reduced salary, I received a raise and a bonus and we are on track to IPO. Throughout it all I was able to keep my optimism, which I think at the end of the day is what got me through it.
At this time we are still mostly at home. This applies to my work, but to you both as well. Let’s talk about that.
Harper – you are currently doing virtual learning. You will see some pictures of you on a laptop where you are doing Zoom calls with your class and teachers. You are in first grade and really focusing on reading and math. You like virtual learning but get annoyed with it relatively easily and begin to act up a bit. I am working from home and pretty pre-occupied, so your mom is bearing the brunt. Virtual learning is hard and definitely not as effective. That said, it looks like you will be back in school soon with a mask mandate. This is a hotly debated topic right now as to whether kids should be in school or at home. Since you go to a private school, they are able to take measures not available at public schools. Public will stay virtual for the foreseeable future. Your mom is adamantly against in person learning due to the covid risk. I am on the fence, as the effectiveness rate of the virus on younger people is far more minimal, and I think you will learn more in a classroom than on a computer. You learn to read in first grade and to me that trumps the risk – not by a lot but by enough.
Ethan – your school got flat out cancelled. Fortunately you are in like pre-pre-school so it’s not a big deal. Only concern is socialization, but pretty confident that you will still have plenty of time to figure that out. You are also a pretty outgoing kid and already had one year at Wesleyan. so the risk is low. Plan is for you to attend again starting next fall. You get packets sent home from school that you work on, and sometimes even enjoy. For the most part this is a time for you to play and get a lot of time with mom and I.
The covid-19 pandemic has taken a toll on many lives in many different ways. I have to say it is like living in a movie sometimes, like when you drive through downtown and don’t see a single person. Or look at pictures of major cities like NYC or San Francisco and there is not a soul to be seen. We still do not have a vaccine, and until we do life likely won’t get back to normal. Even then who know how long it will take to reach some level of normalcy, but at least the hope is that we might be able to socialize in some capacity again.
I think this is a post that I missed so many things but likely is the longest one I have ever written. I will add additional comments that are unique to you both below, as the next one for Ethan won’t be until 11/15 and I imagine over the next 2.5 months we will see a lot of changes. I hope the story above is at least worth reading, and I selfishly took the opportunity to write it. Hopefully it provides some insight into me, the time we are in, and the thoughts happening in the moment.
While covid has been terrible for many, from the pictures you will see in your posts, it was not for us. It brought us closer together and gave us more time with each other. Overall I think it made us a stronger family. All the pictures are happy, and that is not a facade but rather a reflection just how amazing you both are in your ability to look at the good in life. I love you guys very much.
Bike
Ok, so back to just your Harper Mae – this section is unique to your website. One other thing that was a benefit of this time is that I was able to teach you how to write a bike!
It was end of March, and as you can probably figure based on the story above I was a bit down. One day you came to me and said you wanted your training wheels off. So we went out to the garage and took them off and started riding around the driveway while I held you. Well, you are not one to fail. Has never been your style. You didn’t walk until you were 14 months old, but once you did you never fell. You didn’t ski until 5, and you clung to me the first few times, but again, once you decided to do it you were great at it. Riding a bike was the same.
The driveway was not a great place to teach you so we went to Baggley Park down the street. We went into the grass and had you try a few times. You made me hold you and not let go, and when I did let go scolded me for doing so. After about an hour you had a couple decent rides. We went back the next day and I took you on the cement path. I got you going and you said let go – then proceeded to ride about 30 feet before putting your feet down and stopping. We did that another 20 or so times, and by the end you were able to ride a couple hundred yards before stopping.
On the third day we went and you rode the entire path all by yourself. You never fell. I taught you how to start on your own and get going, and since then you have ridden your bike nearly every day. You impress me every time you try something new with not just your devotion to figuring it out, but your competitive nature to master it.
Ok this post has gone on long enough. I want you to know how proud I am about the way you are growing up. You are kind, loving, mannered and just an all around good person. Could not ask for a better Buggy.
I love you more than anything in the world.
Love, Dad
