Member-only story
What’s The Best Way To Let Your Team Know About Really Bad News?
“What happens if we don’t get a term sheet in the next six weeks?” One of my employees asked me during our company meeting.
I had just let the team know that everyone in the company was going to minimum wage for the next six weeks. During our board meeting the previous day, one of our investors told us he wanted to shut the company down.
The request to shut the company down totally came from left field. We were doing well, and our fundraising was going well too.
We already had one term sheet, and we had several other investors who appeared close to giving us another term sheet. In fact, we had just presented to the full partnership of a fund two days prior, and we were expecting them to give us a term sheet (they did).
So, I suggested to our investors that we put everyone on minimum wage for the next six weeks, so we could play the hand out. It was a Hail Mary pass that I didn’t expect them to agree to, but they did.
The hard part was what should I tell our employees.
You need to be fully transparent when things aren’t going well.
I fully expected that we would get at least one more term sheet. But that wasn’t the point.
