Q and I'm talking with Sonia Gill. She's the founder and CEO of Fluenz. After travel restrictions shut down her company's in-person immersion program in Mexico City, Oaxaca, and Barcelona, Fluenz had to return to its roots, online education. But Sonia still wasn't sure if they'd make it. Sonia, was there a moment where you were worried about whether the whole, your whole business would, would make it through this year?
A Oh my gosh. Are you kidding? Yes. I'm still worried. Um, we're alive and we're good, but of course, yes, absolutely. Step one was just go back to the Excel sheet and just Dial down everything. Like, what are we spending on that we don't need to be spending on right now? How do we get to the bare minimum to keep going? And, you know, it was important to us to keep the entire team as much as possible. We had no idea what was going to happen, but, you know, what can we do? There's a lot of things that we already paid for. Like, what can we do here? Let's negotiate a lot of things we lost, a lot of things we're able to keep. And then, okay, we have all of these people booked for the whole year. We need to contact them, do the best we can in terms of You know, returns or postponements, like we need to come up with a policy. That was like the first couple of weeks, just putting down the fire. Right.
AI assessment note: “Oh my gosh. Are you kidding? Yes. I'm still worried.”