 I'm Chuck Crumpton. I have with me Mellie James and Madsen and rather than my wasting anybody's time I'm gonna let each of them give a real thumbnail quick background on who they are and then we'll get started on this. We're gonna talk about COVID change, how it impacts business and how businesses can try and adapt and cope and move forward from this in responsible ways. Mellie, start us up. Thanks, Chuck, for having us. I'm Mellie James. I'm co-founder of ManaUp. We are a product accelerator based in Honolulu that works with consumer packaged goods products helping them to scale the global markets. I'm also the president for the Hawaii Venture Capital Association. Thanks for having me today. Thanks, Mellie. Yeah, my name is Madsen Davis. I was the first president and CEO of Kona Brewing Company, kind of a co-creator there. I sold that company with my partner and moved on into back into the restaurant business a little more full-time and do some real estate over here on the Big Island. So I live in Kona full-time and got the property where the brewery is now. Awesome and in the background and it's beautiful. Yeah, so let's we'll start out. We don't have any softball questions. There are none. What have COVID-19 and its impacts changed for business here? Mellie, you want to start us out? Sure. I mean, I think, you know, the most obvious response to that would be our tourism industry, you know, completely disappearing and our, as we've all known, our major dependence upon that. For a lot of our companies, you know, being in the product space and, you know, a lot of tourists and Omoyagi and, you know, being in retail locations that have a big tourism component, those sales have been completely dropped off. You know, even looking at kind of the ag tourism like experiences, that's completely dropped off. Restaurants have completely dropped off. So, you know, we're finding that a lot of our companies that have had a bigger digital presence, more e-commerce presence, more direct to consumer revenue channel are faring a lot better at their Amazon and Shopify revenue channels have, you know, for some of them doubled, if not tripled, really making up for that gap. But the ones that have had more of that wholesale and retail presence, they're not, you know, it's really challenging. I think we have such a huge dependence upon tourism here. Even looking at the grocery stores, those sales have been up but also down because tourists go to the grocery stores, you know. All those sales are, you know, completely depleted. So, you know, I think we're seeing just, you know, over and over just the true dependence that we have on so many people coming to our islands and creating some of those revenue streams and seeing that completely, completely drop off. Yeah, I would totally agree, Mellie. You know, there's a question that came to me years ago that I finally got it. Compared to what? We always knew it was a lot, but my a lot and you're a lot are really different. And when you see 37% unemployment and you see just a barrel trickle of pick up restaurants and Kona where we're so dependent on that and we are really a rural community in so many ways. You know, our infrastructure seems to be not big enough when they're around and vastly fine when they're not. Thousands of cars at the airport here. So, I think it's really changed the way we're thinking. And I also think that one of the things that I'm missing so much in my own heart is just, it's just contact with people and really the conversation, you know, the spirit of Aloha as it's passed on by just saying hello to somebody, taking a moment and talking story, you know, I'm in the restaurant business for a reason. You know, I love to have that conversation. And I think that, you know, that's part of who we are as people here or what's attracted us or me here for 23 years. So there's just a lot to be studied. And now it's not about what it's really like, oh, my goodness. And now what are we going to do about it? Chuck, really, as you were saying. No, exactly. So what might be effective adaptive strategies and resources for businesses to survive and recover? Well, I mean, for me right now, I mean, we're just going to start this today online, you can order some pickup meals. I mean, we're in the restaurant business. So you're really missing something when it's just about having somebody else semi prepare the meal for you and bring it home. But I guess it's about really going back to your values in a way. And what is it the niche? You know, right now, there's probably a lot of entrepreneurialism that is that is sparking, because we're trying to solve our own problems. And that's where entrepreneurialism comes from, you know, is, I see a problem, and now how am I going to solve this? So, I mean, what we're doing right now is Zoom. I've had more Zoom meetings. It's become easier and just softer. I've gotten people to show themselves on a screen that never showed themselves before. You know, they always had the blank screen. So I think we're just going to continue to learn. You know, we're going to ask ourselves some deep questions. Well, we talk I'm just thinking more about the infrastructure, which is challenging for me right now. But is there, you know, is there enough to go around? I mean, I always have believed that, but it's a different kind of go around now. Yeah, I think we're, we can take this time to have a pause. I mean, there's kind of that knee jerk reaction around, you know, what am I going to do to survive? But there's also kind of that deeper strategy and deeper thinking that can be done now around, what do I want to look like? And what do I want to be coming out of this? What does post COVID look like for my business? And how can I be looking at solving problems in my own backyard, but also creating more of a sustainable economy, even a sustainable way that we're approaching tourism here? You know, I think a lot of what we're looking at is around agriculture. How do we create more systems that whether that's for food security or more in the value add world that I'm in around, you know, not necessarily immediate food that you that you need, but around the chocolate and different snacks or different things like that. But how are we looking at how we can help tourism make more sense for us from a sustainability standpoint? Um, you know, how are we re approaching? I think we've had very deep systems in place around how it's worked. And we've had more and more tourists coming in. I mean, we all seen the stats we've had double the tourists coming in yet the same amount of spending. So what does that look like from an, you know, average daily spend standpoint? What does that look like for how do we what kinds of tourists and how do we want to be sharing Hawaii with the world? But in addition to that, the Hawaii has the one of the strongest brands in the world. You know, how do we also start sending Aloha to people at home, where we're actually can increase our exports. We have had the lowest exports per capita in the United States, we're 51 out of 51 states, that's including DC. How do we shift that because our brand is so strong and people don't actually have to physically come here to get that Aloha and I think there's a real opportunity to be looking at sending Aloha to people. But also as we as we are reopening, how do we look at ways that we want to kind of reopen Hawaii and what are the ways that we want to kind of kind of approach, approach tourism? It's a really good point. I think the whole model of how we approach, deal with and serve tourists is changing economically, tectonically. What do you see as projections, opportunities for change for business? Well, I'm thinking a little bit about what Mellie said, Mellie said and really with the Triple P, you know, I'm very, very, very encouraged to spend money on labor. So I'm trying to figure out how am I going to get the people that are usually servers, bussers, chefs, bartenders to do something a little different. And one of the things is how do I change the script? How do I interrupt the script and create a moment that's different, a memorable moment, you know, in the restaurant business instead of just the old, you know, basic. I'm a big fan of the Heath Brothers and they came out with a book not too long ago about moments. And I've been listening to it while I've been running, which is something new for me. With COVID-19, I started listening to things when I was running, because I was just, you know, trying to keep up. And I am just intrigued by the fact that I've had a restaurant that opened, was open, almost, well, actually, just two days short of exactly one year that I had to close. And now I've had this opportunity to kind of rethink what it is we were doing. And that is a huge gift, but you've got to be in the head space of it. I didn't, I didn't even think about how many, what were my accounts payable with that? Because in the restaurant business, you're always using today's money, you know, like Wimpy to pay for yesterday's hamburger, you know. So I mean, there's a big shift there. And there's a lot of opportunity here. So, you know, rambling on here, what's your values, what's your core? We're not going to be able to limit the amount of people that come to Hawaii necessarily. But I was thinking about this, they could tax them enough to slow them down. It's not what we want to do, but we certainly have some really big issues, you know, that are going on, that we need to solve. The sky is clearing. It's a much cleaner place right now. The ocean is beautiful. So, you know, and that brings up a really good point, because traditionally, the activity orientation has been to cluster and to try and get the efficiency of space, because it costs so much here. But we may need to completely reorient the direction to spread people out, get them into more different activities, spaces, combinations, and the businesses that do that the most effectively exactly what you're talking about, Mel. So what kind of resources and strategies might take us in those directions that might better serve future of tourist business and local business? I think as we kind of take this pause, and we look at, like, what are these opportunities that can be blossoming? And I think Matt's said it earlier, that, you know, innovation, you know, I think truly comes out in times like this. Not only as people are thinking differently about, you know, what hasn't worked in the past, and how can we make change now, because I think people are adopting technology a lot quicker now than they would have otherwise. Whether that's telehealth, or getting things delivered, shopping online, all those things are massively moving forward, because we realize that we have to. And, you know, some of the things I've seen, like even with CSAs happening, like that's a huge opportunity where we look at the farm where we're sourcing local farm, and it's getting the box delivered to you of local produce. You know, I know Oahu fresh here on Oahu literally had like a 50 X in terms of monthly or weekly subscribers. How cool would that be if that stayed the same, right? It didn't that things didn't just shift back to what they had been in the past. It actually stayed at that level. So if and when something like this happens again, we already have these systems in place that won't be disrupted. So I think in terms of resources, you know, I think as we're working with government and talking with other business leaders, you know, what are shifts that we can make to help us be more resilient and be future proofing our businesses. I know for a lot of people who have been laid off or furloughed right now, you know, that that idea you had all those years that you now have some time to work on, see if we can start to seed those and actually make significant change in our community and help us, you know, like I said really future proof our businesses and our models. I think from a resource standpoint, who is that can come together even in different industries like how do we actually we've all been in such silos, or it's like I've got mine and you've got yours, but how do we create ours that where industries can start to talk to each other, where there have been inefficiencies. And there have been these like deep rooted system that obviously certain entities have always benefited, right. So those people aren't going to want to make any change. But as we're in this time that we've never seen before, how do we shake those up and have people actually talking to each other that never do and make those and shift in efficiency. That's what innovation is about, right. You've seen inefficiency, you make that change. It doesn't actually have to be something new and shiny. It's actually something that just hasn't worked for a long time that you can shift now that we all are kind of opening our eyes. Yeah, that's a brilliant idea. And for what I do mediation, it's it's the core of it, which is can you put people together who haven't been collaborating before. One good example, our friend Ben's Kamura pointed out, get the food and the egg people together, they get the middle people out of there, and just start dealing directly with catering to the public, establish that new set of relationships and connections that's going to make the service much more cost efficient. And then secondly, as both of you have indicated, how do we get the groups that are otherwise going to be left out of this recovery and resilience in touch with the people who are so that they can get part of that pie? How do we expand the pie to include them? I think we're still discovering what that is right now. I still think there's a big head scratcher about that. I keep coming back to basic needs. Two months ago, housing was just so critical here over in Kona. And the cost of it was so high and it was so difficult. I mean, all the people I knew that had rentals about once a year, they were getting kicked out of their place because they were turning into a vacation rental or they were selling it because there was so much equity for who had owned it. And so we've got to come up with some of those basic needs and hopefully opening up a sense of learning, a sense of being open and learning because I think there's a lot of people out there that are going to have to learn differently or be engaged in a different way. Back to what Mellie was saying in the beginning too, or what she was saying just a moment ago, there's three key elements to consumer product goods. There's the manufacturing of, the distribution of, and the marketing of. And you talked about, or she was talking about, we got to work with industries that machines aren't working 24 hours a day. So that we, why do we, why does Kona need another coffee roasting machine? There's more machines on this island, but get the efficiencies to stay focused on growing the best coffee, not becoming this expert at roasting it and buying a machine and everybody wants them to have their own machine. It's kind of same thing from where I came with brewing, but how to work with those guys together that there's enough to go around for everybody. And I think you see it more and more and more. The big companies are becoming vertically integrated. There's no room for the middle guy anymore. And so what you were talking about is getting straight to the consumer, we're having a very efficient way of getting there through distribution because everything has distribution engaged in it, transportation. How is that going to be? And where are those margins to make it livable? Well, and the other thing, which there are now more examples of, maybe we don't need all of that transportation distribution. Maybe we can do like restaurants pick up, go get it. Choose what you want online, set the time, the quantity, go get it. People are going to get going to want to get out of the house. We will all miss the experience of going to restaurants and having those moments that you talked about. That's what brings us back for the in-person stuff. And those still need to happen. They need to happen a little more. And Chuck, maybe it's a hybrid, maybe it's a hybrid of things too, like you're saying, go get it. So I was just listening to the sweet green story, the salad company that's over 100 units now. Just in the last year, they started to do these lockers in the office buildings. And of course, that business has just completely disappeared. It was all of a sudden, 30% of their business just overnight. But let's take that idea and go to the next place. Amazon was trying to do something like that as well. So maybe you get a little bit of both. So you don't have the, it's not an Amazon drop off, but it's a place where a guy can come. That's the cost of transportation. That's why you see all these minimum drop costs, because the guys are breaking it down by the mile. They're saying it's just not worth it. And the little guys getting completely squeezed out. But if there's, maybe that's the future of the post office. They have just a few units around the world. I mean, around the United States. And they also happen to have like the second largest fleet. I think their fleet is larger than the military fleet or something like that. So, wow, wait a second, maybe there is something here. And maybe there's another step. What if FedEx, UPS and the post office instead of competing, all collaborating said, you know what? We're going to specialize in different markets. Post office, you're going to handle this market. UPS, you're going to handle this one. FedEx, you're going to handle this one. We're going to have a common intake center. People come in, we'll figure out which delivery method is going to work the best. We'll route it. We'll save time. We'll save money. I agree. And I think if we can create some of that infrastructure that is able to support more of the small guys so they don't have to reinvent the wheel for themselves, that they'll be, we'll encourage more small business to open up. And I mean, that's really the key here when we're talking about how do we start including more, right? When we have these large national corporations, we're essentially, you know, exporting all of our dollars that none of that's really staying in the community. And so that's been, you know, what you was built on small business. So as we are building this infrastructure, like you were just talking about with like delivery, right? If there was an opportunity for a small restaurant to be able to just bring whatever they needed to to that hub, whether it's FedEx, the postal office, whatever, then that's eliminating all of those costs that was challenging for them to even get off the ground. You know, some of the things, you know, we're looking at is, you know, looking at food business. So many of our value add producers have to send their product to the mainland because we don't have some of the basic machinery infrastructure, like increasing shelf life or food safety with, you know, x-ray or, you know, metal detector. And so they have to send it to the mainland. So if we're able to start to look at where are, where are those bottlenecks and where can, whether that's government, corporate, private, whatever that can create that infrastructure, it'll allow more of these small businesses to plug in and actually create more opportunity for higher wages, higher wealth creation, which is essentially, you know, the challenge here in Hawaii, that we've had so many, some of these big entities that are representing so many jobs and they're all lower paying jobs. As we encourage more innovation, entrepreneurship, and small business, that would obviously make a huge shift in where we're at from now. No, and that's a great idea because the closer you get the producer delivery combined to the consumer, the higher the compensation for that because you take out all of those middle and extraneous steps. Quick example, office space. Decades ago, Century City set up all those offices and people could work. Now, people can work from home 80, 90% of the time. Have office spaces available if you needed for conferences or meetings or stuff like that. You go online, you book it, you go in, you use it, it comes with the parking that stuff. Everybody's costs and efficiency, costs are reduced, efficiency is greater, but the real difference is control comes back more and flexibility more to the ultimate users. You don't necessarily have to cook it or have servers. Prepare it, they come, they pick it up, they throw it in the oven or the microwave or whatever, and they can enjoy it at home fresh out with their own people or friends. So if we're gearing toward more personalized at home activities and enjoyment of good services, we can take out a lot of that middle expense. It's going to impact the 1% because they've lived off that for a long time. I can live with that. I think that one thing that comes to mind for a lot of people will be, if you were to join the three things that we were talking about, UPS, FedEx, and the post office, you have a big fear of where's the Department of Justice and all of this? How is this going to work? What kind of a co-op does that then become where the shareholders of those three companies share in that or does it become one big and where's the competition? There's a lot of fear that it would be that. I think that's one thing comes to mind. As a small brewer for a lot of years, we had a different tax than the big brewers because we couldn't make the beer nearly as efficient as they could. But I think that there's more machines on these islands than people realize, but it's finding those and being open to being able to share that and how does that work and share together. I'm intrigued by these ideas and I'm also, we need to be sharing more. It's almost like the creating this database. In my book, it was talking about Southwest Airlines knew that they would get a comment about something like one in seven or something that someone would comment that they heard a great joke when they were doing the talks on Southwest Airlines that somebody heard a funny when they were doing the FAA thing. They were able to then track how much did that person travel and what did it mean to kind of have more jokes overall? I mean, it's just a powerful, so powerful, but you got to be able to figure that out and then how do you share it down? Because what I see right now is a lot of people getting in this world because of the guy, the little orange guy, there's such greed. There's a such amount of greed that it's really hard for people to break that, well, what about mine? How is mine going to work? Yet, we all turn around and we want to know, where's my cut of the two trillion? I don't care if you keep printing money. I just want my money. Where's my money? That's a good point, Matt, because the greed, the resistance to change and the hoarding, they're all centered in the same group, but they also have enough power to be able to make it really difficult for all the rest of us to accomplish that change, except as a mediator, what I have to remember is I can go into the separate room with that 1% guy and say, okay, we'll just settle around you. And then I will ask you the Dr. Phil question. How is that working for you? Because I think we're now in a situation historically we have seen that change can bring a reallocation and improvement in the lot of the previously disempowered new deal after the big crash of 2930, improve things for workers, we can improve things for students and teachers, we can improve things for health care patients, the elderly, we can improve things for many sectors of society, tenants that have been previously disempowered, because finally those who have controlled it may have to start bargaining with collapse in these sectors can also cause collapse for us. So we have three minutes left. Wrap up thoughts. Where do we go from here? Where would you like to see us go? What would be a really good business model that you'd like to see evolving? I guess what I would say is if we could wave a magic wand and allow for collaboration without selfishness, the give, and so give is love, get is sin, or hate can be that. So what's in the give? And if we can all, all ships rise and I just somehow to collect that stuff and not feel like I have to be smarter than or something. I'm still very confused by it, honestly, as my business is coming back open. I'm just not quite sure how it's all going to center out. So what if we, to incentivize that, radically change the system so that equal distribution of resources and opportunities is rewarded, monetized, and incentivized instead of unequal? Sounds like you're talking about a different kind of society. Yeah, I mean, I would say kind of similarly to Max and like, how do we create more of a regenerative approach as opposed to extractive? And how can industries be coming together that it works for everyone? I keep thinking about like ag here and tourism, and there's so many big industry here that can really be layering onto each other and adding and helping to regenerate as opposed to what it's been in the past. I think there's a lot of, like you were saying, machinery here and resources here that are being underutilized. And if we're able to open up these conversations where we have a shared vision, that, you know, we all kind of know what the what I wouldn't say the worst could be, but we've seen some pretty bad things in the past month, and where it can go from here. And so now we kind of know where that other side of the spectrum is, unless we don't make some change, if and when this happens again, we are not going to be the better for it. And we've all seen that at times the states are literally having to fight with each other for resources. So our community is now more important than ever, as we can help each other being here, rolling up our sleeves, getting creative to solving some of our community challenges. You know, it was really interesting to see with the 50 states all fighting for resources, we were not one country, we were literally 50 countries fighting for resources. And so it became more apparent than ever, how much our actual local community, having local business here, having local leaders here is so important for when and if this happens again. Mellie, Madsen, thank you. We're about out of time. I think we finished with that word collaboration. That's the new model, the new strategy. Thanks, Charlie. Thank you so much. Aloha. Aloha.