 Having a nice day here. We were talking to our next guest, Janina Abiles of Pro Service a minute ago, and I want to welcome her to the show, This Is Community Matters. Hi, Janina. Hi, Jay. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, nice to have you on. It's very important to be in human resources these days, and it's very important now, you know, for coronavirus, because your whole world is changing. I say changing, you know, it sounds like that might be a change for the best. I'm not sure that's so. I'm not sure it's a change for the best. It's certainly changing. And you're going to be servicing me. Tell me if I'm right. You'll be servicing small, medium-sized businesses. You're going to be helping them with human resources, payroll, and structuring their relationships with their employees. So that's a challenge when they're losing their employees. And you're right there with Pro Service. First of all, tell us what Pro Service is, and then tell us what you do for Pro Service. Sure. So Pro Service is a provider of HR services for small and medium businesses. So generally speaking, we would say that's about under 500. We have some clients that are over 500 employees, but our sweet spot are businesses that are in that kind of 30 to 40 employee range. So we serve HR, sorry, businesses across the state of Hawaii doing HR services. And we've been around for about 25 years. And our bread and butter, if I could call it that, is kind of payroll benefits. But we also do workers' compensation. We manage the unemployment process for employers, which as you can imagine is something that is a hot topic right now. We do HR training and HR consulting for clients. We help them structure their benefits packages. And then my role within all of that is my team does the client-facing HR and safety training. So that's training for managers, supervisors, and for the employees themselves on a variety of different HR leadership management topics, and then any safety-related topics that help support a safe workplace. I suppose that at a better time, you would have had a lot of conferences and seminars and speeches and group meetings. But that's probably unsuspense right now, am I right? Yes, absolutely. Yep. So we have had to adjust very quickly to, we already had a webinar series that we did, but we've had to adjust very quickly to the on-demand type format and to leveraging not only our webinar technology, but things like Zoom meetings. And not that we didn't use those before, but we're using them tenfold now. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is going to the bottom line. But when this is over, it will be over. Knockwood soon. Knockwood. I guess you're going to be using Zoom more than you did before, simply because you're going to be really familiar with it and you know the leverage involved. Am I right? Yeah. I think, I also think even on our client side that people who maybe weren't as open or interested in these types of trainings before that maybe were more insistent on in-person group trainings are going to be a little bit more flexible and willing to accommodate trainings that are done in this kind of, quote unquote, virtual classroom. Yeah. So is there a degradation of the environment when you go to Zoom? I mean, you're into communication. It's really critical communication because you have to make sure that they are hearing what you are telling them. That's the payload. And if you're in the room with them, you can eyeball them, you can see their reactions, you can see them. What is it called? Audio language. Right, all that stuff. But you're in Zoom and it's not quite the same. So query, is it a serious degradation of the environment or is it workable? So I think it's workable. I think probably the answer might depend on the maybe the definition of who you ask in our learning audiences because I do think that a lot of the younger folks are used to online learning. They've been doing it in high school and college and now they're in the workplace doing it. So it might not be as strange to them. Our webinar technology allows us to share slides and hand out some things like that. So we've been using that for a while. I think that you're right that when you don't have the ability to read and see the body language and reactions of people and including your learners themselves, it can make it more difficult, certainly, to have effective training. I think one of the things that we're still challenged with is for those of us that are used to facilitating in a classroom is how you facilitate activities and interactions so that the other learners get to interact with each other and not just with the facilitator. And that's something that we're still working through getting better at. I think the technology would allow you to do that. They have these side rooms in Zoom. They're developing as we speak. So you can have three or four people over there in a modular discussion. That works. The other thing I was going to say, and I hadn't thought of this until just now, is that when you have a screen full of Zoom participants and you're the teacher, well, if you're anybody in that screen, you can watch the other person. You can make sure that that person is awake, alive, listening to you. I mean, it may not be the same body language thing, but you can actually see if somebody's following you, you can see that they're there anyway. So I'm thinking that, yeah, there are detriments, there are disadvantages, but there are also some significant advantages because not only can I see that you're there, you can see that I see that you're there. You can't fall asleep in class. Yeah, you know, one of the other advantages that we have with some of the things that we've been doing in an on-demand format is then it becomes asynchronous, right? So you can do it 24 seven at any time that's convenient for you. So if you're a morning person, if you're an evening person, you can do your learning in the evening. So that has some obvious advantages as well. Yeah, well, and the other thing is, gee whiz, you can record it, which is what we do. This show will be recorded and we'll put it on our overnight player and it'll play all night with others and it'll be playing a long time. So you actually can really get it out there. You can advertise when it's going to be played so people can see it again and again. And furthermore, they can download it. So the whole thing is, you know, it's memorialized that way. And the lesson isn't lost just on the first iteration yet. So, I mean, we learned. So, you know, the serious part of this discussion is you guys have been a notable force in the marketplace, the business marketplace in Hawaii for a long time and you've done great service and there are people actually who extol your virtues all over town. I don't mean it as a compliment so much as a fact. And so what has happened now is that everything has changed. Your market, all these companies that have been your clients for all these years, all of a sudden are at the edge of a cliff. Some of them have already gone over the cliff. And, you know, I mean, it hurts you, of course, economically, not to have that client anymore. I mean, if an employee is lost, if a bunch of employees are lost, that's lost revenue for you. But at the same time, you know, I'm sure that you have the notion of trying to help them. You're in a service industry, trying to help people individually and by company. And so the question is, you know, what can you do to save? This is really a heavy question. What can you do to save a company that is a victim of the coronavirus phenomenon? What can you do when you wake up in the morning and you think I'm going to save them? What can you do? Yeah, so there's, it is a heavy question and there's a lot. There's a lot we can do. There's a lot we're trying to do. I think, you know, one of the first things that we've done is we launched a hotline for our clients because it did feel like it happened really fast. So I can remember a month ago, we did our first webinar and this is before the stay at home order on COVID-19. And we were advising people at that time to start planning for remote working, right? Like that was the big topic. And since then, we've launched a hotline. We grew our unemployment team. We started redeploying employees to all different areas of the business to beef up our hotline, our HR consulting, our unemployment teams. And then we started trying to publish tools and materials really fast to make those available just to clients, but to the community at large. So we, in just the last couple of weeks, we've produced eBooks that people can find online on reductions in force, right? I mean, unfortunately, we knew that that was going to be a topic people were going to need. How do you do a layoff? What's the difference between a layoff and a furlough? We did a remote work guide. We did an unemployment guide for business owners. We did there's some new bodies of law that have come out, right? So the family's first Coronavirus Response Act, the CARES Act. So we did eBooks on those topics, the PPP loans and the CARES Act. So we tried to produce and push out a lot of content that would be helpful to educate business owners to give them an understanding of kind of what are these business survivors. What are these business survival tools? And that's really our job anyway, right, is to try to interpret things like the stay at home order and help people understand whether or not you should do a reduction in force. And if you choose to do that, is it a layoff or is it a furlough? And how you can leverage or maybe not leverage, but feel comfortable knowing that your employees may need to leverage unemployment. That's what it's there for to kind of protect them, right? So all of that happened. And I think I'm sure we can talk more about these new bodies of law, but I think employers and business owners can take advantage of these tools and resources. Not just to educate themselves, but actually take advantage of doing things like applying for the loans that are available, leveraging the credits that they can take against these, you know, new leave laws, things like that, that can really help them to maybe save some cash during this really tough time period. So those materials available to the public or just your clientele? No, we've made them available to the public. So if, if anybody went to proservice.com slash coronavirus, that would be the place where we have all of those available. And there's, of course, there's links to click on. If you scroll down to putting on the size of your screen, how much you have to scroll. But there are webinars, videos that, you know, my team has done that we've mentioned on demand that are available and all of those ebooks are completely available to the public. Wow, very valuable for the community. It's good of you. You know, I think I want to sort of make a small digression or a point of that is this, you know, the world of human resources is so hard. There are so many rules and tax, tax provisions and the law changes and all these court cases come around and you got to be so careful that you don't get into a a me too kind of thing somehow wrongfully, or at least have the appearance of wrongfully discriminating. It's a minefield out there. And so over the over years recent seems to me that a lot of small businesses they don't have in house human resources. They rely on organizations like pro service, you become their human resources. You know, you're their consultant and you serve the purpose of a human resources department in their business very valuable. And the problem is that, you know, they're only too happy to have you do that, but they don't follow it. They expect you to follow it. They support themselves on how to deal with their employees. They expect you to help them at every turn at every difficult, you know, the personal type decision. My goodness gracious, it's a minefield and you you help them through it. So now, okay, we have the minefield getting much more dangerous, much more threatening with new issues that nobody has thought about, even if they were expert, even if they'd gone to the trouble of, you know, learning all about this. They don't know anything to deal with coronavirus. It's a new and more dangerous world. So I think you perform a great service by making this kind of publication public help companies that are not are not your clients. Yeah. And to your point, you know, our job on a regular basis, as mentioned as human resources, advisors, consultants, trainers, payroll individuals, right, is to guide people to mitigate risk to help them through the interpretation of the law. You know, I'm not an attorney. And I'm not a banker. But in the last couple of weeks, I've learned a lot and I feel like I could probably give a lot of decent advice on small business loans and the unemployment process. Because these are also tactics that we have to do to survive is to become, you know, of course, I'm not an expert become as expert as possible. And just be a couple of days ahead of our clients and being able to provide them with information and just sometimes having access to the information so that we can help them through that process. Help them understand what, you know, information they're going to need in order to apply for a loan help them put together their data packets, you know, those kinds of things. Those are a lot of the things that our team has has tried to do and to your point about, you know, making the information publicly available that really goes back to our core purpose as an organization. I'm not going to take credit for it. I'm proud to be part of an organization that believes in empowering businesses to be successful. And in this case, it's almost turned to empowering businesses to survive right where maybe before it was thriving. Now it's about getting a survival stage so that we can all rebuild after. I'm going to say after the dust settles maybe is the right term. Well, I'd like to cover two specific things, but maybe more with you. You know, one is, you know, what do we do. What does the company do faced with coronavirus. You identified a number of choices. You know you terminate them you furlough them. I don't know you close the door of a bankrupt that's a possibility. And the second area I wanted to talk to you about is, is how to how to apply for relief, whether it's federal state, what have you. And I guess, you know, my view of it as a small business person would be, let's keep the sucker alive. Because if I have to shut down, and then start up again. Oh, the effort is enormous. Now, maybe I just simply have to do that because I don't know how I'm going to be, you know, without revenue but, but I still want to at least consider the possibility of, of keeping it, you know, insuspends keeping it on ice for a while. That's what they're doing in Europe, you know, in Europe they keep on the payroll, they pay them even though the business isn't doing well, the government helps them do that and when they're ready to go back. They all come back. They haven't lost their resource. The US is not quite the same. Can you give me sort of a schematic of the decision process that a small business would go through in deciding what to do with the employees when the doors are closed? Yeah, so, so there's a couple of things. You've got one stay at home order, right? So even if you wanted to be open in some cases, if your business is not considered essential, you don't really have the choice or the employees maybe can tell a work depending on what you do for a living. In that vein, we've had two major bodies of law that have passed in the last month, which seems like, you know, it takes forever to get things to pass through Congress and all of a sudden things move really fast. And we're just trying to, the first one was the family's first coronavirus response act, so FFCRA. What that did is it provided funding for small businesses who have employees that need to take leave. Leave is essentially to either care for somebody who's got coronavirus or to care for yourself because you have coronavirus or though there's kind of an extension of the family medical leave with childcare because so many people, well, not so many. Pretty much everybody who has children, your kids are home because schools are closed. So that body of law has been able to help. And if you have a business where you are open, there is work to be done or your employees can tell a work. But you're struggling to keep them all available because, again, they're trying to care for children or maybe they are dealing with sick family members because of coronavirus. Then the FFCRA could provide some relief for those employers and we can talk more about it. But essentially what it is, is pay leave and as an employer, you would pay that out through the tax money that you would have normally set aside and then paid your federal taxes with. Am I going to get into all the details because you've got to kind of figure out how to manage that within your own business. The second piece of it is this CARES Act that was passed. And this is like a, it's a, I think it's $2.2 billion and it's a relief program. So it's an economic relief program. And there's a lot of different components to it. But the part that is most interesting to us and to our clients is the Paycheck Protection Program, which does provide services with an influx of cash. It is a loan, but it has a strong potential for forgiveness, loan forgiveness, if you meet the various requirements. So for a small business owner to be able to take out a loan that is potentially 100% forgivable or even if not forgivable is only at a 1% interest rate is a really great opportunity to get some cash. And to your point, just keep your business afloat because why would you shut down if you could try to keep your business afloat just a couple more months and then hopefully stay at home order gets lifted. And it's of course, we know it's not going to go back to everything being completely normal, but at least you can open your doors and resume business again. So is this happening? Is this available? Are these checks coming in? How much trouble is it to get online? Yeah, it is happening. We worked with our clients, it feels like it was weeks ago, but I think it was just last week. And the loans, I know that it's like dog years, you know, what the way time is passing now. The loans were available for people to start applying for. And so we have, I think over 1000 clients that apply for these loans. They're available through most major banks and credit unions. Our particular clients, most of them went through two of the local banks. So American Savings Bank on ASB and then CPP, so Central Pacific Bank, because we have a relationship and we built a particular process, a special application process with those banks. So because of that, many of our clients went through them. We are already hearing from some of our clients that they received confirmation of not just the submission of their application, but the acceptance of their application. I don't know off the top of my head today is what Tuesday. I don't know if anybody's actually received their funds yet, but the idea is that the funds should come pretty quickly from that point in time so that they could start to bring their employees back to work. You know, it's becoming clear that that what was allocated in that 2.2 or 2.3 billion trillion dollar trunch may not be enough. And in fact, Hawaii share, you know, that part of it coming to Hawaii may not be enough. So then you then you get into a kind of a barrier and Congress will have to be equally nimble to put more money in and I'm afraid to say there be politics and various sides of the fence will be arguing with their own agendas. But I'm just wondering what happens when we reach the barrier and the second tranche is supposed to come around. Yeah. Well, there's a couple things I think, you know, one, we're hearing that there's going to be a cares 2.0. I don't know if it'll be named that but we're hearing that there will be additional laws signed into, you know, whether it's a an economic, you know, stimulus package, whether it includes small businesses. I don't know the answer to any of that yet. I'm sure about it. Yeah. Secondly, I think there are also idle loans. So the economic injury disaster, if I'm getting that acronym correctly, those loans as well, which they're not for they're not non forgivable. Or sorry, they're not they are not forgivable. So they're they're they're they're low interest, but still loans available to small businesses and they have a little bit more flexibility. So we're the the PPP those paycheck protection program loans. Those are really very specifically intended for paying your employees to keep them employed. You can pay their health care with it as well. But the idle loan is a little bit different because you can use it to pay other business expenses, vendors, contracts, you know, machinery equipment, supplies, things like that. So we are also advising our clients if they are eligible for those loans to consider those as an option. That's an additional way to just infuse some cash into your business and cash is very much the the lifeblood of most small businesses. In addition, you know, honestly, we've done some business seminars. Recently, we had some of our executive teams, executive team members on panels where we've been trying to guide our clients on how to do things like cut costs. I mean, I think that people think of it in their own home when they're faced with things like potential for unemployment or furlough. But they also need to think about it as a business owner of, you know, cutting not discretionary spending and things like travels already been reduced. But all the other things that you might normally have spent money on how do you turn the faucet off on some of those expenses. So we've been trying to guide our clients to think about that and then start thinking about thinking about the future. So there's a point in time when you have to stop focusing on just what's happening in this moment and start planning for the future, making sure that you have the best talent in place. Do you need to innovate? Do you need to do something different with your businesses? We're seeing all these stories about all these restaurants in Hawaii that never did take out never did delivery and all of a sudden they're faced with this, you know, challenge but also opportunity to completely change their business model. And so I think there's a lot of opportunity for small business owners to do things like that. And we're trying to help them through that with as much guidance as we possibly can. Well, that's very valuable because, you know, every crisis does have opportunities. I mean, there are opportunities to pick up some of these businesses cheap, the ones that were failing. I mean, I fully expect some entrepreneurs going to come around and make lowball offers and buy some of these businesses and keep them going because they're at the cutting edge. But something you said interest me is that one is some of these loans with the required by the federal government of the SBA or by the bank are going to require guarantees. And I don't know if that's happened any of the loans you've seen, but if the guarantee is required in a bottomless pit of debt, some entrepreneurs may say, I'm not doing that. I mean, my stash has already been reduced, you know. Yep. Absolutely. So the the PPP loan doesn't require a guarantee. So that one is a little bit different. That's the one under the cares act. Again, that's also really low interest. So even if you don't get the whole loan forgiven, 1% interest over two years is really pretty minimal. So but but we are guiding our clients that they do have to make the decision that's best for them because we don't know what other loans they already have taken out how much debt they might already be in. You know, you never know how somebody has been managing their business and managing their expenses and whatnot up until this point in time. So we're trying to educate them with all of the facts and the guidance that we receive on, you know, the requirements that they'll need in order to have the loan forgiven. For example, to get maximum loan forgiveness if that's what they want, but also remind them if they don't achieve that, that it's still a 1% you know, low interest loan that they're taking out that they can utilize to even if they're only working part time, if they absolutely have to, but it can keep their to your point, keep their business on ice or keep them afloat for as long as possible until we can get through. I guess what maybe is survival mode. Well, let me talk about the ghost of Christmas future for a minute. Suppose this takes a long time. And suppose we have another wave of infection. Thanks to mistakes by the White House. Suppose we have, you know, a period so long that, you know, it's just no business or no small business is really sustainable in that period and they start to go down. They can't, they can't handle it. They can't handle the fixed expenses. What have you. And so now in a situation they may have tried to hold on to the employees may have tried to hold on to the franchise in some way, but it gets to be impossible. And so what can you do to help them then because this is really a crunch that could happen. By the way, that music is telling us we have one minute. So you have one minute to answer the question. You know, that's a difficult question and it is really hard to predict the future we fully anticipate that is going to happen with some folks and with some businesses. I think, you know, at the end of the day there will be new businesses that will open and that will come out of this and people who have been able to be innovative and creative and be smart about their expenses and their survival tactics. So, of course, my hope would be that those, many of those would be our clients. But I all small businesses, you know, this is a community of small businesses. So I would hope that for everyone. Well, it's nimbleness. And as they used to say in the Coast Guard, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. There was a ship by that name. Thank you so much. And it's great to talk to you. I think you're doing great work. Coast service is really helping the community. And I look forward to having the conversation later. Absolutely. Thank you so much.