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New years is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.

As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.

So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.

Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.

Hey, welcome to How I Built this Resilience Edition. I'm Guy Ross.

So each week, I've been doing live video conversations with founders and entrepreneurs about how they're building resilience into their businesses right now.

And in case you missed them when they happen live, we're posting excerpts right here in your podcast feed.

And today, I'm bringing you my conversation with Sarah LaFlure, the founder of M.M. LaFlure.

We featured Sarah on the podcast just a few months ago in February, but since then, of course, a lot has changed.

M.M. LaFlure sells high-quality, classic clothing to working women who don't want to think too hard about getting dressed in the morning.

But since the global health and economic crisis, Sarah's customers, many of whom work in law, finance, and politics aren't going into the office.

So these days, Sarah's learning to pivot.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, it was kind of crazy how quickly things turned.

You know, we knew COVID was coming, and actually because we have a lot of partners out in East Asia and Southeast Asia, we even back in January, we knew that this was really affecting our supply chain and our partners.

We said to ourselves, like, this could really become a problem if it comes to the US. But I think we were honestly just a little naive at that point.

And then come Monday, I think this was March 12th or something. We had our best retail day.

I was saying, like, maybe COVID won't affect us. And then five days later, we closed all of our stores. And just even in all the scenario planning, we had done nothing I think prepared us for just how much worse it was going to be.

Yes, we had Shen Haimanan from Rentharunway, and one of the point she made is that most businesses aren't prepared for low or no revenue periods for an extended amount of time.

It's totally true. I mean, you know, the first thing actually we did is we actually looked at our insurance policy.

It's that thing called active God, right? You never really anticipate an active God situation when you're running your business.

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