This Is Entrepreneurship: Christine Fisher on Managing a Start-Up Through COVID-19
Like everything else right now, COVID-19 is shifting the focus of our This is Entrepreneurship series. We had planned to focus our talk with Christine Fisher, Director of Operations for Possip, on raising money as a start-up. But instead, we thought it would be helpful to our readers to expand that focus to include how COVID-19 is impacting their business and how she is adjusting – professionally and personally.
So – over Zoom, but still with coffee – we talked with Christine in late April about what it’s like to manage a company through a crisis (or two) with two young boys, a husband, and a dog in her immediate space. With characteristic candor and compassion, we learned not only about the struggles she and her colleagues are facing, but she talks first-hand about the struggles of the families, teachers, and school systems who are Possip users.
Interview by Judy Zitnik. Photography by Chelsie Walter.
Women of Cincy currently adheres to social distancing guidelines during all interviews.
What’s your elevator pitch?
Possip is helping schools better hear from parents through text message surveys, elevating parent voices. We reach over 160 schools and 80,000 parents in over 100 languages. We're trying to reach the most diverse set of parents possible to make sure schools are hearing from everyone.
What was the inspiration behind Possip?
Possip was started by our C.E.O., Shani Dowell, in Nashville over a dinnertime conversation with her husband who runs a network of schools. He was really struggling with a parent issue, and they realized there really was no systematic way for schools to hear from parents, nor a productive way for parents to really engage with the school. Often parents only elevate issues once it’s really in-depth and big, versus being able to get in front of issues when they're smaller. Her husband was feeling frustrated because the teachers only heard from parents when they were upset, but he knew there was so much good going on in the schools. In that moment, they realized there was no easy way for parents to regularly give positive feedback to schools. No parent is going to phone up the school and ask the school secretary to go get the principal to give a positive comment. And so this idea of just asking on a regular basis, and that power of asking the question came out of that conversation.
How did you get involved?
So just over a year ago, I was between gigs. I had been at Procter and Gamble for 13 years in finance. I then ran for office, and when I lost that election, I realized I wanted to do something that was closer to my personal mission. All of my volunteer work was related to education and parents, so while I was networking a mutual connection here in Cincinnati knew Shani Dowell from a former job and put us in contact.
Tell me about Possip’s growth as a start-up.
I came on as the first full-time employee about a year ago. Before that, Shani had grown the company – as a side job - mainly through personal connections, expanding that network as best she could. The idea was that I could run the business side of it and free her up to focus on fundraising. Growing just through sales wouldn't get us there fast enough, we needed to raise more money. When I came on, Possip had raised about $150,000. By October of last year, we were at $1.1 million. Taking that day-to-day work off of her plate was incredibly enabling for the company. Now we have seven full-time employees and another 13 who are part-time, and we're spread across the country.
How were you able to successfully raise funds?
One key thing is having the right message and clear direction of what you're raising for and what your company is doing. So honing our message was a big part of our success. Then it was the alignment of investor interests and company interests that was really important. Frankly, we did not have a lot of success out in the Bay Area or New York City or Boston. Most of our investors are in Nashville or have a connection to Nashville, so I think that for early stage funding more local does have an impact.
Most schools across the country have been out for at least four weeks, with most not going back to finish the year. How is Possip adapting to this change?
Since March 2, it has been a whirlwind for us. A large number of our school clients are in the Nashville area, and Nashville was hit with a tornado that day. We immediately realized we couldn’t ask parents our usual questions when school hadn’t even been on and they may not have their homes. We realized that our platform could be used to help the schools and district identify the needs of their families in that moment.
So we called up the district and said, “Hey, we're gonna pause right now, but would you like our help in identifying what those needs are?” We've done that before. We helped a school in Southern California when there were wildfires, and in Houston where there was flooding. But this was a bit different, just because of the number of schools that were affected, so we helped identify families that were in need of food or water or electricity at that time.
I think the real impact is on our work and life schedules, and the emotional toll of just everything that's going on.
Then the next week came and schools started shutting down, so we adjusted our questions to be more reflective of the current environment. Now we are asking, “Is your child's school meeting your needs this week? Do you have praise or feedback to share? What could have made your experience better?” And then, as the extra question we ask, “Did you face any successes or barriers in meeting your child's educational needs this week?” We also have some school districts that are using that extra question to specifically identify technology, food, or health needs.
How has COVID impacted your team?
So thankfully, all of our team is healthy and safe. I think the real impact is on our work and life schedules, and the emotional toll of just everything that's going on. Most of our team are working parents, so almost all of our team has kids at home. Shani and I are both working moms with husbands who have full-time jobs.
An insight that helps us do our job better and helps elevate parent voice better is that we're living the experience too. We are also trying to manage kids and their education, manage our jobs, and keep the household running. I think it’s going to be interesting to see the impact sheltering in place has on division of labor in the household. I'm really worried about women in the workforce in general moving forward. If schools stay closed for a longer period of time, are we going to see more and more parents opt out of the workforce to single working families? Because it's incredibly challenging for people to manage full-time jobs and kids at the same time.
How has this time been for start-ups in general?
Really challenging on two fronts. One is on the fundraising front. We were looking to potentially raise some money in this time before COVID hit. We're still out there having conversations, but most investors and firms are doubling down with the companies they currently are with because they want to make sure their current investments are safe for the future. But, this means raising any kind of new capital or new areas is incredibly difficult.
The other piece is on the sales front. We have been fortunate that we're a product that is very needed at this time, but schools are facing upcoming budget cuts as their sources for funding are impacted. For school districts across the country, we're hearing anywhere from 5% to 10%, all the way up to 20% budget cuts moving into next year.
Some of the government programs have been incredibly helpful. We were able to get a PPP loan, which is going to help us sustain our employee base through this time, but there were so many companies that weren't able to get in. I think that hits start-ups even harder, because you don't have established banking relationships and strong ties when you've only been in business for a year or two. You can't call up the relationship manager at your bank who you've been with for 20 years if you're a new business. So it really precluded a lot of small businesses from getting these loans.
Have there been other resources you’ve found in the local community that have been helpful?
For us as a business, being able to hear high quality content and webinars being put out by Cintrifuse and other organizations has been really helpful. Things that would have been paid conferences or speakers are now free. So that has been really helpful.
How has this all impacted you personally?
It's been really challenging. I have two boys, five and seven years old. One boy is in preschool and the other’s in first grade. There's not a whole lot of independent work happening. A lot of it is side-by-side work with a parent to help them through it, so a lot of the challenge is balancing that time commitment.
That split between work and home is no longer there, which just means our work day is the whole day. From trying to get a little bit done while they're just getting up and playing in the morning, to after you put them to bed doing another couple hours of work. I think that isn't sustainable for most people. Personally, I'm very fortunate that I have an actively engaged husband who is a full co-parent, but he’s on video calls and conference calls most of the day. There's a lot of trying to manage our schedules of who's going to do what in advance.
The reality is we have had the conversation, probably almost every week, of “How sustainable is this?”
It feels a little bit like both work and schools have tried to just continue as normal, and replicate it at home, like “We would have a full day leadership team meeting at work, so we're just going to do a full-day conference call.” It doesn't work. I don't think we're in that state of mind yet of we can't just take what we were doing and reapply it in the home environment, and I think both workplaces and schools are trying to do that right now.
The reality is we have had the conversation, probably almost every week, of “How sustainable is this? How many more weeks can we keep doing this? Should one of us step back and go to a reduced schedule? What happens if this continues through the summer and in the fall?” So we're kind of taking it a week at a time, but as we move forward it's going to be much more challenging.
So what does Possip’s growth plan look like moving forward? How are you adjusting?
We're pretty worried about COVID. We serve schools and schools are shut down. What is that going to mean for our business? After an initial couple of weeks of schools just really not responding while they were developing their own plans, we've actually seen an uptick in interest and sales discussions through the month of April. And that resulted in us bringing on our largest single client last week: an entire school district of 49 schools and 30,000 parents.
This environment really has elevated the need to hear from parents. While parents aren’t typically at the school on a regular basis, they're never at the school now. So it's really highlighted the problem that we've been trying to solve.
What are the barriers for connecting parents and schools?
Reaching all families can be challenging. Locally, Cincinnati Public Schools announced that over the last month they had tried to reach all of their families and realized they didn’t have accurate contact information for about 14% of their students. One of the services Possip provides to schools is when they first give us their data, we feed it back to them and say, “These numbers are defunct; these numbers don't exist; these numbers are landlines versus mobile,” and we help update the data as we go.
But, the other barrier is that parents and school administrators and teachers aren't all the same. There are often language and educational barriers. And when we see some of the things that either schools or other products put out in terms of questionnaires, they can be long-form with language that is not really accessible to a large portion of the population. Usually, these are written by people with PhDs, and you're talking to people who may or may not have high school diplomas, may not have English as their first language.
The other piece is technology. Across the country, schools and districts are reaching out to parents via email asking if they have any technology needs [pauses to let that sink in]. So, yeah, we think they might be missing a little bit of the barrier.
We chose text messaging as the platform because we know that is the most accessible way to reach parents. Typically in the schools that we’re serving, about 30% of parents don't have internet access or a smartphone. So how are they supposed to download an app? How are they supposed to respond to a web survey if they don't have access?
What do you think parents most want the schools to know? And what do you think schools most want parents to know at this time?
What we're seeing through our data with Possip is that parents want schools to really understand that they're not full-time teachers - that they have all these other things. So when the content and the requirements that the schools are sending assumes there's a full-time caregiver to help teach the content, that's really not a reasonable expectation.
We're also hearing from parents just the fear that their child is going to fall behind; that they don't have the resources to give them, but they know they need them whether that's the technology needed to enable remote learning, the educational background to help, or the time because of their work schedules. And then just the very basic needs they have: some parents are concerned with where the next meal is coming from, so they're not quite as concerned about getting that next lesson done.
And then on the school side, I think it's the realization that they're also just doing their best - that this is a once in a 100 years occurrence and nobody really knows how to address it or what the future holds either. I think parents are wanting answers and certainty, and I think districts are wanting to tell them that they don't have that for them.
Tell us about something good you've seen over the last couple weeks.
A reconnection with nature. One of the only options for people recreationally is to hike and get outdoors, and that was something we loved to do as a family before this crisis. It's even more important to us now. It's kind of our one weekly excursion. I'm excited to see that other people are starting to really enjoy that too.
So, tell me about an influential woman in your life.
My mom. She was a working mom. They were in Chicago right after they had their first kid. My father finished his PhD and she was having a successful career at an actuarial firm. He was a stay-at-home dad with their first kid while he was finishing his graduate work. Then he got a job teaching at a university in Canada, so they up and moved and she left her job making more money than what he was going to make. But of course, in the early 70s they weren't going to make any other kind of choice.
So she did take some time out of the workforce, but then went back and got her MBA. The early years for me were seeing her finishing up her degree, then teaching at the university with her MBA, working full-time, volunteering, and raising us. She just sort of established very clearly that it was an equal world in our household. My dad did a lot of the cooking and a lot of the child raising, and that was because she prioritized both her family and her career. So she's definitely influential.
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