How I Led the Podcast Ally Team Through Our Closure

It took me 10 months to definitively decide I wanted to step away from my business.

By the end of that time, I had an inkling of the type of work I wanted to do next, and my excitement for that work outweighed my feelings of loss for Podcast Ally. 

But can you imagine the stress I felt knowing that my purpose was to build better teams, when I’d have to disband my own?

Letting my team go was the hardest part of shutting down Podcast Ally, and it didn’t help that I couldn’t find many useful models to guide me through it. So today, I’m sharing my process with you.  

Before I go into the good, the bad and the surprising, I’d like to introduce the team. It’s important to me that, as I open up about my own thought process, we recognize the people who were impacted.

The team

The core of the team were our three account leads, off of whom happened to be based out of Colombia. 

• Valerie Grove, our most recent hire, was the most experienced and helped me develop the Podcast Planning Intensives. 

• Santiago Calad was incredibly creative at finding new markets and brainstorming angles for clients.

• Sam Brake Guia was the recruiter of our team, referring both Valerie and Santiago to me! He’s still working with a Podcast Ally client through next year.

A few months before I made the big decision, I traveled to Medellin to meet these three in person for the first time. You can probably imagine how this affected me when I finally decided to shut down Podcast Ally, but it was worth it.

Santiago, Brigitte, Valerie and Sam at a pottery studio (left to right)

I never got to meet the others in person, but they were no less important to me.

• Kelly Mulay transitioned from account lead to social media specialist when she had to cut her hours back and was creating content out of our podcast when we closed.

• Emma Katz was the glue that bonded our team! Emma provided client support for interviews and managed our podcast database.

Nynke Humalda was also on board for most of the decision-making process, but she left the company of her own accord for a role at the Nature Conservancy.

Now that you’ve met the team, let’s travel back in time to June 2022. 

Do you remember last summer? There was a lot of talk about an upcoming recession. 

In my field of PR, we tend to experience the impacts of economic downturns early on. Our services are seen as a luxury and rarely make the first round of cuts. 

Looking ahead, I was nervous.

I knew I could keep the company afloat during a recession, but did I want to?

I didn’t know – and I also felt the weight of the 8 people who counted on Podcast Ally as their primary source of income, counting my husband and me.

No matter what I decided about the company, I had to find a way forward that honored everyone. 

But how? Looking back, I've identified 4 steps that anyone in this situation can also learn from.

1. Look to the lessons of past challenges.

I launched the company not long before COVID. At the time, I employed two people, and we were coming out of a beta round of projects with a refined service and a solid plan for growth.

That’s why I decided to keep my two employees on payroll, even though I also let a few clients out of their contracts for the year. I expected demand to come in strong once people found their footing.

That gamble paid off. 

I started 2020 with 6 clients and ended the year with 20. When I think of our growth from July to December 2020, I often visualize it as holding onto a runaway stallion for dear life.

But I also didn’t pay myself in April, May or June, and I ended the year completely exhausted and burnt out. 

I don’t regret the decisions I made for the company, exactly, but in the aftermath, I decided that if the company wasn’t supporting me, it wasn’t fulfilling its purpose. 

This is why, when I saw another downturn coming only 2 years later, putting my own needs last wasn’t on the table. I also was certain we could survive a recession, but, was it worth the anxiety and burn out? 

I didn't know, but I decided to start laying the groundwork for cutbacks or a closure as a way to create space for myself to make the decision while feeling like I was doing right by the team.

2. Seek out role models to get ideas on how you want to lead.

"When in doubt, get more information," is something of a motto of mine. Unfortunately, it was nearly impossible for me to find any models on how to proceed. That’s why I’m sharing my experience with you now.

When you do look for resources, the easiest thing to find are news articles about what public companies have done. The problem is that the actions of public companies are poor role models for smaller businesses! 

According to US law, a public company’s leadership must make decisions in the “best interests” of the company. This is a complicated standard for public companies, but for our purposes, what it means is that large, public companies are guided by a system of regulations and incentives that simply don’t apply to us. 

If a public company doesn’t handle things in a way their shareholders approve of, those shareholders can sue!

In a recession, the result is behavior that no individual would condone if they applied their personal morals and values to the workplace.

Is telling your team that you’re shutting down at the last minute the most ethical way to go about things? 

No, of course not. 

But it is the path that makes shareholders the happiest, because the company saves money in the short-term and people don’t leave ahead of layoffs, taking their productivity with them prematurely.

Looking at the behavior of larger companies, I had a good idea of what I didn’t want to do, but I had to discover for myself what the alternative would be.

3. Decide how much you’re comfortable sharing with your team – and when.

One of the reasons I insisted on introducing you to the team before we got into this discussion is that I think it’s important to remember that everyone who works for you is an adult with agency over their own life. 

None of us has the moral right to take their personal choices away from them to pad our own pockets.

With respect to my big decision, this meant that I felt I owed my team enough information to make individual decisions about whether they wanted to keep working for the company, knowing what I did about the risks ahead of us.

By the end of that summer, we were having regular discussions about the economy, what it meant for the industry and for all of our incomes.

I don’t have an account of the exact timeline unfortunately, but every 1-2 months, I’d give an update on where our finances stood in staff meetings and any leading indicators of what was ahead of us. 

As I came closer to making a decision about Podcast Ally, I also started to let them know there was a chance that I’d close the company.

I communicated this way, because it was the right thing to do, but I’d be holding back on you if I didn’t admit that it was also incredibly rewarding. 

The team got involved in brainstorming and developing new lines of business, and we worked together to create new offers. These discussions directly led to our extremely popular (and profitable) Podcast Planning Intensives.

And when I cut hours at the start of this year, no one was surprised.

4. Take responsibility for how your decision affects the team.

In the end, I gave everyone a little over a month's notice that we were shutting down.

So much had changed for me in the preceding 10 months. My husband and I moved back to Sacramento, bought a house and were planning the second half of our careers, leading into retirement. 

It wasn’t about the economy any longer; I was ready to move on. 

That doesn’t mean it was easy. Telling the team was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my career.

It would have been so natural for me to make the announcement all about what I was feeling. It's such a weird thing to be a founder of a small company and have such repercussions for a what feels like a personal decision.

I made a conscious choice not to center myself in our dialogue.

I decided to tell everyone during our weekly team meeting, so they wouldn’t be freaked out by a random meeting showing up on the calendars, and I talked about what the change would mean for them. In that meeting, I made a commitment to help everyone transition into whatever role they wanted to pursue next. 

I would refer clients, connect them with anyone in my network that could help them – do anything and everything I could to make it easier for them to find new employment. I am very happy to report back that I was able to line up clients for anyone who wanted them!

During my weekly 1-1s, I reiterated this commitment and asked everyone to think about how they’d like me to support them. 

In these meetings, I heard things like:

• I’ve been thinking about starting my own company for a while now, and this is the push I needed to go for it. 

• I’m inspired by the change you’re making and ready to pursue my own career change. I’ve been saving up and will never have such a good opportunity to do the work I really want to do.

• I’d like your help lining up 2-3 freelance clients while I figure out what I want to do next.

Most of the team had spent the previous months thinking through what they’d do if the company closed. Writing this all out, I’m just now realizing that folks stayed with Podcast Ally all those months not because they had to – they wanted to. They were able to make that choice for themselves and think about options at the same time.

Perhaps the biggest surprise in all of this was the fact that no one ever expressed anger or resentment. 

On the contrary, I heard from team members that I didn’t need to worry about them, they were excited for me, they’d be okay but would miss our company and our culture.

I never wanted to turn to my team for emotional support – this was my choice and it was affecting them – but that is what I got.

Hopefully by sharing my experience and process, I’m paying that support forward.

Caretaking for your team is not always easy, but it’s worth it.