In late February, when news of COVID-19 began sweeping the country, I was reading everything I could find to understand what this would mean for our company. Our Evergreen® business, Life’s Abundance, produces safe and effective products for people and pets and distributes via online sales and individual distributors nationwide, and it was pretty clear to me in those early days that COVID-19 was going to change everything about the way we operate. We would have to pivot quickly because in a few weeks’ time, we were going to find ourselves in a brand-new world.

First, to support our employees in what seemed an inevitable transition to remote work, we quickly moved to get everybody set up at home so that they would have no need for the physical office—we enabled remote access, set up home office equipment, and did everything we could to think ahead to what team members would need to continue to work offsite. Our location in hurricane-prone Florida meant that we had an off-site business continuity plan established for a period of weeks. Now we were shifting to potentially be out of the office for months.