Wartime Leadership with Aleksandr Volodarsky, Founder of the Ukrainian Company Lemon.io

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:02) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Alexander, founder and CEO of Lemon.io, a Ukrainian remote staffing company for engineers. And they discuss what it has been like leading his company while relocating from a war zone, steps Alexander and his company have taken to make sure their employees are safe, and how you can support the war effort in Ukraine. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Alexander at 00:00:36) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) This is the Modern CTO Podcast. I was really excited to talk with you. I guess the way that this whole thing got started was there was this article about running a business from a bomb shelter, and that's because you're currently in Ukraine. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

(Alexander at 00:01:06) So yeah, we realized that it had started. Didn't believe it until the last minute. That was very foolish of us. When we realized that we were already here, it took us at least two weeks to not get back because we're still not back. We have people in occupied cities, so we still have people who are mobilized. But at least to get to some level of productivity in the company, we started planning for the war before, even though we didn't believe. It was obvious that something would happen, but we didn't think it would go full scale and we would find ourselves over here. And also, we thought, okay, even if—we've never been at war, so you don't know what's gonna happen for sure, right? You cannot realize. We were thinking, okay, if something happens, let's gather everyone in the city on the west. Let's work from there. That's a no-brainer. But in reality, when everything happened, the roads were packed. It was high traffic. You couldn't move. People stayed on the road for like 30, 40 hours. The city was packed. Everyone went there because it's the biggest city on the west. So we couldn't find accommodation, nothing. And also, we didn't realize that people were gonna be making their own decisions because they have families. They have their own choices, and we couldn't just gather them just because we wanted them to be together and help them. We wanted to help them, but they were thinking for themselves in terms of safety, in terms of relocation and everything. A lot of people wanted to stay where they are, even though several people who were in Kharkiv—it's one of the cities hit the most in the world—there are several people who chose to stay there even though they were pretty intensified over there. So we didn't realize this before the war. We were like, okay, let's plan this, this, this. If this is gonna happen, we'll do this. But in reality, it was very naive for us to think that we'd be able to do anything. The smart thing what we did is we gave people two months advance salary before it started so they have actual cash. And we assumed that if there was a full invasion, there'd probably be a problem with the banking system. They won't be able to get cash. And it was not like that, but still, having cash was very helpful because there were lines to ATMs. There was not enough cash in ATMs. The branches were closed and so on. Also, an important thing that we did that was great is we ensured everyone that no one will lose their jobs, whatever happens, unless they move to Russia. But we knew no one would. There are several people who are mobilized, who are in the front and protecting us. We told them you're gonna keep your jobs. You're gonna keep your salaries. We'll keep paying you until the company is still alive. And also, we understood that some people will be volunteering. Some people will be moving around a lot, and their productivity will be much, much less. So we said, you have to do your thing. You have to help your family. You have to help your community. You have to help yourself. Take your time. We're not in a rush. Even at the beginning, we said among founders that OKRs, our goals, are not relevant anymore. We live in a different world. So let's just kill most of the processes in the company and not focus on that and just let people find their places and relocate and find safety. And then we'll think what to do later. So everyone was very calm in terms of they didn't rush into working, and they did their thing to get to places that are safe. Most of them did. Some were relocated to the west. Some were relocated to other countries. And then two, three weeks after that, most of the people came back to work and very motivated to keep working.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:54) Yeah. And you have a lot of—you have 60-plus employees, right? And did some of them stay in Ukraine?

(Alexander at 00:05:02) Most of them in Ukraine, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:04) Are they still in Ukraine right now?

(Alexander at 00:05:06) Yeah, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:07) And what's their everyday like? Are they serving in the military during the day and programming at night? Or what's their life like?

(Alexander at 00:05:15) So the people who are serving in the military, they are not working. They show up once a week just to motivate us and to see other people. But if you're in the military, you're at war. There's no break. There are a few people who are in occupied cities. Now it's, I think, two people. And whenever they have connection and they can go online and start working with us, they do because they wanna do this. You know, what do you do if you're in occupied cities, right? They cannot go on vacation. They cannot rest. So whenever they have a chance to talk to people and spend time with the people they like, they do that. But the majority of the people are in safe places. Of course, there are sirens. There are missiles, and they have to go to shelters whenever there is a danger. But other than that, people are working as much as they can.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:10) What are they talking about on a day-to-day basis in regards to the war and what's going on?

(Alexander at 00:06:18) Oh yeah, it takes a lot of talks. It's about war, of course. First of all, there are loved ones that are at war right now—their fathers, brothers, husbands—and they talk about this. They talk about, you know, if you go to a bomb shelter a few times a day, of course, a lot of people are afraid of full mobilization, that all men will go to the army. They talk about this because, again, some fathers and brothers and husbands are still at home, but there's a chance they will have to go to war. That is very dangerous, and they could lose them. And of course, people speak about this a lot. But also, it's not like this is only what we talk about, and people are trying to wrap their heads around this and maybe try to focus on something else. That's why a month after it started, we decided to put back our goals as they were before the war, because this feeling that you can actually accomplish something and you can actually win something is very encouraging. And, you know, we say that our lives are not—work is not our lives, our lives don't circle around work. But to be honest, it is. You spend one-third of your time there. And also, whatever happens when you work will influence your regular life. If you are losing at work and your boss is bullying you at work, it will definitely influence your family, your regular life, your attitude, everything, right? So if at work you're winning and you see the results of your work and you see that it's growing, of course, and you see you're accomplishing—because wars can take long. I don't wanna predict, but wars take long to win or to settle. But when you see some accomplishments at work, it's much easier to live a life and be motivated and have hope in your life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:17) Yeah. I was reading some of the average wars last two to three years historically, not specific to Ukraine or anything. So in general, the people at your company—morale is sort of back to where it needs to be because people enjoy the structure of getting work done? And then there's just some nervousness about the potential of the people who are there having to go into the military?

(Alexander at 00:08:45) The morale is not back. People are pretty stressed, and even though they're trying to live their normal lives, you can see that this is a different person. This is a person with a different perspective. We had a person—we have our head of marketing. He's in the army, and he showed up last—he showed up, and some people just started crying. So morale is hard. Even after it started, in reality, you can say that people break down very easily. And it's not their fault. They're still facing a massive, massive danger and not only being hurt themselves, but also their families, their friends.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:38) How do you—you're one of the founders. You're one of the leaders of the company. Obviously, this is—I don't think there's any management book on this, right? So this is a really unique situation right now. But are you just focused on your team and handling things as it comes? Or what are the conversations like with your co-founders?

(Alexander at 00:10:03) You know, we have to, as founders, very much protect whatever's happening in the company. So we have 55 people in the company, and we have to make sure they're protected. So we think, what else we can do to protect them? For example, we started psychology sessions, group psychology sessions. So people enjoy and the psychologist is gonna explain to them how to deal with this and that. So a lot of—if before that we were planning growth, growth, growth, now we have to think about how to sustain people's morale, how to sustain people's health, physical health, and stuff like that. We have to think about, do people have enough money? Because when you relocate—I relocated myself—it's hard. Through your life, you gain so much stuff, so much crap in your house, in your apartment. Then you have to leave it all, and you have to switch to another place. We left. We took one suitcase with the two kids. I imagine the rest of the people did the same because some didn't have cars. I also didn't have a car. I bought it from a friend. But if you had to go on a train, you couldn't bring your stuff. You couldn't bring several luggages because in the place of your luggage would stay another person leaving the train. So we can understand that—we have to understand that people relocated, and maybe we should give them more money. Some people relocated to other countries. Maybe we should help them too. There's one girl whose mother didn't wanna leave the city that was one of the most hit. And they waited until two weeks ago when it was even dangerous to go out on the street, so they couldn't leave. We helped them to find a person who would drive them and evacuate them, and we'll pay for that. Now she's in Greece, and she needs to take care of her health, and she needs to rent an apartment, buy this and that. No one's gonna give it to her for free. So we help her to at least get back on—to some level of having things to get through her daily life. We think about this a lot. We think about how to structure the company so it can still function normally so 55 people don't lose their jobs, because it's very important to give—I mean, we wanna keep our company also, but also we think about how those 55 people would fare. What are gonna happen if we're gonna lose the company and they're gonna lose their jobs? So we have to be very mindful of how we do our business right now. Before that, we were very easy on investing in marketing and other things. Now we have to think through to have enough cash. Also, we donate all our profits to the army through different funds. So we have to think about how do we do this. There are some people who we know—they have friends or relatives in the army—and we're trying to help them find ammunition and different things like drones to help them actually protect us. So yeah, conversations change a lot. The things that we focus on change a lot. Before that, we were thinking, okay, do we wanna keep the company or sell the company? Do we wanna take investment or bootstrap? Now it's a different world. We have different priorities right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:26) So I wanna take the you and your company conversation and put it to the side. And I wanna just talk to you as a person, a father, right, with kids. And are you a citizen of Ukraine? Were you born in Ukraine?

(Alexander at 00:13:43) Yes, I was born in Ukraine, and I lived in Ukraine most of my life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:47) Okay. So as a Ukrainian, right—I'll share with you really quickly. So I've got three friends, one in Kyiv, one in Belarus, and one in Moscow. And we've worked together on and off freelancing together for ten years. So we knew each other before we had wives and kids and everything. And I was in Slack talking to them, all of them. And the entire time, I was saying, hey, this looks like it's going to happen. And they're saying, no, no, no, no, no. This is—no, no, no, no, no. All three of them from all three different countries. It's not gonna happen. He's just ruffling feathers or trying to scare people. And I was like, it looks like it's gonna happen. And then it happened, and it was really surprising to all of them. I'm curious, why was it so surprising for some people?

(Alexander at 00:14:47) I mean, first of all, it's denial. First of all, it's hard to believe that something like this happened in 2021, right? It's just crazy to think about this, that in the middle of Europe, something can happen like this. Secondly, the war started not two months ago. The war started in 2014. So there was already an ongoing war on the east of Ukraine, and we were already living the war. And we knew that the war is somewhere in the east. There's something happening there. There's bad days and good days, and this is how you imagine it's gonna go. We've never been on a full-scale war before. That's why I think people were like, no, it's not gonna happen. It's impossible. Because we were living that war before. We didn't think it will scale to that part. We were thinking, okay, maybe it's gonna expand a little on the east to other cities. So my parents lived on the east. And by the way, their home doesn't exist anymore. And I spoke to them about what's gonna happen and how can we evacuate them if something happens, because they didn't wanna leave before that. So I didn't think that I would have to relocate myself, right? So I didn't—I mean, we had a plan. We had a suitcase. But in reality, we didn't even think this is possible. We just, you know, let's do this.

(Alexander at 00:16:07) We just have to do this, but we didn't think this through. If I was believing that this is gonna happen, I would just, you know, go outside of Ukraine and stay there until there's a better situation. Because there was already something going on on the border, and from the Russian side, there were, you know, propagating fights. And it was pretty clear that something gonna happen, but that it would go full scale and the missiles in the close airports—no. And even more, I'm also a citizen of Israel.

(Alexander at 00:16:34) And you have to register that you're a citizen of Israel living in Ukraine, so I did that. And I get emails. I get Facebook ads saying you have to leave Ukraine now because later it will be hard and impossible to leave, with a red exclamation mark. And I still, you know, was in some kind of denial probably and not believing that it's possible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:03) And so what was the exact moment where you said we need to get the suitcase and leave?

(Alexander at 00:17:08) It was already in the middle of the day of the war. So we woke up, actually overslept because there was that at 5 a.m., and then we woke up maybe at six. So I didn't hear the sirens. And at the beginning, it was impossible to leave Kyiv because the roads were already blocked and it was high traffic. People stayed for many, many hours. People stayed for like 20, 30 hours on the road where it's usually six, seven hours. And there were already problems with gas. You could only get like 20 liters per time, and it was like two, three hours of line. And we said, okay, we're gonna stay because it's impossible to leave.

(Alexander at 00:17:51) But later in the day, they announced curfew, and I understood that, you know, with the curfew through the night, the roads were gonna empty, and we could, you know, there's a chance to leave without high traffic. And we went before the curfew to a Jewish village outside of Kyiv. We went there. We stayed overnight, and, like, we stocked up on coffee and then we just went. And we could—it was pretty empty. This is when we understood, this is when we started acting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:25) And then from there, how did you actually get to Israel?

(Alexander at 00:18:29) I went to the West, to a Western city where my mother-in-law—we stayed there, and then we went to another city. We were looking for the border where there's, again, like, you could stay on the border for like 30 hours, and with two kids and a suitcase, and it was raining or snowing—I don't remember already. So we decided to go further to the West, closer to Hungary. And then over there, on the border of Hungary, we crossed the border and went to—then flew to Israel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:00) And you were driving?

(Alexander at 00:19:03) No. I don't own a car. It's my friend's car. I live in the city, and I'm a city kind of person. Don't like cars. But it was my friend's car. I left it in the West with someone I know, and then we crossed the border by foot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:19) Okay. Wow. And then what's the type of conversations that you're having with your kids about this? Like, how do you explain it to them? How old are they too? Sorry. I know I'm asking a lot of questions. How old are they?

(Alexander at 00:19:31) Sure. Yeah, let's start with that. Six and three. My boy's six. My girl's three. We're parents who don't hide things. We're not trying to hide anything. I was always like that with them. I had no problem explaining that if you're not attentive on the road, you're gonna die. Not that the car's gonna hit you, but that it will lead you to not living. So we're pretty transparent with what's going on, and we couldn't hide it because on the road, there were already sirens. We had to go to bomb shelters all the time through the night.

(Alexander at 00:20:00) So we had to explain what's going on. Of course, kids understand through their prism, and they talked about this a lot. And, you know, of course, we were, like, thinking about how we were explaining this, but we're pretty transparent. The girl, she's three. She wouldn't understand most of it, meaning like the meaning of it, but we had to talk to them equally. This is what we choose.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:24) And what's, like, I can't read Ukrainian—what's the Ukrainian news talking about right now?

(Alexander at 00:20:33) I don't read news.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:34) Oh, you don't read the news? Smart guy.

(Alexander at 00:20:38) Yeah. So what I read is a Telegram channel that tells you about what's going on, the facts, not the opinions. Opinions are very speculative, and it's just one opinion against another opinion, and it's gonna be like this. So why would I spend my time on reading this and thinking about this and also living through this, thinking that, oh, if this might happen, this might happen. If, you know, it's a 50-50 chance, I would better spend my time with kids. They are very stressed, and, you know, I have to spend time with them because they are different people right now, like, in terms of emotionally different people. And spend my time with the company. We need to—we are growing, and thanks God, we're growing like we never grew before. But, you know, we could lose the company right away if, whatever, full mobilization in Ukraine. Right? We could lose our company. So I would better spend more time in the company and trying to go even further so that we would be at the point where it would be much harder to lose, and we have more money to save, et cetera. So yeah, news, I try to stay away.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:50) So you're saying full mobilization. Is that when the men have to be a part of the military versus volunteer?

(Alexander at 00:21:59) Oh, everything is have-to right now. So there's a queue where mobilization is mandatory for everyone. It's just there are volunteers too, but there's a queue of mobilization. So the first part of mobilization was people who were already in. So someone who was serving and already fired and knew better, you know, the fighting, they mobilized first.

(Alexander at 00:22:24) Then the people who were in the army but were never in the fight, then et cetera, et cetera. So the last people who were never ever even taught, or dumb like me—I never had a gun in my hand—so this is the last, you know, the last number in the queue. But other than that, it can be full mobilization of all the men.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:44) In America, there's like more guns than people. We've got a lot of guns. Right? And it's almost like sort of a hobby for a lot of people, including myself. So I've been around a lot of guns, have a lot of guns. I just—it's a hobby sport type thing.

(Alexander at 00:22:58) Wow. Where do you live?

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:00) Tennessee in the United States.

(Alexander at 00:23:02) Okay. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:03) I spent most of my life in Florida, and then we moved—we wanted more land. When all of this stuff happened, we were in a close neighborhood, like a city-type neighborhood, and we wanted to go out to a place where we could, you know, grow food or have animals. And so we found that in Tennessee. Yeah.

(Alexander at 00:23:24) Wow. Very cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:25) What's the culture like there in Ukraine? Do most people have guns in their house? Like, I'm talking about before the war.

(Alexander at 00:23:33) So I know two people who have guns in their houses. That's it. Also, my surrounding is very different. Like, I'm an Orthodox Jew, and a lot of my surrounding are Orthodox. Not all, but a lot of my surrounding are Orthodox Jews. And those people don't own guns in Ukraine. I mean, maybe in Texas. They do. I've been to Houston, but by the way, they have guns in houses.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:59) They have lots of guns in Houston.

(Alexander at 00:24:00) Yes. So yeah. I know two people who own guns, but not a lot. I didn't know a lot of people who do. And the laws are still—I think the laws are still not very in favor of guns. You had to go through a lot to own a gun and to be able—I mean, you can use a gun unless you're hunting. You have to have a license. Unless you are training, there's also some regulations around this. But like, having them at home, I think it's harder.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:33) Now because you're in Israel, right, so you're outside of Ukraine currently.

(Alexander at 00:24:39) I'm outside of Ukraine currently. I'm in the United States right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:40) Oh, you're in the United States?

(Alexander at 00:24:42) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:43) Oh, what part?

(Alexander at 00:24:45) I'm in New York.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:46) Oh, you're in New York. This is so funny because when you're talking about being an Orthodox Jew, I was like, I've got several Orthodox Jew friends and they all live in Brooklyn.

(Alexander at 00:24:54) Yeah. I'm in Monsey. It's not far from Brooklyn.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:58) Yeah. Honestly, I've gotten to go up there and hang out with them and see their community and stuff like that. And it was really cool because when you hear the word community and you're not an Orthodox Jew or you're just a normal citizen, it's one thing. But when you hear community, how they do community, it's really cool.

(Alexander at 00:25:21) It's incredible. It's incredible. Yeah. We've been taken care of so much over here. It's just unbelievable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:27) So the conversations that you're having with your wife and your family are more around creating a sense of normalcy with your life right now. Is that accurate?

(Alexander at 00:25:38) Of course. Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot about that. Physical comfort, emotional comfort, we talk about this most of the time, to be honest, because we've been on the road for two months and we just got to the United States.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:51) Okay.

(Alexander at 00:25:51) Trying to find the right place. And yeah, we speak a lot about this and see—of course, a lot of this is around kids because they're stressed and they have to go—they've been through, you know, different places and already, like, two schools and it's so hard on them. But also physical comfort. But I believe people who are able to get back to normal life have to. Because whatever you are going through, if you are trying to live your normal life—what means normal life? To work normally and to be able to contribute normally. If you are in good health and living a normal life, you could actually be helpful to the people who are not.

(Alexander at 00:26:34) Like, example, we spend, as I told, we donate all the profits to the army. So whatever I make right now—not me. I'm sorry. Whatever our company makes right now, if we make more, we're gonna donate more. If we make less—how do you make more? You're in a state. You can make good decisions. And how do you make good decisions? You have to be in a good state of mind. So I think this is the right thing to do right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:03) I love that what you just said. You make really poor decisions when you're frantic and fearful. You make really good decisions when you're in a good state.

(Alexander at 00:27:14) Again, like, good state is very—I'm sorry. I don't know the word, but it's subjective. Yeah. Subjective. Yeah. So, I mean, we're still stressed. We're still reading the facts and news. Like, this missile there, you know, happened this and then that. And also, we have friends. And all the—55 people in the company who are there—not 55. I'm sorry. I think 37, something—people are in Ukraine still. So we talk to them. We're worried about them. So there's no normal state, but trying to reach it as close as possible, it's what I'm aiming for.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:50) Do you find that the tech community is very supportive in the sense that they wanna give you business and help?

(Alexander at 00:27:59) Yeah. A lot of support. I wrote this tweet, the one where I—that's, you know, how we're getting ready for the war. And if I'm trying to go back and read this tweet, I was very foolish to do that. But the things that work for us, like, you know, keeping people's jobs and so on, a lot of people related, and they reached out. Clients reached out to us and said, like, we wanna do the same thing. If someone is mobilized, we're gonna keep paying them, or if they cannot work temporarily, we wanna keep paying them. So the community is very helpful, and there are a few initiatives like Hire from Ukraine or Buy from Ukraine, and people are very interested. I had another tweet where I said that a lot of people I know lost their jobs, and let's try to find them. And I think I had like 100 plus answers, people looking for engineers, marketers, virtual assistants, and so on and so on, and we could match a lot of people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:53) Any specific charities or causes that you like that we can link to in the show notes?

(Alexander at 00:29:02) Yeah. We donate to a few. We actually donate to two charities right now. And then, like, if someone reaches out personally, we do that, but not to the fund. There's one called Come Back to Life. In Ukrainian, it's Povernys Zhyvym. It's a foundation that was helping the army since 2014. They are very trustworthy, and they're doing amazing things. We see, like, they're supplying the army with the things that are hard to find, and it's just amazing what they do. We support them, and there's another foundation that was created by product managers from tech firms, and they also created a fund that's also supplying just with the smaller stuff.

(Alexander at 00:29:46) But still, it's, like, for the safety of soldiers and also for, like, drones and things that will help them, you know, make better decisions when protecting us. It's called Kolo. They're also amazing people. We support them widely, and we know them very well. All of them are, you know, deeply concerned with what's going on and working around the clock to do that and to spend the money wisely. And then, you know, there were a few great initiatives. So, like, Airbnb did—if you saw that—someone booked an apartment in Ukraine that they didn't wanna use. They just wanted to send people directly the money. So I think Airbnb advertised this, and a lot of people did that. So much money was sent directly to people through Airbnb.

(Alexander at 00:30:32) There's one more initiative that is really good, made by one of our VCs. Not our VCs, VCs in Ukraine. We didn't have venture funding. So they did—they gathered donations, and then they gave, I think, each family several hundred dollars to the families who were affected by the war.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:50) Amazing. And then we can get those links from you.

(Alexander at 00:30:54) Sure. I will follow up with you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:56) Yeah. So that way we can put them in the show notes, and anybody who wants to donate or contribute, they can.

(Alexander at 00:31:03) That would be great. Yeah. A few things you can do is donating directly is, you know, a great help. Then buying from Ukraine, because if when you have the economy running, you can actually keep supplying the army. You know, we have to do that. And also, it's not just supplying the army, but also you can pay other people, and those people support their families. So you're actually, like, hiring one person, you're supporting like 10 or 20 people at the end. So, like, hiring and buying from Ukraine is also very helpful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:34) Is there any other topics that — so if I seem a little off, it's just like this is a big thing happening. I've never lived through anything like this, and I'm trying to make sure that, you know, I ask the right questions and cover topics that people would want to hear about. And is there anything that I haven't asked or brought up that you want to talk about?

(Alexander at 00:31:57) Yeah. We spoke about this already, but what I learned with this situation — also never been there and never wanted to experience this — but what I learned when you manage the company, you very much rely on people and how do they feel. And you cannot, you know, you cannot make them feel good. You can only help them feel better by fixing something.

(Alexander at 00:32:22) So, like, if you tell people that we're going to support the cause, support right now, whatever is serving you, it's going to help them to cope with that, and they will be motivated to contribute to your company so you contribute to their cause. Like we said, we're going to contribute all the profits to the army, and people just went over their heads to be as productive as possible because they know whatever they do is going to influence the outcome of what they can contribute. Also, we thought, like, maybe we should kill our goals for a year because we didn't want to put even more pressure on people if they are very pressurized. But later, we learned that, you know, all those wins that they have is very encouraging and it helps people to cope with the stress. It's actually like a — I don't know.

(Alexander at 00:33:11) The work becomes, like, kind of a metaverse from the reality of, you know, the tragedy that's going on. And the third thing is very important — to give people, if they're in this kind of situation, to give people some kind of foundation, some kind of hope that they can keep their job. Whatever happens, they not only have to go through all the shit, right? But also, they may be fired because they cannot work or they can lose their jobs or salaries, right? If you give them the feeling that they are safe on this side, it's unbelievable, you know, what kind of return you can get in terms of emotional return, in terms of productivity in the future. People are very thankful and grateful, and they will be much more loyal. Even though they're still loyal, they will be much more loyal, and they'll be contributing like hell.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:06) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.