The Atlanta CEO Council’s mission is to connect CEOs to capital, customers, talent and each other. We execute this through memberships and 14 annual events. We are directly affected by the COVID19 environment but that hasn’t stopped our CEOs from gathering, helping and inspiring. On Monday night April 6, the usual time we hold our CEO dinners, 17 CEOs gathered to share their stories with dinner and drink in hand.
Palaniswamy Rajan, Chairman/CEO SoftWear Automation, kicked off our gathering stressing “health and safety is our top priority, then everything else can be solved.”
Baha Zeidan, co-founder/CEO Azalea Health, gave us feedback from surveying all of his clients, the importance of banking relationships, line of credit covenants and the uptick in telehealth.
Ritesh Sharma, co-founder Jvion, launched a public COVID19 Community Vulnerability Map that identifies populations most at risk for severe outcomes once they’ve contracted the virus.
Keith Schroeder, CEO High Road Craft Brands is the founder of the newly created public/private COVID19 Atlanta Hospitality Task Force that is solving for the risks in the food supply chain that affects manufacturers, farmers and grocers.
Mallu Huralikoppi, founder/CEO PrintForm, is working with Georgia Tech and Wellstar to help 3D print face masks.
Jeff Schmidt, CEO Avertium, is one step ahead of cyber criminals with security hygiene solutions as companies move en masse to work from home environments.
Monty Hamilton, CEO Rural Sourcing, is keeping employee morale high at his 500+ employee company by his display of transparent leadership.
Evan Jarecki, co-founder Gimmie, educated the group on his company’s software & hardware solution for the food service and grocery delivery sector.
Harish Mamtani founder Recordant, gave us insight into the COVID19 pandemic in India as well as a new company his team is starting in the payments collections sector.
Eugene Tutunikov, CEO SwissWatchExpo.com, is finding silver linings, launched a new website and tackling things he wouldn’t tackle otherwise.
Christian Ries, founder/CEO Jonny On It, has seen an uptick in customers as homeowners have been cooped up long enough to begin home improvement projects.
Eric Hartz, co-founder/President Nexus, has a business of converting waste plastics into virgin plastics and is deemed essential and has his team working in split shifts and has been operating in a budget conscious environment well before the pandemic.
JP James, Chairman Hive Financial Systems, was predicting a recession in Q4 2019 and made adjustments to his consumer lending business at that time and in parallel is working with the non profit police foundation to procure PPE resources.
Sathish John, founder/CEO Alora Healthcare. Alora’s home health software is deemed essential for the healthcare field and is implementing COVID19 assessments inside his software for both nurses and patients.
Andrew Bate, CEO Safely. Due to COVID19, home rentals in April have had no ‘movement’. Andrew spoke of a personal experience with the virus, the wearing off of the novelty of working from home and infrastructure changes so the company is not dependent on him.
Krishna Arangode founder/CEO Kaizen Analytics. Krishna thanked the first responders and shelf stockers while informing us of a deal with a cruise line that will be delayed. With the downtime, he has had success in getting front of prospects.
Adwait Joshi, founder/Chief Seer DataSeers, has very long sales cycle with very ‘sticky’ software. He’s hiring, cross training employees for incident response and crisis management skills. With his banking connections, Adwait has been able to help many CEOs with the PPP loan application.
We wrapped with discussing key qualitative COVID19 measures: 1) Increasing COVID 19 diagnostic testing 2) Increasing serological testing 3) Finding a predictable treatment to decrease mortality/morbidity rate 4) Vaccine being the longer term solution 5) Asymptomatic patients who can potentially infect others.
Our message is to keep your family safe and healthy first and then go execute on your business. Be safe, be well.
See this article on LinkedIn.
