Being ready for unexpected situations can make the difference between life and death. Our world is full of potential crises, from natural disasters to catastrophic accidents. Ignoring these risks and hoping for the best is not a viable strategy. However, by prioritizing emergency preparedness, you can reap numerous benefits and increase your chances of survival in a crisis.
In this episode, Golden Hour Preparedness CEO & Founder Emily Jane Zahreddine joins us to talk about emergency preparedness. We dive deep into the importance of emergency preparedness and crisis management, not just from a physical standpoint but also for mental health. EmilyJane shares valuable insights and practical tips on how to respond and keep yourself and your family safe in the face of disasters.
Listen to this episode to understand the significance of emergency preparedness and help us share this episode with friends and family.
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Emergency Preparedness and Crisis Management with EmilyJane Zahreddine
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, we’re going to talk about emergency preparedness and this is something that a lot of people, especially if you’re really excited about your idea, you’re really excited about what you’re pursuing, don’t necessarily want to talk about, don’t want to think about but it is something that’s really important because it can make the difference between something that becomes a minor hiccup and something that kind of ruins you. There are times when we have to cover our bases and sometimes we have to cover what happens when something unfavorable happens in so many aspects of our lives, businesses and all of our pursuits. My guest today, EmilyJane Zahreddine, is the founder of Golden Hour Preparedness, an emergency preparedness company.
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Emily, welcome to the program.
Hi, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.
Let’s start by talking about emergency preparedness. What does it mean? If someone hears the phrase “emergency preparedness,” a lot of times you’ll think about, if you live in California, an earthquake, if you live in St. Louis, a tornado, if you live in New York, a hurricane, but there’s probably a lot more to it than just that natural disaster that’s most prevalent in your region.
Absolutely. So, I like to think of a really close to home example. So I’m married and I have an eight-month-old son so if my son had a medical emergency and needed to go to the hospital and be there for several days and be treated, my life would change dramatically from the way that it is today. I would take time off of work, I would cancel my dog grooming appointment and cancel my nail appointment, make sure only essential things that I need to keep myself, my husband, and my son going are happening and that’s what emergency preparedness is. It’s making sure you know what those things are so you can keep going and keep focusing just on the essentials when things get tough. When you don’t have all of your normal bandwidth and you’ve got to reduce what you’re able to do because an emergency or disaster takes up some of your capability, you need to have a plan, a strategy to fall back on that makes sense for you and your lifestyle for you and your family, for you and your business, that makes sense for you to implement and execute so you can keep things rolling in the way they need to to stay in business, to keep your family together, to support people who are going through a hard time in your life.
So it sounds like it’s less about even identifying a list of these are the possible emergencies and this is the relative likelihood of it happening and more about understanding what those essentials are.
Absolutely. So, every individual has different essentials and FEMA is coming out, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is coming out with a new way to define emergency preparedness. So, historically, it has been build a kit, so you need to build your emergency kit, you need your three gallons of water a day, you need your protein bars, you need your snack, stuff like that, but we are working to redefine what emergency preparedness is I think across the emergency management field and so I identify emergency preparedness now as being prepared as an individual for what you individually need. If you’re an individual who is lower income, who might not be able to put three meals on the table every day, FEMA has been telling you, “Oh, you need emergency food supplies,” but if you can’t achieve that on a daily basis, you can’t have food in stock and in reserve for yourself so that doesn’t work. So, what we’re saying now is you need to understand what community resources you have.
You have community organizations you can go to to get the help that you need. It’s not just about having the three gallons of water and the protein bars. There’s a lot more about it and it’s so much based on your individual situation.
So, everyone has a different situation that combines what you need and I just think about even specific examples, say, someone that’s type 1 diabetic and their needs might include their insulin or some sort of a quick source of sugar at all times, which is different than someone who doesn’t have that disease or someone who has a different type of mental situation as well as the resources that you have available based on your specific circumstances and what operations you need to keep going.
Absolutely. And so one of the things that is really important to keep people going and that’s really customized as well is comfort items. We can’t all just be happy and successful and thrive if we just have our protein bars and our three gallons of water. We need more than that as humans and so we need to make sure that’s reflected in our preparedness kits. So, in my preparedness kit, I have a lavender eye mask. It’s luxurious. It was very fancy, I got it in a spa. It’s luxurious but it makes me feel calm and comfortable and so if I’m in a disaster or an emergency, when it is my time to rest, I need to take advantage of that and so that’s why I have sort of a more personal item in my care kit that really helps me get back to my Zen space.
And can these emergency preparedness kits, when you talk about comfort, go a little bit too far? Is there a point where you have too much frivolous stuff and people claiming, “Well, I need this for my comfort, I need that for my comfort,” and it can be a little bit where you have to say, okay, you might have to pick and choose a little bit here?
Yeah, there certainly is a fine line and what you want to keep in mind is is this stuff that if you have to leave your house, you can bring with you conveniently. That’s a really hard part about disasters and emergencies but the reality is the impacts of disasters and emergencies impact our homes and people have to leave their homes and, sometimes, they have to do that really urgently, like you see in wildfires, you see it in flash flooding, even regional flooding after major rainstorms, like you see it all across the Midwest and it’s a really hard and severe thing and, unfortunately, it’s something that we need to come to terms with a little bit more is understanding what are those essential items that if I were to lose my house, I want to bring with me. And this is such a grim topic and I hate to be the person who’s a real bummer but, at the same time, I’d prefer you to have that half-hour conversation where you say, “Okay, the wedding photo book, my jewelry that’s in my bedroom, and my favorite boots,” or whatever it is, “those are the three things I need to grab,” I’d prefer you to have that uncomfortable conversation right now than have evacuated your home and not have your wedding photo album. I’d prefer that to happen to you is for you to have that uncomfortable conversation to think through it than for you to have the worst-case scenario happen to you. And that’s the value proposition that I offer in my work and in my mission space of educating people to navigate disasters and emergencies. It’s so important to be able to have those difficult conversations.
And then when it comes to people who operate businesses out of their homes, how does that work? Because there’s certain other things that are literally going to destroy operations or there’s some emergencies where people just need to accept that, well, your business is going to not be operational if your home suddenly gets flooded.
Right. Yeah, that’s a really hard part of this is that as lives have changed after COVID and like our homes are more of our entire world than just where we spend the evenings and night times, it has changed a lot. And so that is something people absolutely need to be aware of. The use of cloud storage is such a game changer and it’s so cheap now compared to what it used to be, you can have Google Drive for free and you can put a ton of stuff there and making sure that you have all of your backups, all of your paperwork, all of your insurance information backed up is so important. But I want to take it a step beyond that because I’ve talked to a lot of companies that say, “Well, we don’t need this kind of work. We don’t need to be proactive about emergencies. We’ll just go out of business,” or, “We’ll just have insurance write us a check.”
Yeah.
Okay, so, I mean, if you want to go out of business, I don’t know if I can help you. But if you’re saying insurance is going to write us a check and then we’ll be fine, I want you to have a strategic plan so you understand what you’re going to spend that money on rather than just being overwhelmed and completely overloaded while your whole business feels like it just got shaken up like — what are those called? Snow globes.
Oh, yeah.
I don’t want your world to be shaken like a snow globe, I want it to be a little bit calmer for you. And so my hope is that, as businesses realize how important this work is, they take steps to building resiliency within their organizations.
And then are there other scenarios because we’re thinking about, say, a flood where you have to leave your home and your home may be destroyed, but there may be scenarios such as, I don’t know, there’s a terrorist threat called in where the most likely scenario is you have to leave the area or you have to hunker down for a number of hours, number of days, but then you’ll be able to go back and, most likely, your office, your home, whatever place is going to be completely intact the way it was before. How do those scenarios get prepared for from a resiliency standpoint?
So I addressed that mostly through the concept of shelter in place. So shelter in place situation will last either from 10 minutes, where it’s, oh, there was a bomb threat called in, a car accident outside, something scared people and we need to shelter in place to make sure we’re safe in the building. That usually lasts, as I said before, between 10 minutes or 10 hours. So either you’re there for a little while or you’re there for a real long time. And if you’re there for a long time, we want you to have what you need to stay engaged and safe and productive in that room. When I say productive, that’s a really important part of it because if you’re sitting there for 10 hours with your co-workers, I’ve loved all my co-workers, God bless them, but I don’t know if I want to spend 10 hours with no bathroom access in a shelter in place room with them. So, part of what the training goes over, part of what I sort of talked through is making sure that people understand that there are so many different types of things that could put you in these situations but the situations have kind of the same responses. You’re going to end up doing the same things, and that applies to personal preparedness too, but there are common standard activities that you’re going to want to do. If there’s an active shooter or any kind of emergency going on in your office, in American policy, you’ve got three choices. It’s run, if you can put space between yourself and the assailant or the problem that’s going on, you want to put as much space as you can. And if you can’t do that, you want to hide. You want your cell phone on silent and make yourself invisible. And then the third choice, which is not what we want anyone to have to do, but if you end up in this situation with this perspective, it’s you and the assailant, you and the danger, we want you to survive and so we give you permission to do whatever you need to do to stay safe in that situation. Other cultures like the UK, for example, they use run, hide, tell so the third step is to inform people that there’s an emergency going on and to get additional help. So there are different pros and cons to each and it depends on the culture that you’re talking about as to which one is going to be most successful.
So, run, hide, and then survive.
Yes.
And it actually reminds me of a movie that I watched that just came out last Friday called Cocaine Bear and if I think about all the characters in that movie, I don’t want to give away too much of it, but, obviously, the premise of the movie is pretty obvious from the title, it’s a movie about a bear that does cocaine and, as a result, things get really hectic but it seems like the characters in that movie, each one uses one of those three tactics.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, they’re really transferable and it applies to walking in a downtown of any city right now is what is your personal space, what do you find to be acceptable, and how do you maintain that space, and that’s one of the things that I like to coach people on as well is how to feel comfortable in any situation that they’re in. You don’t need to know karate, you don’t need to know self-defense but if you can understand when someone’s crossing a line and hold that boundary for yourself and say, “Nope, that’s not okay,” and then react and stand up for yourself and say, “No, that’s not acceptable,” then you’re doing a lot to protect yourself.
And then what are the edges or the constraints of the domain of things that we can think of as emergency preparedness? I know a lot of people have recently talked about things such as mental health and mental health usually shows up most commonly right now as burnout and burnout is a completely different idea than a hailstorm is coming and it’s going to destroy your car windshield while you’re driving and may hit you in the head. Does this still fall under that domain or is preparing for whatever can happen to you, your family at home, you, your employees at work, a totally different discipline?
So this is such an interesting question and emergency managers have one primary professional association and this topic came up yesterday in the discussion boards.
Oh, wow.
The prime example that I see of emergency management being used for, and I’m using air quotes, “non-traditional” methods or “non-traditional” missions is homelessness. Or the opioid crisis.
Okay, yeah.
The city of Philadelphia has opened their emergency operations center, I would say this was in maybe 2019. For 90 days, they did a 90-day sprint to address opioid addiction and abuse in Philadelphia. And so the reason that emergency management is pulled in to handle these other disasters and emergencies is because we have a great framework for organizing personnel and running operations. We use the National Incident Management System and the National Incident Management System was developed in the 1970s from the Firescope Project in the California wildfire community. And after 9/11, the 9/11 Commission Report came out with a finding saying that the National Incident Management System, NIMS, needed to be taught to people across the country. So every fire department, police department, emergency medical service department, and emergency management department, along with public health departments, all of them use the National Incident Management System. So this allows us to scale quickly. It allows us to organize and manage massive resources like food for 10,000 people a day with a snap of our fingers because we know how to work in this module sort of infrastructure. The problem is the infrastructure is built to suit first responders because that’s where it grew out of, but first responders are a really small portion of emergency management and so we need to move away from some elements of NIMS to allow non-traditional stakeholders like nonprofits, businesses that have extra salt when you have an ice storm, communities that can help in different ways, you need to make it easier for them to organize themselves and to fold into our diverse, rapid decision making process that we conduct in an emergency operation center.
And within an organization, we talked about all these resources, are there any people that you would advocate don’t need to think about emergency management? If someone’s like, say, a rank and file, I hate that word, the term, whatever, just a standard employee at a large corporation or is this something that everyone should think about it at least to some degree, even though you’re probably going to have like your, in these big businesses, floor captain of like the emergency preparedness stuff?
Right. So I — well, I mean, I live and breathe this stuff. I’m into it. It’s my hobby and my passion, my professional focus so I think everybody should be concerned about it. I think it’s relevant to everybody because everybody’s responsible for their own safety.
Nobody is responsible for your safety but you. Click To TweetAt the same time, I would say pre-COVID, I would say, yeah, you can probably get by with just having floor captains and letting them be in charge of things and they can sort of educate the rest of the team. Not a best practice but I understand why some organizations would do that. I would say now that’s not the case though. Unless you have 100 percent back-in-office policy and no one’s going telework, you don’t necessarily have the floor captains there every day and I’ve seen this happen with clients. The organization in an emergency will end up relying on a “rank and file,” air quotes, individual who happens to be there that day who needs to end up stepping into a leadership role. That is what will need to happen, just because there’s so much inconsistency with people in the office because of telework.
Yeah, and so how does this work for a remote-first or remote-only organization? There’s a lot of organizations out there that don’t even have an office or decided when COVID hit, “Hey, you know, why are we paying for this real estate?” How do those organizations need to think through their emergency plans?
One thing that is really important core concept in this type of work is that you are only as secure as your least secure vendor. Your business is only as redundant as your least redundant vendor. So, if you’re on telework, that’s fantastic, like that’s great. You reduce so many risk factors to your organization but you have an even bigger risk factor, which is if the regional Internet is down, if the local power is out, things like that will completely cripple your organization’s ability to conduct business so they’re absolutely still significant threats facing that organization, it’s just a little bit less maybe with the life safety element and a little bit more with the organizational stability.
I’m thinking maybe you have a startup with six to eight people, Series C area, and you, your founder, your CEO loses their power for three days.
Yep.
And at that point, you haven’t gotten to the point where you have tons of other people, tons of other redundancies, it’s still kind of an ad hoc type of system where when that person leaves, you need a lot more slack picked up from the others.
Yeah, absolutely, and speaking of leadership, something that is really pervasive after a disaster or an emergency is the leadership involved in those events losing their jobs. I would put money on the reality that you will see that after the derailment in Ohio, that the train company CEO will resign or be removed. It is so common after disasters and emergencies because everything gets put on the CEO, and as it should be, right? The buck stops with the leader, right? But if you don’t have training to handle yourself on one of your worst days, if you don’t have the training to handle yourself on one of your worst days —
Definitely one of their worst days.
— that you’re going to put your best leadership foot forward with your staff.
Yeah.
And that, I even see you reacting to that, like that’s a stressful situation and there’s a lot of opportunities to prepare for that ahead of time.
Yeah. I can only imagine that because if we think about a situation like what happened in — was it East Palestine, Ohio?
Yes.
Right, like there would be a significant amount of public outcry if some sort of leadership wasn’t ousted from their position, but we’ve also seen scenarios where people, I’m not going to mention any specific political figures because this is not a political show but certain specific leaders of certain states and countries that do a really good job of being prepared for emergency and do a really good job of like the aftermath and usually the people in those states and countries reward them for it.
Absolutely. So New Zealand is a fantastic example of this. Their prime minister, who, of course, whose name I cannot remember at this moment.
Jacinda Ardern, I think it is.
Yes, that’s it, thank you. She’s a case study in crisis communication. She’s a case study in crisis leadership. She demonstrated that during the terrorist attack that her community sustained on the mosque, I believe. She demonstrated that at the start of COVID and the way that the nation of New Zealand handled that from start to finish. And she demonstrated that also in her retirement speech or maybe her speech where she announced that she was not running or seeking reelection.
Yeah, stepping down.
She has consistently demonstrated compassion as the most significant emotion that she’s experiencing when she’s speaking on behalf of the government and on behalf of the people of New Zealand, and that is the most important thing that you can do is empathy, is to create that empathy and to be able to look the victims and the surviving family members of those victims in the eye and say, “I am so sorry and I take responsibility for what has happened.” And that’s what needs to be done by executives and that is not always what you see. It’s a very hard thing to do. It doesn’t necessarily guarantee you your job but it is the first step in being an ethical leader, I believe, and being a strong leader during an emergency or disaster.
Now, how would this apply to someone who’s just starting up their own company and maybe has one person, two people, they’re just following their passions and they’re thinking about their idea and how they want to execute it right and who their target market is and all the things that people usually go through when they’re starting up a business and they’re not necessarily responsible for however many people live in the whole state, a whole country, or work for some of these larger organizations?
So, there are a lot of tools that can achieve for you what larger organizations can achieve by going through the planning process. So, there are so many automations and redundancies that you can build in to your business, even when it’s really small, that will save you so much time and effort. One of those things that I like to do is use Loom which records your screen and it also records you and can record you as like a little bubble in the corner but so that technology can be used to essentially show people how to do different technical operations for your business. You’re recording your screen so you can demonstrate and illustrate some of those processes to people. And so even in my business, before I grew, when I was just a team of one, I had standard processes that I went through on a regular basis recorded and I would update them and edit them and keep them current because I knew when I was growing that I’d need to pass those off to someone else. So there’s a lot of synergies and overlap from the perspective of being a startup founder or a small business owner, because I think the synergy is you need to duplicate yourself. You need to be everywhere doing everything at once and you’re not going to be able to do that during a disaster or an emergency. So how can you photocopy yourself prior to that to offload the tasks that you trust pretty much anyone to do for you?
So that makes sense. I’m going to switch gears a little bit here and ask you a little bit more about your business specifically. So, Golden Hour Preparedness, what size organization or what type of organizations do you tend to work with the most?
So I tend to work with organizations between 100 and 400, 500 employees. So, if you get around 1,000 employees or sort of above 750, you should probably have this function in house.
Yeah.
Well, I’m trying to be in that space where you don’t need a full-time person but you can have a stand-in emergency management department come from Golden Hour Preparedness and we can fill that role for you. So what is most important to me when I consider how I like to run Golden Hour and what I like in clients, I guess, is a really significant commitment to the quality of your employees’ life and the quality of their experience on a regular basis. Those are the people who I find understand emergency preparedness the most and have the organizational buy-in to do this work. It’s big work.
And so that can be a hard process too so there’s a lot to it but it’s something that can be navigated fairly easily and I see myself sort of as a tour guide in that process.
Now, you start every process with an assessment. Without paraphrasing off of your website, tell us a little bit about how that works.
So, you need to understand what risks you’re facing before you can develop a strategy to mitigate them. Click To TweetIf you live in western New York State, you don’t really have earthquakes. I mean, maybe rarely, occasionally you have one, we never thought we had them in Virginia until 2013 and we had a big one, but so let’s say you live in a place that just doesn’t really have earthquakes. Okay, so you don’t really need to focus on that or worry about that, but there’s so many sort of standard things that are at play that we want people to consider and that’s why this is so important and what we’re sort of trying to move towards.
Yeah, you talked about before these standard procedures that really kind of operate no matter what the name of the disaster is, whether it’s an earthquake, a flood, a fire, an invasion of aliens from a UFO, whatever you want —
A zombie apocalypse.
Yeah, exactly.
Always need to be prepared.
And then what is the connection with the employee wellbeing that you’re mentioning?
So, anyone or any organization can experience a disaster or an emergency and not do this work and turn out okay on the other side. Your organization will look okay but I will put money on the fact that you have significant employee turnover in the following 6 to 12 months. And if you can take the financial hit, you can go ahead and do that but I don’t know a lot of businesses that can because it’s so expensive and so hard to replace people and you have downtime because of training things along those lines. So, doing this work provides an emotional security blanket to your employees, both in their personal life and at their time at work, that they are safe by arming them with the information they need to stay safe and then also making sure that the organization is stable. You can provide a better emotional experience for your employees, which I know it sounds sort of luxurious, but it’s — I don’t think it is. I think it’s a common decency type of thing that people should be doing to care for their employees.
Yeah, I mean, I feel like everyone’s talking about employee turnover and employee satisfaction because, you know, I actually was having this discussion a little earlier today. I have no idea how the corporate world got away with not really thinking about employee satisfaction, not really thinking about that for what felt like decades when I was growing up, but now it seems like at least employees now, I’m going to say like if I feel like I’m living in a war zone where I’m constantly mistreated, I might as well go downstairs and talk to my local Crips captain and just become a drug dealer or something like that.
I mean, that is a lifestyle choice that you could make. It is a great point. I understand that when I am making these statements, I’m asking corporate America to take a huge, huge leap.
Yeah, for sure.
I am asking for them to put dollars and cents aside, or not even, but look at it in a more even barbaric way of saying dollars and cents aren’t on your side if you don’t keep your employees safe. They’re just not. And then there’s the ethical matter on top of that too, right? So if you can take the ethics off of it and you just look at dollars and cents, it’s still in the favor of doing this work.
Well, I think one of the things that is oftentimes in people’s minds, this trade-off between kind of this, I don’t want to say traditional approach of like milk your employees for as much as you can, which I think the consequences of that are happening right now with the whole burnout thing, but also the trade-off between kind of how much do you set aside for possible downside, whether it be emergency or whether it be legal protection or insurance, so it all kind of the system where it’s saying, okay, you could go without any of that and just free flow and maximize your numbers today but then as soon as anything bad happens, you’re just SOL, you’re just out of luck.
I recommend businesses get different types of insurance. So you can get cybersecurity theft or hijacking insurance, you can get active shooter insurance that protects you against the impacts of having an active shooter in your workplace. You can get workplace violence insurance. And that’s only going to cut you a check, that’s not going to help you figure out how to spend it and so part of what my role is is understanding the organization’s priorities and saying, “Do you wanna provide mental health services to your employees if there’s a shooting in your office? Let’s get that under contract ahead of time.” So, again, the worst day of your life, when someone came in and killed one of your co-workers, I don’t want you have to be negotiating a contract. I want that in place for you and I want you to be able to pick up the phone, dial the numbers, and that’s pretty much the end of your responsibility. It’s just making the phone call, letting them know what happened, and then you can go back to taking care of yourself.
And so it sounds like a big part of it is also making a decision at a time when you’re of sound mind to make these decisions because, in the heat of the moment, in the stress, people will oftentimes make some terrible decisions just based on that panic.
Absolutely, and it’s not even the decisions so much as how the information is communicated.
…and will cut you a lot of slack if you make bad decisions, but if you are an empathetic, if you are cold, if you are not considerate, even if you have the best ideas, even if you’re the most generous person, if you can’t summon that humanity in the most difficult moment to be the leader for your organization to set the example and the bar, then you’re in bad shape.
And now you’ve mentioned empathetic and empathy a few times during this conversation. What I’m wondering is, having gone through this experience yourself of being kind of a solo entrepreneur for a little while then taking on a few employees, is that something that you see that people should work on as soon as they decide to take on starting a business of their own?
To take on emergency preparedness work?
Take on like becoming more empathetic.
Oh, absolutely. Oh, I’m sorry. Yeah, I mean, yes, everyone should do emergency preparedness work at all times and we should all be more empathetic. I sincerely believe that everyone is carrying a very heavy burden and we have no idea what each other is dealing with on a daily basis. And that really came into sharp focus for me during COVID. I managed the emergency operations center for Arlington, Virginia’s jurisdiction for the first 60 days of COVID and that was a really scary time, if we think back to about three years ago now. We didn’t know what was going on, people said wear masks, don’t wear masks. We had no idea. And that is one of the foundational examples or experiences I have where you really just don’t know what people are facing and kindness, consideration, empathy, and flexibility are the most important skills as a leader because, yes, I lead the organization, I set the priorities, I do all of these things, but I do them in consultation with my team and, ultimately, my job is to remove roadblocks for them. And so, in so many ways, I work for them and so that’s sort of how I see that and so I see respect and empathy as being foundational in those relationships.
And when you assess organizations that you work with at Golden Hour, do you look into how empathetic that communications are coming across, like whether or not like, okay, well, this particular leader in this division tends to come off a little cold, tends to not be the most calming voice in this particular situation.
So I know enough to know, I don’t know your organization as well as you do. And so I rely on a partner from each of the organizations I work with. I have a partner, it’s usually the person who I’ve worked with most closely, but they are the one who sort of gives me some of that insight Intel or that knowledge about the staff. I do not base those decisions on my assessments, because I have such a small time to assess and to meet people, but I do heavily rely on the input of your organization for those things. It’s really important to me that nothing I do is implemented until it’s completely signed off on.
And that goes back to what we started saying in the beginning. I’m not diabetic but if my spouse’s, insulin is absolutely essential for them in their emergency hit, but, for me, it’s my lavender eye mask. And those are essential to different extents.
And I also want to make sure I cover a little bit about your story about what made you decide to start Golden Hour.
So I was a freshman in high school when 9/11 happened, I was like two weeks into school, and I was a freshman in college sitting in a public administration class when Hurricane Katrina happened and there was a photo of a woman laying face down in the water on the cover of The New York Times and I just — I felt again the same feeling I felt when 9/11 happened but I was more prepared to put myself into action to do something about it and so I focused academically on public administration, public policy, and I started to work in emergency management in 2013 where I started with the House of Representatives, doing emergency life safety exercises and continuity of government planning. I did that work at the federal level with FEMA to make sure executive branch departments and agencies can continue our constitutional form of government under all conditions. So, if worst-case scenario happened, we have a zombie apocalypse, can we still be America? That type of question is what I work to answer. And then I went to work at the local government level. As I said before, I worked for Arlington, Virginia, and I left that position 60 days into COVID because I realized that I had been hearing from FEMA and in the FEMA doctrine that emergencies need a whole community approach. You need the whole community to support an emergency. Every workplace I’ve ever been in has been a community but that’s not how FEMA is approaching it. FEMA is saying community, like a state or a city and they’re saying private sector, they mean, Home Depot and Lowe’s and Walmart, they don’t mean the local startup down the street that’s based in someone’s house but that’s a community and that community needs to be resilient, just like every government, every city, every other part of our community that needs to be resilient, so too do our professional communities.
So you wanted to bring that level of emergency preparedness to communities that hadn’t really necessarily been thought about in that sense and so, right now, you’re talking about organizations between, you said 100 and about 500 or about 750.
Yes.
In that area. Now, what did you receive as far as feedback when you decided this, like did the idea, did the name Golden Hour just come to you right away? Did it take some thinking? Did you just abruptly quit because you’re like, “Oh, I need to do this,” or did you have to prepare a little bit?
So I originally started my business venture which I, by the way, never crossed my mind to work at a business. I worked at governments, I worked at the government contracting company but we were built and so constrained by contracting regulations that it wasn’t a regular business.
Yeah, pretty much.
And I only worked on the client site so I never was at headquarters or doing proposal work or anything. So I started Golden Hour Consulting in December 2019. So my husband said, “Well, you’ve done two master’s programs in six years and we bought and renovated a house and we got married in California, even though we live in DC, so I’d like to take some us time and relax.” And I said, “Okay, you do that,” and then I went on LegalZoom and incorporated my company, Golden Hour Consulting, because I don’t like to sit still. I don’t like to stop moving. I like to push and I like to achieve things, I like to meet my goals, and I like to set big goals for myself. And so I originally was going to do government work, government consulting work, do what I did before in government for governments again, but that work, based on my experience in procurement as a government employee and other friends’ experiences and things along those lines, I came to the understanding that government contracting work in my space is a race to the bottom in price and that provides a really low quality of life for my employees and I don’t want that. I want a four-day workweek. I want us to have company holidays where we take two weeks in the summer to get — you know, not hang out together but we all, you know, we close the business for two weeks. I want to do cool stuff like that. I want to have a quality of life fund that you can use if you need a babysitter or a therapy appointment or a special SoulCycle class. If you want to go to a $20 SoulCycle class, use that out of your special fund that Golden Hour gives you. So I really want to create a fantastic place for people to work. That is at the heart and soul of what I do is creating a great business environment for people to come and spend their time every day because I think that’s how you attract the best talent and that’s what I want. I want the best. And so that’s how I’m pursuing that. So, in June 2021, I switched over to Golden Hour Preparedness, where I only do work with businesses but I do work with businesses across the country and it’s a lot of fun and my perspective so far has allowed me to get the best and to have the best and to do the best and so that is what really pushes me to keep being better.
So it sounds like if anyone’s listening and is feeling like in the wrong place, maybe you’re stuck, not sure what they want to do, one of the important considerations, which is something that I think a while back people never really thought of when they pick careers is what lifestyle does this career bring you into, not just what you’re interested in, “Oh, I picked this major because this was my best subject in school,” but when I’m in that job, what is the expectation? What am I going to be doing day to day and does this match who I am as a person?
Yeah. So emergency management is different than entrepreneurship and so I’ll talk a little bit more about the emergency management elements of it. Emergency management is very similar to a first responder experience. If you work at the local government level, which is where the rubber meets the road, all disasters and emergencies should be locally executed, so the emergency management lifestyle is incredibly rewarding and also incredibly taxing. Emergency management is consistently undervalued just everywhere. We have one PhD program in the United States and all the funding for it just got cut. A lot of positions in local governments, I would say the majority of them are not funded by local government, they’re federal dollars being implemented at the local government level. So the local government doesn’t have these positions in their organizations. They have them funded from outside. So if the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA stop funding it, they just won’t have emergency managers unless they add three to five people to their budget. So, what, you’re adding a million and a half to a budget just with a snap of a finger? Like, I mean, some jurisdictions can do that, a lot can’t, so that work needs to be internalized and needs to be stabilized because grant money is not stable. and being an emergency manager is very unstable in the same way. So, there is the response role that you have. There’s the urgency that you live with that at any moment, there could be a bomb on the metro, at any moment, there could be a tornado that rolls in, right? We haven’t had tornadoes in Denver but there could be tornadoes, it’s on the high level of the risk for FEMA, so there’s all kinds of things that we’re really not expecting that we need to have a little bit more of an eye out for, I think.
And then, finally, I want to get your take on work culture. Where do you think work culture is going? Because, right now, we’re in a time period where we had a major disruption from COVID, now, it seems like some people are trying to bring back some of the old work culture after we’re going back but there’s some pushback, especially amongst younger people. What do you see the future holding for how we set up our work?
I am so frustrated on a daily basis by this return to in-person business. I agree and I get the point that there’s something about being in-person that has a quality that you can’t replicate virtually. But I just saw everyone I know who’s not an emergency manager — I mean, I saw all the emergency managers do this but I saw everyone else I know churn so hard during the pandemic, professionally, not for personal advancement because they were job hunting or job hopping but because they were just working really, really hard. And it breaks my heart to see it put in place so rigidly. I know Amazon has done this rigidly, Snapchat has done it fairly rigidly recently with their Default Together program, and I just don’t see it being successful because people have understood the value of quality time in their life and I think a lot of people have come to understand that, sometimes, the cost of working is too high for what you get paid and that’s okay. And that’s okay. And you don’t have to keep doing that job and that’s okay. You can have your quality of life.
Yeah, for sure, because we’re all looking for quality of life and I, for the life of me, still can’t figure out how 65-, 70-, 80-hour work weeks became a badge of honor somehow in the 20th century. That just confuses me to no end.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I get that, I was on that roller coaster, the like, “I need to be in the meetings. Why am I not in the meetings?” and then I’m in the meetings and it’s really cool and then I have too many meetings so it’s not cool and now I’m trying to do anything that’s legal to get out of going to meetings. I hope that we will bounce back. I hope that we will be able to find a middle path and that people will continue to be able to enjoy their lives because I personally couldn’t appreciate that. When I lived in DC before COVID, I couldn’t appreciate the idea of relaxation or slowing down. As I said before, I did two master’s in six years and got married and renovated a house and I didn’t appreciate that and that’s why I’m in Denver now is because I wanted a cultural change of pace and I’m really thrilled that I found it here.
Well, I’m thrilled that you found it here as well and I’m thrilled that you’re helping people with some amount of peace of mind, in a sense, of what’s going to happen when something bad happens. Emily, I’d like to thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, covering a topic we’ve yet to cover on this podcast about how to prepare for these kind of unusual and unpleasant events that are eventually going to happen. No matter what you’re doing in your life, you’re eventually going to have that bad day. You’re eventually going to have that day when that phone call comes in or that warning light comes on your phone and it’s just not the most favorable news, but if you can kind of minimize your business disruption and also minimize the risk to your health, your safety, the health and safety of the people that are under your care, if you’re a division leader or owner of a company, that would be amazing.
Absolutely.
Absolutely, and I’d also like to thank everybody out there for listening, for tuning in to Action’s Antidotes and encourage you to tune in to more episodes for more stories about people who found something that they’re passionate about in life and pursued it in a manner that really suits what we all need individually because if there’s one thing that I hope comes out of this work culture readjustment, it’s just that we’re a little bit more flexible and we’re a little bit more able to accommodate each particular person’s kind of toying back and forth and figuring out what works specifically for them as opposed to trying to implement a one-size-fits-all solution on the entire population. Thank you and have a wonderful rest of your day.
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About EmilyJane Zahreddine
Mrs. EmilyJane Zahreddine is an accomplished community leader with recognized public and private sector achievements. As the founder and CEO of Golden Hour Preparedness, based in Denver, CO, she guides organizations to navigate disasters and emergencies better. Before she transitioned to the business world, she supported the executive and legislative branches of the federal government’s efforts to maintain the continuity of our government under all circumstances. Following this, she transitioned to local government, where the rubber meets the road for emergency management. She served as the Program Manager for Emergency Preparedness for Arlington County, VA. During her professional career, she has achieved two master’s degrees, one in Public Administration (GMU) and another in National Defense and Security (NPS).