In early 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic began its deadly spread, it wasn’t looking good for a 20-something-year-old entrepreneur and her young company. At Charu Thomas’ firm, then called Oculogx, orders suddenly stopped coming in for its software that powers augmented reality (AR) smart glasses worn by warehouse workers. Technology rollouts were impacted as businesses scaled back plans during the initial dark days of the public health crisis.

Oculogx was quickly running out of money. Thomas furloughed all of her employees. Desperate for a financial infusion that could save her company and its employees, the young business owner brainstormed.

Thomas listed every conceivable option she could think of pursuing to preserve cash, generate investments, and create new revenue.

While “some of them [had a] very low likelihood of working out, we had to do whatever it took to make sure we could make payroll,” she said.

The triage list — about a dozen items — ranged in size and scope.

Number one, which she described in retrospect as being “fairly obvious,” was getting a federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) grant. The program provided eligible entities with funds to help “maintain their payroll, hire back employees who may have been laid off, and cover applicable overhead” during the early parts of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the United States Department of the Treasury.

Second for Thomas was renegotiating deals with current customers for better payment terms, so Oculogx was paid upfront. Third, the CEO asked her business’ existing investors and advisors for assistance and advice. Fourth, Thomas reached out to all of the would-be investors she had previously turned down, saying this time that her company would accept their money at a lower valuation of the business.

She executed on these strategies in the coming weeks and months “one by one,” she said recently. “I was so freaked out.”

But Thomas and her employees weren’t deterred.

“We were very scrappy and basically tried every option, and a couple of them worked out, others definitely did not,” she added.

The hard work paid off as several items on the list came to fruition: She received two PPP loans totaling just over $90,000 through the U.S. Small Business Administration, the full amount of which was later forgiven, helping her to bring staff back and tide the company over its roughest stretch; customers accelerated payments and investors stepped up; and the company received $3.5 million in the first such cash infusion from investors in its history. Now called Ox, the company’s focus on warehouse efficiency positioned it to thrive once the worst of the global economic fallout was past.

Thomas’ tenacity to set a goal and work tirelessly toward it is a character trait honed years earlier in a different battle of pluses and minuses.

In her early years of elementary school, Thomas got poor grades, especially in her math classes.

“I wasn’t very good at multiplication,” she shared recently.

The young student feared she would never be good at math, certainly not good enough to get into her school district’s gifted and talented program, her dream.

What Thomas lacked in knowledge, she made up for in positivity and grit. To catch up with her peers, she knew she needed to work harder and do extra math work — so she did.

It took two years of concerted effort to improve her grades and academic standing, but Thomas’ dream of being accepted into the gifted-talented program was realized in fifth grade.

Having that goal “sparked something in me,” she said. “There are a lot of examples like that throughout my life of something not going the way I wanted it to, necessarily. And typically, my response is to dive in and just put in hours until I can’t [work] anymore.”

Years before the pandemic seized up the global supply chain, Thomas, while in college, had already begun working to provide some of the needed solutions to improve this complex system.

Graduating high school a year early due to her academic excellence, Thomas received a governor’s scholarship in her home state of Georgia and was accepted to the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Although she originally wanted to be a mathematician who “wrote proofs all day” Thomas decided to pursue industrial engineering, which she described as “a practical application for mathematics.”

While Thomas’ background in math and engineering gave her the technical foundation for her future company — especially in software programming — it was the people she met during her time at Georgia Tech who would have the most profound impact on her career.

One such influential mentor was Thad Starner, a professor at the School of Interactive Computing at the university. He runs the school’s Contextual Computing Group and is a co-inventor of Google Glass. Starner’s patents include several wearable and soft electronic devices, which he’s worn in some form in his daily life since 1993 — well before most people could even conceive of the idea beyond the confines of a science-fiction film.

Thomas had originally reached out to the professor during her freshman year. The two failed to connect, so she ended up working with a different professor on logistics technologies.

Read the full article here: https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/journeys-innovation/field-stories/delivering-grit-and-positivity