The CEO of Verizon Business on how COVID-19 took the life of a friend and led to her toughest quarter ever at the telecom giant

Verizon Business Group CEO Tami Erwin

Tami Erwin is CEO of Verizon Business, the telecom giant's division geared to serving enterprises, government agencies, and small businesses.
She said the coronavirus crisis led to the toughest quarter in her career, as she reeled from the death of a friend and the devastation of small businesses in her community.
On Monday, Erwin's 30,000-strong Verizon organization is rolling out new products geared towards helping small businesses that were forced to shut down suddenly, particularly brick-and-mortar shops that had limited or no online presence.
"When they shut their front door, they were out of business because they didn't have a digital storefront," Erwin told Business Insider. "No website, no ability to do any kind of commercial transaction via a website, and not even a website presence that showed their address, their hours of operation or any kind of communication. So completely out of business."
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The CEO of Verizon Business says the coronavirus crisis wreaked havoc both personally, as it took the life of a close friend, and professionally, as it led to her toughest quarter at the telecom giant

The coronavirus pandemic forced Tami Erwin, the CEO of Verizon Business, to confront challenges that were both personal and professional.

She lost a close friend to the virus, which devastated her home state of Washington in the early days of the crisis. She watched her favorite shops near her New Jersey home shut down while, similarly, her organization scrambled for ways to help the Verizon clients hardest hit by the crisis: small businesses.

"This is the hardest quarter I've ever experienced as a leader and I've been in the business at Verizon 33 years," Erwin told Business Insider. The pandemic caused sudden, severe changes, she said: "We've moved from reacting and responding to reimagining and defining what success looks like."

Verizon Business is unveiling an initiative on Monday with new products aimed at helping businesses — including mom-and-pop shops — navigate the pandemic.

The launch includes a new dashboard that would give small businesses with limited or no online presence a way to reach customers. Verizon Business is also providing small business owners an online communications tool through BlueJeans, the video conferencing platform it bought in April.

Some of the products will be available for free, including limited use of BlueJeans and tools that small businesses can use to evaluate their online security risks.

It's a big undertaking for Erwin who joined Verizon in 2000 and rose steadily up the corporate ladder of the $233 billion telecom behemoth.

In 2019, she was named CEO of Verizon Business, the division geared towards business customers, including big corporations, government agencies and small businesses. Erwin leads a 30,000-strong organization that rakes in $32 billion in annual revenue.

She was exposed early to the world of small business, growing up in Skagit County, an agricultural area in Washington state. Her father was a physician "who wanted to be a farmer," she said.

Erwin learned to pick produce as a young woman and also spent time in her father's clinic helping modernize his antiquated record-keeping system. "That's when I first got excited about technology," she said.

Technology will be key in helping small businesses navigate and survive the crisis, she said — even though she lamented that many of them won't make it. Erwin cited a company survey in which 68% of small business owners believed they can still bounce back: "That means 32% think they won't recoup," she said. "For me, that's pretty startling."

Erwin saw the devastation up-close in her community as small businesses that she and her family had patronized for years, including a yoga studio and an Italian restaurant, closed.

"Businesses were shut down so quickly," she said. "That for me was the thing that caught me by surprise. I remember going to our little Italian place on a Friday night. The next Friday night, they were shut down. Whether it was my favorite Italian restaurant, whether it was where I got my haircut, whether it's a little boutique in town, all of a sudden what had been normal life shut down."

Many small businesses that could operate through online orders or pick-ups faced another dilemma: They had limited or no online presence to tell potential customers about their plans.

"When they shut their front door, they were out of business because they didn't have a digital storefront," Erwin said. "No website, no ability to do any kind of commercial transaction via a website, and not even a website presence that showed their address, their hours of operation or any kind of communication. So completely out of business."

That's the kind of situation Verizon's new tools hope to address.

The coronavirus crisis also hit Erwin hard on a personal level.

Washington became the pandemic's first major flashpoint in the US. As the crisis was unfolding in February, she found herself cut off from her adult children, her mother, and many people she cared for who live on the West Coast.

One of them, a very close friend with whom she had just gone on a holiday strip in Portugal, died from the coronavirus.

Erwin spoke of the many "grief cycles" people are going through as a result of graduations that got cancelled or the separation from family.

"There's the grief of losing somebody," she said. "For me that was when it went from being an academic exercise to emotionally impactful," she said.

Got a tip about Verizon or another tech company? Contact this reporter via email at bpimentel@businessinsider.com, message him on Twitter @benpimentel or send him a secure message through Signal at (510) 731-8429. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

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