A product built around physical touch is a reasonable business right up until the moment touch itself becomes the danger. That is the position Albert Bou Fadel found himself in during March 2020, running a construction technology company whose entire product depended on dozens of workers pressing their fingers against the same shared device every day.
SmartBarrel had spent years building biometric time clocks that construction crews used to clock in and out in the field. Then a pandemic made a shared keypad look less like a labor tool and more like a health hazard, and clients started asking for their money back within days.
This story moves through four stages: Build, Break, Breakout, and Breakthrough. Each one shows up in the six weeks between the morning Albert's devices went offline and the morning his company started growing again.
Albert built SmartBarrel's first prototype in his own bedroom, teaching himself electronics and coding at night after working construction during the day, because the labor-tracking tools already on the market were digitizing the same unreliable paper process rather than fixing it. "The source of the information is still as crappy as it was," he said of the tools he had tried before building his own. A rival contractor spotted his taped-together prototype on a job site, asked where he could get one, and could not understand why Albert could not simply hand him a copy. That conversation turned a personal tool into a company.
By early 2020, SmartBarrel had grown into a real business, deploying weatherproof, biometrically powered time clocks that construction crews could set up anywhere on a job site. The company was still small, about twenty to twenty-five clients, a team of six or seven, and operating only in Florida, but the product worked and the business was growing.
On March 16, 2020, the day after Albert's birthday, every one of SmartBarrel's devices went offline at once, not because of a technical failure but because of a message spreading through his client base. "I'm getting emails from all my clients saying, hey, how can we return them," he said. A shared biometric keypad that dozens of workers touched every day had gone, overnight, from a labor efficiency tool to something clients no longer wanted anywhere near their crews, afraid that one infected worker touching the device could spread the virus to an entire job site.
Albert's first response was not a product decision but an act of pure improvisation. He personally bought barrels of aloe vera gel and alcohol to make hand sanitizer for clients when store shelves ran out, trying to buy time while the company figured out what came next. It was not enough. Clients still wanted to return devices they no longer trusted, and Albert had to ask them for two months of patience without payment while SmartBarrel figured out what to build instead.
The reflection Albert describes was less about the product and more about what he could actually influence in a moment when almost nothing was under his control. He drew a hard line between what he had no power over at all, the epidemic itself and whether the industry would survive it, and what he could still direct, his own team's output. "What we can control is the output," he said. "Let's focus on what we can control."
That reframe produced two decisions in quick succession. The first was about his team rather than the product. Rather than laying anyone off, Albert told his staff of six or seven that any pay cuts would be shared equally across everyone rather than concentrated on a few people losing their jobs entirely. "We're all in this together," he told them in a Slack message. "There's no termination. If we're cutting salary, we're all going to cut them slowly until we all are our jobs." The second decision was to rebuild the product itself around a genuine constraint, that touch itself was now the problem the company had to design around, not a feature to defend. Within six weeks, SmartBarrel engineered a touchless retrofit, a forehead thermometer scanner paired with an RFID tag, shipped existing devices back to the company for conversion, and returned them to clients ready to use without a shared touchpoint.
Within about three months of the devices going dark, SmartBarrel was back in business, and the retrofit did more than restore the company to where it had been. It repositioned the entire product. Construction sites that had previously paid for security guards to check workers' temperatures with handheld thermometers before allowing site access began using SmartBarrel's touchless devices instead, and the company grew from that new position as a safety tool rather than shrinking back to its prior scope.
The internal shift Albert describes has outlasted the pandemic that caused it. He still applies the same test whenever a crisis hits the business. Rather than absorbing every piece of outside news, he asks what specifically is within his control and puts every resource there instead. "I don't want to lose the business because I focus on the news, or on the hospital statistics," he said, describing the discipline he built during those six weeks as something he now treats as a permanent operating principle rather than a one-time emergency response.
Nothing about the pandemic was something Albert could have prevented or negotiated with. What was within his control was how he treated his team while the company's entire product briefly became unusable, and how quickly the company was willing to admit that touch, the very thing SmartBarrel had been built around, had to be redesigned out of the product rather than defended.
That distinction between what a crisis takes away and what a founder still controls is not unique to a pandemic. It shows up in smaller versions constantly, in supply shocks, lost clients, and sudden regulatory shifts that any growth-stage company eventually faces. The founders who come out the other side tend to be the ones who stop spending their attention on the part of the crisis they cannot touch and put all of it on the part they still can.
