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The most frequently used word to describe the last few months is uncertainty. Our heads have been spinning as we get word almost daily of major policy shifts, market turmoil, new advances in AI, and on and on. Many leaders are feeling a little lost in the wilderness as they navigate the rough terrain. As you ruminate on these heady problems and how to move forward, how you respond to uncertainty is as important as what you do. To quote Maya Angelou, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” There is no doubt that periods of uncertainty call for leaders to make tough decisions and make unpopular choices, but the leaders behavior in doing so may be remembered long after the crisis has passed. Here are 10 mistakes leaders make that break their teams trust and erode loyalty during uncertain times. Panicking Nothing destroys a teams confidence in a leader more quickly than panic. Leaders project their energy and emotion onto the rest of the team, and when a leader panics, so does everyone else. You dont have to be a stoic, but dont catastrophize either. Be authentic in your level of concern and focus. Be honest that you dont have all the answers. Then set the tone for the team to keep calm and carry on. Withholding Information Bad news doesnt get better with age. Its painful to communicate bad news to your team, especially when you may not have the solutions worked out. But its important to realize that your team cant help to solve the problem until or unless they understand whats going on. Trust your team with information so that they can effectively help. Making Unilateral Decisions Its lonely at the top. Leaders often feel the full weight of their role in a crisis. With the mantra the buck stops here ringing in your ears, its tempting to be the heroto move forward with haste and make a decision without consulting your team. Why consult your team? Decisions are better when they have the benefit of a teams wisdom. Your team provides ideas, helps to kick the tires on solutions, and identifies blind spots. Further, its likely theyll have to carry out the decision, so getting their input on the front-end preserves trust and creates buy-in. Suspending Accountability Structures & Rigor In moments of uncertainty, it may be tempting to suspend processes, checks and balances, or the established rules of engagement to move forward quickly. If you feel pressure to transgress your culture or bypass your policies to move forward, think twice. If you do conclude that the situation warrants overriding business as usual, make sure your team understands the rationale and be aware that youll be setting a precedent, which may come back to haunt you later. Burying Your Head in the Sand Are you fiddling while Rome burns? Confronting a crisis may involve working through the stages of griefgrief for something lost and a future not yet visible. Leaders who get stuck in denial are paralyzed by inaction. Not identifying and addressing challenges head on causes the team to lose faith in a leader. If youre feeling overwhelmed and unable to act, use the Boy Scout acronym STOP: Stop, Think, Observe, Plan. And if you find yourself stuck in the thinking stage, engage your team to form a plan. Whatever you do, take steps to move forward. Be a hero, not a Nero! Playing the Blame Game Sadly, some leaders are known for their emotionally volatile outbursts and blaming others for their circumstances. These behaviors can be very unsettling to the team and culture of fear, which is never productive. Spending time revisiting the past isnt healthy and will only serve to slow you down, stifle results, and create a toxic culture. Its important for leaders to soberly accept the situation, take responsibility, and move quickly to solutions. Shutting Down Ideas Many leaders trying to move quicklyespecially those making unilateral decisionswill shut down the teams brainstorming and discussion that are necessary to get to the best solution. Even if the solution you came into the meeting with is the one the team ultimately accepts, the time spent ideating and discussing will serve to both improve it and align everyone around your plan. Flip-Flopping Nothing is more frustrating than an uncommitted leader who steers the team in one direction then quickly pivots when he hears another better idea. Frequent pivots erode confidence and present to the team like you dont know what youre doing. Do your diligence on the front end, pick a direction, and commit to seeing it through. Build in incremental goals and check-ins to monitor progress. If you must pivot, do so with data and a defensible rationale. Your team will give you grace if they understand the why behind your decisions. Forgetting to Listen Sometimes the most important thing a leader can do is not act, but listen. Listening helps us to process challenges and source ideas for the path ahead. For leaders in crisis situations, prepare to do a lot of listening. In fact, get out of your office and go on a listening tour to see how others are experiencing the turmoil. Get their input. But dont stop there. If you take the time to listen, you must circle back to the team to say, This is what I heard, and this is what Im going to do with that information. If you dont take that last step, the team is less likely to provide feedback the next time you ask. Make sure they can see how they added value to the direction. Tolerating Bad Behavior In periods of uncertainty, leaders arent the only ones under stress. Others may act out inappropriately as well (see all of the negative behaviors above). Its not enough to keep yourself in check, you must keep the rest of the team in check, too. When negative, trust-behaviors surface, be quick to pull the perpetrator aside for some one-on-one coaching. Uncertainty is inevitable. How leaders navigate a critical moment can make all the difference. Successful leaders turn toward their teams in times of crisishumbly realizing that they alone do not have all the answers. If you trust your team to help you handle the turbulence, theyll trust you in return.
Category:
E-Commerce
The night is young when Bilt Rewards founder and CEO Ankur Jain steps inside Manhattans ABC Cocina restaurant on a Monday in early spring. Vintage chandeliers glint overhead as the 35-year-old Jain, in jeans and sneakers, makes his way through the crowd, shaking hands, his winsome smile comfortably affixed. Were here for a recurring comedy show thats offered to members of Bilt, the loyalty program and payments platform for renters that Jain founded in 2019. As usual, the show sold outthrough a combination of dollars and Bilt pointsin minutes. As we find our seats, Jain disappears briefly, reemerging with martinis. Over the next hour, a half dozen comedians take the stage to deliver their takes on politics, parenting, dating, and more. Jain joins in on the biggest laughs, slapping the table in approval. And when the evenings final comedian takes a dig at Bilt itself, which has close to 5 million members and is valued at more than $3 billion, calling it a cult and suggesting that the audience rob its founder of his billion dollars that very night, Jain doesnt flinch. In a way, Bilt did start out as a cultone aimed at credit card enthusiasts who collect points and miles with near-religious fervor. The startup first broke through with the Bilt Rewards Mastercard, which offers users rewards points for rent payments. The card launched to the public in March 2022 with a party at One Vanderbilt, Midtown Manhattan’s tallest skyscraper. Mayor Eric Adams attended and A$AP Rocky performed. Credit cards are a cutthroat business, but no one had ever tried securing a place in the wallets of affluent young professionals by focusing on rent, the biggest financial burden for many. (In the U.S., residential tenants pay $750 billion in rent each year.) Eighteen months later, Bilt had activated more than a million accounts and won over the kind of reward maximizers who treat The Points Guy blog as gospel. Brian Kelly, the Points Guy himself, is a Bilt investor. Yet even as the card took off, Jain turned his attention to a much bigger prize. He began approaching property managers, proposing that they use Bilt to process rent payments. In exchange, Bilt would craft a loyalty program for their residents. Today, a growing number of apartment buildings require tenants to pay via Bilt, which operates a digital wallet that connects with whichever credit, debit, or ACH method tenants prefer. So far, Bilt is the exclusive payment-processing platform for 70% of the top 100 multifamily property owners in the U.S., covering roughly 25% of the multifamily rental market. Thats why, despite the Bilt Rewards Mastercards buzzy reputation, Jain is quick to note that only 15% of Bilts rewards program members are cardholders. The vast majority simply sign up when they use Bilts platform to pay rent and earn points with each on-time payment. Bilt plans to further expand that model this year with the launch of a program that will give homeowners points for mortgage payments. Now Jain is on his way to realizing the final piece of his vision. Through the digital wallet that members create when they sign up, he aims to make Bilt into a meta-level loyalty platform that touches just about every aspect of a users life. To enable that, hes knit together a network of some 40,000 merchantsincluding fitness studios, restaurants, and major national brands such as United Airlines and Lyftthat allow members to earn and redeem Bilt points. To complete the circle, members can even put their points toward rent itself or a down payment on a home. In the process, Bilt has found a clever way to layer itself over a large swath of local commerce. When a member dines out or breaks a sweat at one of Bilts merchant partners, Bilt charges the merchant a fee, using any cards loaded into the members digital wallet to prove attribution. (In the U.S., merchants pay a roughly 3% interchange fee for accepting credit cards, money thats divided up among payments companies, with Bilt now among them.) Jains plans caught the attention of former American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault, now a venture investor at General Catalyst. Chenault led Bilts $200 million fundraising round in January 2024 and became board chairman. We want multiple cards to be on the Bilt platform, he says. Use the card that meets your needs for different spending categories, but use the Bilt platform for your spending. According to Chenault, Bilts economics are very, very attractive. Bilt made $200 million in revenue in 2024. It crossed $400 million in annual run rate in the first quarter of 2025, and expects to cross $1 billion in ARR by spring 2026. Its largest revenue stream derives from its business with property managers: Bilt takes a cut of the $36 billion-plus in annual rental payments that its currently processing and earns a commission for renewals that it helps to facilitate. Its second-largest revenue stream is its expanding merchant network. Despite its growth, Bilt remains something of an enigma. Each of the individual pieces of its operationsrewards credit card, rental payment processor, local marketing platform, digital wallethas been tried before with mixed success, or at great expense, by other companies. Bilt is the first to try them all at once. As Jain told leading fintech banker Steve McLaughlin during a fireside chat last year: To pull this off, you have to figure out a model where everybody wins. In Bilts loyalty-based world, property managers and merchants win when Bilt delivers good tenants and customers. Members win when they get a free dessert at a local restaurant or book flights to a beach vacation with Bilt points. And Bilt, of course, wins by sitting at the center of all of these transactions. In a points-based economy, everybody can win. The fine print is that not everybody can win big. Before he began offering renters lifestyle perks in exchange for on-time payments, Jain was focused on solving generational-scale challenges. Indeed, hes been encouraging business leaders to tackle big markets with big problems since 2008, when he launched the nonprofit Kairos Society, a membership community for mission-driven entrepreneurs, while an undergraduate at the Wharton School at Penn. During his freshman year, Jain sent 50 letters to executives, asking them to speak to his fledgling Kairos Society. He landed names including Boeing CEO Phil Condit and Virgin Group cofounder Richard Branson. Funded by Jain, the organization continued to operate after he graduated, hosting events that offered entrepreneurs a network of peers, access to people in power, and a heady shot of glitz. To kick off Kaiross 2017 global summit, for example, Jain flew 200 dinner guests to the Hudson Valleys Rockefeller Estate in Blade helicopters. Jains father, Naveen, had also charted an entrepreneurial path, leaving Microsoft in 1996 to found web-services company InfoSpace. Naveen, who was born in a small village in India, made a fortune as InfoSpaces market cap climbed to its peak of $31 billion in 2000. In 2002, when Jain was 12, Naveen lost control of the company following an accounting scandal and accusations of short-swing trading; he paid a $105 million settlement and denied liability. Jain speaks of his father with admiration, and often repeats his business adages. But where Naveen navigated InfoSpaces early days as a relative outsider, Jain has built his career around being the consummate insider. He attributes the inspiration for Bilts rewards model to Starwood Hotels and Resorts founder Barry Sternlicht, a regular dinner compnion. He is grateful to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who is a Kairos adviser, for introducing him to Chenault. Those relationships paved the way for Bilt, Jain says. Candidly, youve got to have the right platform, the right idea, the right time,” he adds. “But if you cant call the CEOs of every major airline and hotel, how are you going to move quick enough to do this? Jain began circling around the right idea in 2019, a few years after he sold his digital Rolodex startup Humin to Tinder, where he stayed on and spent close to two years as VP of product. The avocado toast is not whats stopping us [millennials] from being able to afford a down payment on a home. We rent for, on average, seven years, he told the host of AOLs live-audience show Build at the time. Youre lighting that money on fire every month. Bilt was just the germ of a concept. But Jain painted his vision with sweeping confidence. Can we build a business model where that rent dollar actually goes toward your future home? So imagine that every single person in this country, just by renting, by the age of 28, 29, 30, has actually saved enough money to be able to afford the down payment on a home. At some point, however, Jain refined his world-changing mission. Instead of making home-buying more affordable, hed make renting less onerous by plying renters with rewards from airlines and hotels. Hed also offer renters the chance to put rewards points toward a down paymenta benefit thats welcome, but not substantial enough on its own, to turn a renter into a homeowner. [Photo: Tonje Thilesen] At first, prospective partners took Jains pitch calls but declined to make any kind of commitment. Property managers wanted to know who his rewards partners were, and airlines and hotels wanted to know which property managers had signed on. Jain realized he needed an elaborate growth hack to get Bilt off the ground. Enter the Bilt Rewards credit card, which Jain describes as an accelerant to reach customers directly. When companies launch co-branded credit cards, they typically grow the products slowly so they can monitor cardholder behavior and ensure the economics work. Get the model wrong, and the cost of paying out a reward like 3% cash back can be dear. Bilt, in contrast, went all in, with headline-grabbing rewards including one-to-one points transfers with airlines such as United and Emirates and hotels like Hyatt and Hilton. On Reddit forums and blogs, points maximizers cheered.[Bilt] took value that existed [outside of] the points ecosystem and brought billions of dollars of value into consumer pockets, says The Points Guy‘s Kelly. Bilt wasnt necessarily restoring young renters faith in the American dream, but it was giving them freebies that made them feel good. The runaway growth was a boon for Bilt but a potential challenge for Wells Fargo, Bilts issuing bank. Wells Fargo, which invested in Bilt in 2021, was losing as much as $10 million a month on the card deal, according to a Wall Street Journal report from last summer. Cardholders werent carrying balances at the rates the bank had expected. Wells Fargo is not going to let them keep that deal forever, says Matthew Goldman, founder of fintech consulting firm Totavi and publisher of CardsFTW, an industry newsletter. The card is very, very pro-consumer, but to a fault. Rumor has it that theyre actively looking for a new card issuer, and no ones very interested. Bilts contract with Wells Fargo expires in 2029. Jain declined to comment on whether Bilt is on the hunt for a new issuer. (Wells Fargo also declined Fast Companys request for comment.) Its not our core business, Jain says of the card. Our job is to provide the best rewards ecosystem, the best commerce platform, the best [customer] acquisition, the best brand, so that our partners can create a great card product around it. In other words, the economics of the card are the issuers problem. Jain doesnt have plans to drop the Bilt card, but going forward, he imagines it occupying a relatively modest place in Bilts overall strategy. Loyalty programs, after all, are a booming businessand one that extends far beyond credit cards. Restaurants like Chipotle, Crumbl, McDonalds, and Starbucks run app-based loyalty programs. Sephora woos its members with early access to new products and the opportunity to exchange points for beauty samples. PlayStations loyalty program doles out digital collectibles. Rewards are eating the world, says Kelley Halpin, cofounder and CEO of Mesa, a newly launched loyalty program for homeowners that grants points for mortgage payments. The proliferation of loyalty programs, Halpin says, means that people expect more value back. But they are also suffering from loyalty fatigue. The average U.S. household belongs to 29 programs, according to a 2017 Accenture analysis. Bilt sees that fatigue as an opportunity to create a streamlined umbrella program, but it will have to stand out. Luckily for Jain, by working with property managers, hes found a captive audience. The morning after the comedy show, I meet Jain for coffee at Bilts NoHo offices on Bond Street in New York City. Bilt operates a small café on the ground floor and uses the space for one of its recurring monthly “Rent Day” promotions: free coffee, paired with a breakfast treat. In a clever inversion of the days gloomy psychology, Bilt has transformed the first of the month into an opportunity to drive earn and burn, as the loyalty industry puts it. Pay your rent on time, and on rent day, Bilt showers you with extra rewards, like 50% transfer bonuses with airline partners and special giveaways, including the chance to win a month of free rent. On April 1, New York Citybased Bilt members lined up for coffee and everything bagels from PopUp Bagels while a DJ in sunglasses and a silver chain spun club tracks from behind the counter. The Rent Day promotion is the perfect encapsulation of Jains win-win-win approach to Bilts network. Bilts linking of on-time payments to deals and rewards encourages tenant compliance. Merchant partners get a dedicated opportunity to introduce themselves to tenants. And members get a glimpse of the credit-based rewards lifestyle. Some people really love aspirational travel, Jain says as we settle into a meeting room, and some people only care about everyday utility. Bilt aims to serve them all. Jain, sipping a chocolate protein shake, opens his laptop and leans back in his armchair. He wants to demonstrate the tools that have pulled property managers into the Bilt Alliance. If youre in a housing space and you dont have Blt, youre behind, he says, linking his laptop to the presentation screen at the front of the room. Jain logs in as if he were a property manager looking to improve renewal rates. Depending on the market, roughly 40% of renters move out each year. Landlords are always looking for ways to convince tenants to stay or to at least give advance notice of their departures. Until Bilt, most relied on a combination of rent discounts and gift cards. Bilt says that properties that use its tools have seen a 20% boost in early renewals. Im a big believer of, fit into the boxes people already understand, Jain says as he pulls up a screen with fields that allow landlords to set an audience for a renewal campaign. Today, he says, imagine that were offering half a month of rent if you renew 30 days early. He selects a region and property type, sets a rent ceiling, and launches the campaign. Based on the building [and] the customer profile, we generate a personalized offer. If this were a real campaign, Bilt would present each resident with a choice: If they renew 30 days early, they can choose between half a month of free rent or what Bilt deems to be the equivalent, plus a smidge more, in rewards points and promotions. A tenant paying $3,000 in rent might see an offer for $1,500 cash or some combination of Bilt points, partner points, and merchant offers. At their best redemption value, Bilt points are on par with those of market leaders like Chase and American Express. But the street value of a Bilt point can still vary substantially, from about 1.5 cents per point for rent redemption to 0.7 cents for Lyft rides. Six months into launching the feature, Jain says, just under half of tenants are picking the rewards over the cash. I think that number will go up, he says. Building features at the behest of property managers has helped Bilt win over some of the largest landlords in the country. Bilt Alliance customers include Douglas Elliman Real Estate, Equity Residential, GID, Greystar, Morgan Properties, and Relatedall of which have also invested in Bilt. Their lease marketing budgets, which Bilt is starting to capture, can be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. If you look back at the apartment industry over 25 years, we knew less about our customers than a lot of other industries do, says Greg Bates, GID president and CEO. They apply. We get their credit report. They live with us. Bilt changes all that. The Bilt program gives us access to a ton of information on how [residents] spend their time and how they spend their money, Bates says. What do they value in the community, in terms of local merchants or restaurants? Are they using Bilt rewards for dog walkers? Because the more we understand someone and what they value, the better products we can offer people. During the leasing process today, rewards can even function as an amenity and help make up for a propertys shortfalls. No resident gym? Bilt deals at SoulCycle can help fill the gap. Some property technology investors eyeing Bilts rise from the sidelines wonder whether being part of the Bilt Alliance will lose its allure as more properties join the club. But Bilts partners say they see ubiquity as an asset. We manage 220,000 units, says Margette Hepfner, chief operating officer for residential management at Dallas-based Willow Bridge Property Company. Thats a lot, but weve never been able to build a loyalty program for renters. Not one of us owns or operates enough real estate that we can build our own loyalty brand. Hepfner points to the airline industry as a source of inspiration. The loyalty programs of airlines like American and United are worth billions of dollarsindeed, billions of dollars more than the underlying business of flying planes. Bilt is establishing that kind of program for real estate. We talk about it internally like the Oneworld Alliance, Hepfner says of Bilts property alliance. Maybe you cant fly American, but you can fly one of the other Oneworld partners and continue to build up your points. Graduate student and part-time tutor Elliott Nixon isnt a born points maximizer. Instead, while living in London on a tight budget, he discovered Bilt after researching ways to earn enough miles to fly home to visit family in the U.S. He signed up for the Bilt credit card and, by chance, later moved to a rental building in New Orleans that has since become a Bilt Alliance property. These days, the 27-year-old estimates that he puts 70% of his spending on his Bilt card, including his monthly rent payments. The part that caught my attention was saving up for a down payment on a house, Nixon says of Bilts points-redemption offering. Nixon has watched as airlines have devalued their miles, but he views Bilt as a safe harbor. (Bilt hasnt yet devalued its points, but it did lose a prominent transfer partner, American Airlines, last year.) So far, Nixon has booked one trip with his Bilt points. If he were to apply them toward a down payment today, each Bilt point would be worth 1.5 cents, meaning 100,000 points would translate into $1,500. Thats something, but it wont take him very far toward a down payment. By locking itself in with property managers, Bilt has increasingly easy access to renters like Nixon. (I get paid to acquire customers, Jain says.) But paying rent on Bilt via debit card or ACH only nets the tenant 250 points a month, or 3,000 annually, currently worth about two Pure Barre classes. To win members loyaltyand demonstrate the value of its platformBilt needs them to rack up more points. That means getting them to feel good about putting both bigger-ticket items, such as housing, and everyday essentials on their credit cards. The Bilt wallet is the companys solution to this problem. Set up a Bilt account, and the company automatically creates a wallet thats preloaded with any cards tied to the users login details; confirm the cards, and Bilt starts awarding points for spending at its merchant partners. The company has also built integrations with its partners loyalty programs. A couple weeks after creating my Bilt account, I went shopping for Easter basket jelly beans and spent $2.25 at Walgreens, where Im a member of the myWalgreens loyalty program. Three days later, to my surprise, Bilt sent me an email with the subject line: You got rewarded at Walgreens with your Neighborhood Benefits. I had earned my first two Bilt points by making a purchase matched to my account. What do you already do? Do it through Bilt. We make it better, Jain says. You already pay rent? Pay it through Bilt. We make it better. You already book fitness classes? Book it through Bilt. We make it better. You already go to Walgreens? Just go how youre going. We make it better. Earning points, he says, has to be seamless. The same is true of his approach to burning points. To design Bilts integration with Lyft, which allows members to redeem Bilt points toward Lyft rides, Jain sketched out wireframes over dinner with Lyft CEO David Risher, seeking to get the user experience just right. In April, three weeks into launching the feature, riders had already spent 100 million Bilt points on Lyft. Thats huge. Thats product-market fit, Risher says. Points purists might pause here to note that Lyft rides do not offer the best redemption value for Bilt points. In fact, the best redemption value in any rewards scheme is almost invariably a flight or a hotel stay. (Bilt has its own travel-reward booking engine.) Traditionally, loyalty programs have been split into two camps: casual members who like the convenience of a cheap Lyft ride, and points optimizers with the psyche of an FX trader looking for an edge. But Bilts seamless erchant integrations could upend those dynamics. My pitch has never been to solve the whole housing crisis, Jain says. Im saying that people are spending money today on big life expenses, like rent. Until Bilt, there hadnt been a company embracing all that spend and converting it into rewards. For just doing what youre doing, you can now go on a trip with your friends or visit home. Sure, its just points, but thats a big deal for a lot of people. He leaves unsaid the true price of that free trip: making yourself available as a marketing target to property managers, travel brands, and local merchants. The night before our interview at Bilts offices, Jain and I had met at San Vicente West Village, an exclusive members club in the former Jane Hotel that had been open for barely a week. Inside, after stickers were placed over the cameras on our phones, a checkerboard hall led us to a mocha-hued dining room. Velvet drapes lined the walls; waiters in crisp white jackets darted past. Jain, on the verge of losing his voice, ordered an herbal tea with honey and a gimlet. When the manager stopped by to say hello, Jain quickly found common ground: She was from South Africa, where his weeklong wedding celebration kicked off with a safari in 2024. (The wedding was featured in Harpers Bazaar.) Later, as we stood to leave, Jain swung by a banquette where he spotted a familiar face. Points might get you a free vacation. But the best clubs require a different kind of currency.
Category:
E-Commerce
Robinhood was under fire after the GameStop controversy in 2021. But last year, it posted its strongest results ever. FC Explains how Robinhood rebuilt trust, launched powerful tools, and made a major comeback.
Category:
E-Commerce
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