Take a Deep Breath
This is one of the first things I was taught in my former life in the medical field. In a crisis, take a deep breath and expand your periphery. It allows you to take everything in and slow down time so you can make the best decisions in that moment. Then we could take a look at our patience and go through the ABC’s – airway, breathing, circulation.
This is not unlike your business. If you have worked with us you know one of my favorite analogies is that your business is like a body.
The only way you are going to be able to steer your business through these crazy times is if you don’t cut off your air supply to the brain… aka keep breathing. That’s the only way you will be able to make non emotional, logical, strategic, empowered business decisions.
I also liken what we are going through to being on the battlefield. We are triaging our businesses, our lives, and our finances to make sure that we give them all the best chance of survival.
Even though this is a fight to survive on many fronts, it is critical to stay calm. As the leader of your business, your team, your customers, your fellow entrepreneurs are looking to you to be the calm in the storm.
I am honored to be a lighthouse and anchor of calm to my clients and fellow entrepreneurs in these uncharted waters. I have been working with many of my clients over the past week or so in our “war rooms” to help them create battle plans to help them ride this wave rather than be crushed by it.
The magic wand to being able to get through this and ride the wave is getting your mind right. If you are not ruling your thoughts, they will rule you (and potentially ruin you), so it is even more critical that you take a breath and clear your mind of the stuff floating around so they don’t mess up your decision making capabilities.
Get Clear
With clarity comes certainty. It is tempting in this crazy covid-19 time to let stress and fear dictate your decisions, but that is bad for business, especially now. Working with my clients over the past couple of weeks has only served to reinforce what my gut knows – the intersection of cool minds and clean data creates the best landscape for strategic and powerful decisions.
There are a few main spreadsheets that I use with my clients to help me uncover their weak points, bottlenecks, and leaks. When we walk through them it is almost like I can see the lightbulbs going off over their heads and so many ah-has are heard.
I find it to be fun, but don’t let the fun fool you, this takes work. I have gotten it down to a science and can blow through expenses, projects, and team data in about an hour. Within those three areas I can always find something that is bottlenecked, causing friction, leaking revenue (and often time), and something that is a limiting factor that will prohibit growth.
From there we know exactly what areas need to be addressed. Once we have that list, it is time to triage. For those of you that do not know what triaging is, it is quite simple. It’s a system that medical professionals use to determine who gets treated first. Being a former medical professional, and as my clients call me the “business doctor,” I use the same approach in strategy.
We focus on the most critical problems first. The things that if we don’t get them fixed the business will slowly (or sometimes quickly) die – because if your business isn’t growing, it is dying, you just may not realize it yet.
My job is to stop the bleeding and help you craft a treatment plan that will help you move the business forward. In the shaky landscape of today those treatment plans are now battle plans, because at the end of the day your business is in the fight of its life and the infusion it needs to survive is cash.
The second step is to the look at and update your cash flow projections. What is your current runway and how quickly is it shrinking?
The fun thing about the work I do (and why it is so critical right now) is that it enables the businesses I work with to increase their runway (revenue) and also decrease costs – turning them into leaner, more hardy businesses who can make it through this stormy sea of uncertainty!
Sidebar: Because I am so committed to helping as many businesses as I can weather this storm successfully I have made these spreadsheets available to you as a business triage tool kit! You can get access to it by clicking the link above or picture below (but don’t forget to read the third thing!)
Hone your battle plans
Once you have the clarity, it is time to make a battle plan or 2!
The key to strategic battle plans is prioritizing. The clarity you have around your business should have uncovered at least a few areas that are weak, leaking, or bottlenecked. Once you know what those areas are it is time to prioritize based on which one will have the biggest positive impact first and so on.
Especially in this tumultuous time, you want to find the biggest levers you can pull that will save or increase revenue retention and also decrease friction and costs to the bottom line.
I have never seen a business that didn’t have bottlenecks or leaks or one that hasn’t benefited from a decrease in friction and overhead. You just have to be courageous enough to cut the onion in half rather than trying to delicately pull it back layer by layer.
Last point… don’t forget that battle plans change, so be flexible and expand your periphery so you can see as much as you can while you keep your finger on the pulse of your business!
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I hope that helps reduce some of your stress and give you clarity on how to support your business.
Happy slicing and triaging!
P.s. Still feeling cloudy? Hop on a 30 minute clarity call with Lauren so she can help you get more perspective on what next step you could take to sail through these choppy waters.
