part0035

Y ou now have a variety of planning suggestions and tools that will stimulate your thinking. The thinking required to fully address the new opportunities available in periods of accelerated change. All these should lead you to formalizing and completing the three required plans to survive and thrive. These plans are just that—plans. The actions you and your team take to execute them will make all the difference. Here are some reminders and prompts to help you finish your plans and to lean into this journey.

By now you may be weary of hearing about changing your business model to “match up” to the new market realities. Hopefully, repositioning and reinventing your business should have you excited. There are no guarantees! But it is guaranteed that if you do not fully assess where your business is and take action to meet the evolving market challenges you will not get the results you are seeking. So … feel the fear and do it anyway!

Your newly developing business may need to shed assets, products, or product lines, and change in other ways. It may need some new and different human resources to drive future growth as you bounce back. So, work as needed to fully reestablish the business with the assets you have in hand.

The picture should be clear on what the business will be and will be doing. Your analysis should have revealed the answers to all of these questions.

You should have all of this knowledge and information integrated into the plans that you can share with your management and staff. The more they understand how you expect to move toward surviving and growing the business, the more they can help. They have a vested interest in seeing your business survive and thrive just as much as you do. Make sure they not only understand the strategies you have adopted, but why they are important in a transforming marketplace. (You should put systems in place to help them apply the driving strategies and tactics every day.)

SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) and Ratio Analysis are good planning and assessment tools. As the industry changes, you want to get updated industry information to add to your overall knowledge base. When the time permits, go back and review the low-cost, no-cost ways to gain true market intelligence. This is the type of action that will keep you ahead of the pack to better serve your customers.

The trend reporting outline in Appendix A will help you put a reporting system in place to provide feedback so you can adjust your plans and actions as needed. Early in the survival phase, you want to be on top of all such developments daily and personally. Once you move into the foundation planning time period, you can begin to rely more on this reporting structure. It is good to remember that all the primary drivers of your business should be trended for analysis.

As you step further into the thrive planning period, you may need to acquire capital equipment to improve the cost equation or the delivery metrics. The information in Appendix B outlines a process to achieve superior results with such investment decisions. As you move down this road, it is going to be particularly important not to place excessive debt service requirements on the company. Do not get so far away from the crisis you are in that you forget some of the difficult lessons learned.

Keep an eye out for government actions. They may have helped you survive. But they may implement new regulations that will directly impact your plans. Keep as up-to-date as you can be in these areas to minimize these risks.

The other risk that can creep up on you is a lack of diversification. Once you are into the foundation building phase, make an effort to find balanced customer growth. Ideally, you do not want any single customer to account for more than 15 percent of your revenues as the business matures.

Similarly, if you have a critical vendor, see if you can find a second source to reduce that risk of a “someday” disruption. And, finally, look at your sales and marketing team as it is developing. You want to build a balance into that area so that no single person is responsible for more than 25 percent of total revenue. None of this will be easy. It is however of maximum importance to keep you from finding yourself in a new period of business distress caused by one of these sources of risk.

Businesses run on percentages (Revenue growth, gross margins, net profit)! As you progress, compare your results with the industry percentages. Keep your business on track to be in the top tier of your industry. Measuring and planning for these continuous improvements is the final step in the thrive planning and action process. Revisit the discussion on holding or expanding gross margins if you need another shot of that mental medicine.

Improving business performance, measured as net cash flow, is your ultimate financial reward for developing the right plans and executing them properly. Use these funds to build a cash reserve. Once that is accomplished, try to find a creative and balanced way to have all the employees who made the difference share in this reward.

Your three plans should each be summarized on to a single sheet of paper. This is what the management professionals refer to as a “One Page Business Plan.” (It is not really a plan … it is a summary for your daily use.) There are a number of good books on using this planning approach. Exhibit 1 offers you a template to use. The power for you is in your daily reference to these three summary documents and the “One Page Project” outline ( there is a project template in Exhibit 2.). You should look at them each day as you work through the distinct phases of your three plans.

The plan summaries mirror the planning process steps in that they show the results from applying research knowledge and analysis. The key elements are these:

These are your plans. If necessary, fix them. Change them. Make them work for you and your customers. You developed them in a truly short time due to the distressed situation that prompted this review cycle. Details within a set of plans are not always perfect. The work to find and outline the right strategies is much more critical.

The project summaries will remind you as you start each day … exactly:

It is all too easy to get burdened by new problems each day. By using this simple set of summaries and consulting them daily, you should be able to maintain the needed focus to survive, shape a new foundation, and then thrive. This happens when you structure your survival so you can construct a durable business plan to thrive that is:

In good times and bad, excellent business owners and their managers find ways to create productive organizations based on sound business strategies. Keep your sights on higher heights. You may be amazed at how quickly you will be on your way to reaching those goals. Do not forget Chuck Noll’s words of wisdom. Congratulate yourself for starting the journey.