How to Get a Strong Start When Resuming After a Hiccup by howardshore, Date: Nov 09, 2020

Has 2020 been an unexpected year for your business? Do you feel like your business is stagnant, not growing the way it needs to—basically regressing? Or perhaps an external event, like what we’ve seen resulting from the pandemic, has forced you to rebuild your business? Maybe you experienced a blow, like a flood or fire, that has caused you to restart your business completely? These are three of the five business phases I refer to as the 5Rs. I’ve been discussing each one over the past few weeks. Today, I’d like to examine the fourth phase: Resuming.

Has your business recently experienced a hiccup—a temporary closure due to a factor outside of your control, like a hurricane—but you’re now back up and running near or at the same level of growth you were experiencing before the event? The chances are good that you are in the Resuming phase. Just like the Rebuilding and Restarting phases, your business found itself here because of an external event. What separates you from businesses in one of those two phases is that you had the cash to survive your downtime.

If you’re resuming, but your growth before the event was flat, then you are likely not in the Resuming phase, but instead in the Regressing phase.

Something I firmly believe is that you have to ask the right questions to move forward. Today, I want to share a few key questions to ask yourself if your business is in the Resuming phase.

Do You Have a Business Resiliency Plan?

Having a business resiliency plan will allow you to resume your business faster. It will also allow your hiccup to be less than your competitors’. If you don’t have a business resiliency plan, I recommend that this be the first you do. It will allow you to get your staff up and working faster, whether in person or virtually, and you’ll be better set up to do that.

Even if you had a resiliency plan, now—right after the event is over—is the best time to think about what this plan needs to look like for the future. Everything is most fresh right after you’ve gone through the storms, so to speak, so be sure to go back and review it. What did you learn? Contemplate how you would start back better, faster, cheaper, and be sure to document it. There is no better time than right after you have experienced an event to do this.

Are You in a Better Position than Your Competition?

Closely examine your situation to see where you might hold an advantage over your competitors. For example, do you have more cash on your balance sheet than the average business in your industry? Do you have any strategic advantages over everybody else that you need to take advantage of? These are things that will allow you to resume faster than others.

Key questions you want to consider here include:

• Is there a way in which we can steal share right now?
• Can we steal share by acquiring somebody else that was weakened and crippled that doesn’t have the cash?
• Can we acquire capabilities, like technology, because the cost to acquire has just dropped and is less than it would otherwise be?

Is Now the Time to Recruit A-Players?

When you’re resuming after an event, I think it is one of the best times to recruit, especially for A-Players. If you’re upgrading your technologies, why not also consider upgrading your human capital.

And don’t think your recruiting is just recruiting from your competitors. You’re looking for people with different skill sets, talents, abilities, and behaviors that fit your organization. And many times, those skills are transferable. And with the right training, you may be able to steal talent from other industries hidden differently by what’s going on and causing the uproar in the market.

So, to me, recruiting talent is an excellent opportunity during a Resuming phase.

Are You Set Up to Achieve Exceptional Growth Rates?

Now is when you want to make sure you have the right strategies in place so you can do more than resume.

• Do you have the right strategies to grow at the exceptional growth rates that you want to achieve?
• Do you have the right strategies for building culture?
• Is your team operating as effectively as it should?
• Do you have clear accountability systems in place?
• Are you looking at the right metrics?
• Are you doing a better-than-adequate job of choosing priorities so that you’re building now and thinking about the next three years?
• How do you make your highly achievable but aggressive goals come to fruition over the next three years?

How Do You Get to the Next Phase?

So, when you’re in the Resuming phase, you need to get back to where you left off in your business and build your capabilities and differentiators in your model that can cause you to rocket ahead of your competition. Rocketing—that’s the fifth phase we’ll discuss next week—is what you need to start considering. Two final questions to ask yourself: 1) How do I become a rocket in my market; 2) What needs to be put in place for me to do that?

If you feel that you’re in the Resuming phase and need that extra guidance to keep growing at an exceptional pace, I encourage you to join me for a FREE 30-MINUTE NO OBLIGATION CONSULTATION where I will ask you more in-depth questions and quickly pinpoint actions you can take to get your business on the path of exponential growth, profitability, and increasingly greater cash flow.