Make your numbers this week, and you will make them this month. My philosophy then, as it is now is this: Make your numbers today and you will make your numbers tomorrow. You need a very early warning of a sales crisis. If daily sales were below what they should be for more than a few days, I was asking hard questions of my sales team. Not monthly, and not quarterly, but daily. I carefully monitored sales on a daily basis. That taught me to always have tight awareness and control of every aspect of the business. We had to choose between making payroll or paying the utility bill. There is no future for your company if you cannot survive today. My definition of strategic planning is this: It costs a lot of money, takes a lot of time, and results in little more than a thick book you put on the shelf and dust it off in 3 years. If I do all that, I am putting the future of the company at risk. Don’t spend on anything that doesn’t have a return in 12-18 months. Resist the urge to make big bets on the future. The most important thing you can do to prepare for the next pandemic is shore it up. So how do you do that?Ī common denominator in all of the unlikely scenarios is a massive, sudden, and unexpected cut in sales. So, you better be prepared for the “unlikely”. But then again, so was the Covid-19 pandemic. If you think most of these scenarios are unlikely, you may be right. Your employees stage a walk-out leaving you with unreasonable demands for cost increases you cannot afford.The point is, if I learned anything from the pandemic, it is that the government can do anything it wants, any time it wants. Maybe it decides your company has violated anti-trust law. Maybe it imposes new taxes on any product that doesn’t further the green agenda. Maybe it eliminates all patent protections. The government passes a new law that restricts or eliminates your competitive advantages.A new competitor emerges out of the blue with a product that completely replaces yours at half the cost.What “unlikely” events can you think of? I can easily think of many. It should be a lesson that preparing for “the unlikely” is what you need to be doing right now. But the Covid-19 pandemic should be a metaphor for any unlikely event that could happen to your business. It would be easy to shrug that off as something unlikely to happen again in our lifetime. The next time you say? Sure, Covid-19 was a once in a generation pandemic. Luck is not what will get you through the next time. But if luck is what got you through, you are not out of the woods yet. If your company was lucky enough to survive the pandemic, you probably breathed a big sigh of relief.
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