5 Strategies to Focus Your Wartime Battle Plan
Never have we been more mystified as to what to actually do right now.
We’re on high alert, with all available hands on deck, ready to dive in ... but we’re in unchartered waters. It’s as if we’re emerging from a collective fog with zero visibility into what’s ahead.
And those of us leading teams, we are secretly, quietly vexed. Lost between PPE’s and PPP’s and a host of new terms and tasks none of us could ever fathom, our lack of visibility into the future creates either a form of paralysis or panic.
But there are many things we can do. And it’s not busy-work, but real, tactical tasks to propel the business forward. Though we are all affected by the same calamity, we are each affected in different ways, some more extreme than others, but everyone can do something.
Ben Horowiz described this haze we’re in as the “fog of war,” and said there were two types of CEO’s: Peacetime CEOs and Wartime CEOs.
“Peacetime in business means those times when a company has a large advantage vs. the competition in its core market, and its market is growing. In times of peace, the company can focus on expanding the market and reinforcing the company’s strengths. In wartime, a company is fending off an imminent existential threat. Such a threat can come from a wide range of sources including competition, dramatic macroeconomic change, market change, supply chain change, and so forth.”
In short, a peacetime CEO focuses on the long term while a wartime CEO never loses sight of the big picture while focusing on the immediate, near future. Or, as one article put it, “During a crisis, which is ruled by unfamiliarity and uncertainty, effective responses are largely improvised.”
Since we are all wartime CEOs now, what should be our focus and what can we actually do?
We’re creating a list of tasks, based on the myriad of conversations we’re having with customers and friends, and compiling them here - will you share with us your list so we can keep adding to this? See our working list of 30+ ideas below, but before you leap to those tactics, shore up your strategy with these five principles:
1) Get close to your numbers
By now, most have done this, but you can’t run your business on gut instinct when in a war. In major military battles, logistics, “the discipline of planning and carrying out the movement, supply, and maintenance of military forces,” is often the deciding factor in war, which is a science of calculations, projections, and aligning resources needed for battle. An article in Fortune magazine summed it up best: “In wartime, logistics eats strategy for lunch.” In 2008, when the great recession hit, I was leading a distributorship and we were at the top of our sales growth with $10 million in sales. I was very much a peacetime CEO with a focus on growing the top line. I gave scant attention to the bottom line because the economy was white-hot and we were in a growing market. Then the recession hit and all of us peacetime CEO’s got a crash course in wartime computation. I discovered my bottom line, and with it, our operating costs and payroll, plus I began to get acquainted with projections...
2) calculate projections
After you get close to your numbers, begin to calculate projections. Calculate your predicted gross sales, gross profit, operating costs, and net profit for the remaining year based on sales declines from your previous year’s history. Calculate 2020’s sales in Q2, Q3, and Q4 and work through a variety of scenarios, for example: a 60% reduction in sales in Q2, a 20% reduction in Q3, and a 10% increase in Q4. We are all hearing predictions on how the economy will return, from a V-shaped return with the economy dripping hard and then spiking back, or to a Nike swoosh shaped return with a gradual incline and leveling back to normal. Use these predictions to paint your model. The more you are aware of the shifts to the economy and the more you understand how your numbers will be affected, the better you can plan as news unfolds. But what you might need most now is segmentation ...
3) Segment your client base
As a part of your projection work, segment all of your customers by industry and do some research on how these industries are being impacted. Put those that are high-risk in one category, low-risk in others. For example, telecom would be in a low-risk category due to the demand for at-home wifi and solutions, oil and gas and retail would be a high-risk category. Do research on industries and subscribe to the latest news on how these industries are being impacted (for inspiration, check out this article from Harvard Business Review written during the 2009 recession about how to market in a downturn). Obviously, you’ll double down your activities on the low-risk categories (see below). I just heard from a distributor yesterday who got an 800 pc, $25 per unit order from a company to send Sophia’s cookies to employees at home. There are opportunities out there, it will just take more research work than before. Share specific industry research/news with these clients, come up with solutions before they present problems. If you’re spending more time watching news reports, or more time in the facebook ppp group or on twitter than you are talking with customers (or at least doing research for them, creating new proposals for them, virtuals and collections, etc), then you need to shift that energy away from negative tasks to positive tasks so it sets the right tone in your head and fuels the right activity toward your future. And speaking of the future, remember how the wartime CEO focuses on the near future? It’s time to …..
4) Plan a 12-week year
I was chatting with my friend Nate Bailey, founder of Ideation, about planning. Nate will be leading a session on sales projections at skucamp this fall and he mentioned that they are focusing on the short term, quarter by quarter. It’s really hard to focus right now on annual sales metrics and sales goals when the market is on pause, so how do we guide our businesses and direct our teams? The peacetime CEO and wartime CEO manages their teams in completely different ways, “Peacetime CEO focuses on the big picture and empowers her people to make detailed decisions. A wartime CEO cares about a speck of dust on a gnat’s ass if it interferes with the prime directive.” It’s time to become a gracious micromanager. Yes, continue to calculate sales goals, do that in line with your above projections, but also consider setting activity-based goals around marketing. Like the logistics plan in a war, there is a myriad of micro-tasks we can create and share with our teams (for a working list of ideas, see below). Set your goals around actions. For a primer on how to do this by account, check out our post on the only marketing strategy you need. And for inspiration and a how-to, check out the book The Twelve Week Year.
5) Plan for Day One
I was talking with Tom Rector of Screenbroidery and he said he categorizes clients into two buckets, one bucket was industries who are operational and even thriving right now, the essential businesses still open: banks, grocery stores, etc. The other bucket is those who are on a hiatus. They each have different needs. For those that are on pause, they still have morale demands and other needs, but mostly, Tom is working with them to plan their return. Catherine Graham consulted with businesses prior to commonsku and called this “Day One” planning. “Imagine it’s the first day, when this crisis is over, what are you doing? How are you operating? Where are you focusing? What’s Day One look like?” Day One planning allows you to create an action plan even when you don’t know when Day One will be. Joan Landorf with Axis mentioned that one of the many things they are doing is creating “back to work” kits for customers. When day one arrives, imagine those employees coming back to work and arriving to an inspirational “thank you” gift from the company, a sign of appreciation for their solidarity and commitment. That’s a great example of a Day One tactic.
The beautiful irony of this moment is that we never have time to prepare, time to work with clients, time to dream, and plan. Now is that time. These tasks prepare us for our own Day One in ways that we have never had the runway to plan before.
“It’s not all zoom and gloom,” one friend told me.
How you align and marshal your team right now is of utmost importance. Making sure they have the tools they need to fight this battle and also the orders to carry out their part of the mission is vital, not only for their health and well-being, but for the future of your company and your clients.
One question I want to leave you with: Are you resorting to fear-based thinking and tactics (shrinking into turtle mode, fatalism, and helplessness) or hope-based thinking and tactics? Because either path leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And action, as we know, cures fear.
Here are 30 tasks you can do now. Share with us your tactics and ideas? We’d love to add to this list, give us a shout on the socials @commonsku or email me, bobby(at)commonsku.com, I’d love to hear from you.
30+ tasks you can do now
Gather your team together and reassess their skills
Start a blog, post weekly
Start or refine your email newsletter
Build customer stories, interview clients for case histories
Build product collections for clients
Create spec samples
Research prospects
Build virtuals for customers
Build virtuals for prospects
Create shops for each of your customers
Create shops for prospects
Kits: Work from Home kits, Back to Work kits, Virtual Events kits
Revamp your digital brand
Add chat to your website
Plan your self-promotion campaigns for the remaining year
Launch a weekly product or cause
Start a podcast
Start a video series
Research and implement google analytics
Double down on LinkedIn research and train your entire team on how to become power prospectors
Gather testimonials from customers
Build a marketing automation structure into your lead funnel
Create a “how-to” guide or ebook around your specialty
Repurpose old content into an ebook
Create a social media contest to reward winners with cool merch
Write a guest article or guest on a podcast
Create an infographic around your UVP
Develop a new line of services or product, dream big!
Create a new social media strategy to implement on Day One
Revamp all of your social media landing pages