For those of you that are self-employed and running your own business, or leading a company through these challenging times, i want to highlight areas of concern that you, as a leaders are supposed to strategically review and come up with a business action plan. These areas are insight driven and requires total commitment and involvement of your team to objectively and practically review. The priority action areas are:
- Crisis Actions – What to do and why, right now and over the next 2 weeks to 1 month. In developing a crisis action, it is very important to get “raw” inputs from your staff, allow the senior leadership team in the organization to digest the inputs and come up with clear action items to be communicated back to staff by the leadership. The leader should review the implementation and guide on any deviation without “hotch potch” inputs that may contradict the agreed action.
- Survival Actions – How to stay in business for the next 6 months. Despite the crisis action plan, the senior level management should reason together and gather insights on how to increase patronage/sales turnover, Manage Cost and Enhance service offering. I refer to this strategy as ICE strategy. Develop a checklist of action items in each component of ICE and populate it as Survival Actions
- Predicting the Future – Market research to support forecasting and strategic action. This role should be taken by CEO, CFO , few key senior leadership team members and appointed technical persons to share market intelligence and new insights. Forecasting could be driven by review of the performance of the strategic plan being implemented, feedback from customer satisfaction surveys and other focused group surveys within your business environment.
