If you are a business owner or if you are an entrepreneur and your business has been affected by the Coronavirus, Dan Lok will share 12 ways how to grow your business during this global crisis. This video will give you some some tactics and some strategies that you could apply in your business. It doesn’t matter if you are running a small business or you’re running a $100 million organization, this crisis triangle will work for you if you implement it.
The crisis Triangle
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- Forget about your 12-month growth plan – You need to adapt.
- Think about your survival – survive in order to thrive.
- Get into the right Mindset
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- This is not the time to panic or get nervous.
You need to stay calm, cool, collected (you cannot make
intelligent decisions in your business if you’re panicking.) - Your team demands leadership from you.
This is a time where you step up as a leader, as a CEO, as an entrepreneur and say:
“Okay, this is what’s going on and we’re going through this together.”- What do we need to do? What are some of the strategic moves that we need to make?
- This is not the time to panic or get nervous.
There are three ways that you could grow your business during this global crisis:
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- Suspend
- Suspend all non-essential spendings, including your personal spending.
- You want to buy that car, forget it.
- You want to take a vacation, forget it.
- No major investments
- Suspend all non-essential spendings, including your personal spending.
- Suspend
Your business needs to survive and needs as much cash as possible.
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- Shut down
- Shutdown all cash-heavy projects
Any projects, let’s say you’re looking at a group of projects that you have to do,
you want to execute, you want to implement.Take a look at them, which one sucks the most amount of cash. There are a lot of emergency things, there are a lot fires you need to put out. - You need to look at 80/20. These projects, they may be good three months, six months ago, not so good today.
- These projects, they might have potential,
but there’s a lot of uncertainty. It requires a lot of capital and cash. Those you want to put away.
- Shutdown all cash-heavy projects
- Sell off
- Sell off any non-producing assets.
Unfortunately, not all businesses could be saved, could be rescued. If you are looking at it with no emotion, you know in some case you got to turn the key. You got to walk away. - Most business will require quite drastic change in terms of the business model,
in terms of how they serve customers and how they deliver value. In some cases, you need to make the tough decision.
- Sell off any non-producing assets.
- Shut down
The next part of the triangle, the next three ways to grow your business is to:
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- Digitize
- What could you digitize in your business: your delivery, your products and services?
- You’re selling something that is a physical product, that’s fine, but is there a possibility you could digitize this and actually deliver the same kind of products or similar through technology?
- Through the internet, something that people could download versus shipping something physical to them. Not only it reduces your delivery cost, but now possibly, you can expand your marketplace, you can reach a more global market.
- Systemize
- Systemize your processes and procedures so it’s less people dependent and more technology dependent.
- You want to increase your efficiency, what are some of the things that you could put systems in place, maybe perhaps you want to hire a remote team to execute. Once you have a system in place, it’s easier to do that.
- In a crisis, you don’t want your business to be so people-heavy.
Ideally, you want to reduce the human elements, because if you can use codes,
if you could use technology, you can use software to automate some of these things. Maybe not the whole thing, but ask yourself the question, are there aspects of your business that you could systemize and automate that would make a huge difference,that increases your odds, your chances of survival?
- Virtualize your products and services
- Virtualize, I have a few friends. Before the crisis, a big part of their businesses, a big part of revenue come from doing live events. But now they take the same experience and actually make them better and they virtualize it. Now they’re conducting virtual events, virtual seminars, virtual trade shows, in fact and they’re experimenting a new way to deliver value, a new way to connect.
- Digitize
The he third part of the crisis triangle is to:
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- Count
- What do I mean by counting your cash? Literally, you want to be looking
at your cash balance every single day, you want to be looking at your cashflow statement at least every single week, why? Because in order to survive, we need staying power. - What gives you staying power? Cash, in a crisis, cash is king. Cash is what is going to help you get through this period of time, so you want to be very, very cautious how your cashflow is flowing. And the best way to stay on top of it, you look at your cash balance every single day.
- Where is the cash coming in, where is the cash flowing out? The only way you would die financially, the only way you have to shut down your business is because you run out of cash. So, count your cash every single day. Then at the same time you want to collect as much cash as possible.
- Meaning looking at your accounts receivable, who is owing you money? You want to collect, you want to minimize accounts receivable.
- What do I mean by counting your cash? Literally, you want to be looking
- Collect
- You want to collect all that money. And at the same time, you want to go back
and negotiate with all your vendors, anyone that you’re buying from, you want to negotiate your accounts payable. You want to have as little accounts receivable as possible. You don’t want anyone owing you any money.
- You want to collect all that money. And at the same time, you want to go back
- Conserve your cash
- At the same time, accounts payable, you want to renegotiate the terms.
- Can you extend the terms? Can you spread the payments into multiple payment?
- Can you pay them a little bit later? You want to conserve that cash for a rainy day, forget rainy day, this is a perfect storm.
- You want to conserve that cash as much as possible, because we don’t know, no one knows how long this will last. No one knows where we’re going next and no one knows when we are going to bounce back. It doesn’t matter, as long as
you have cash, you are okay. Conserve that cash. Do you everything you possibly could. Use every mean necessary to conserve cash, cash is the lifeblood of your business.
- Count
The last part of the crisis triangle is to:
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- Re-energize
- How do you re-energize your existing client base?
- Can you add additional value to them. Keep in mind, chances are your customers are experiencing the same thing that you and I are going through. They have challenges, there’s a lot of confusion, there’s a lot of uncertainties, so what could you provide that will help them, that will comfort them?
- Maybe you could offer them some additional help. Maybe you could just reach out to them and say:
- How are things?
- What help do you need from me?
- What can we do to help you solve some of these problems?
- Re-energize
You want to re-energize and communicate with your existing customers.
Here’s a very powerful question that you could ask yourself?
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- In the next 12 months, let’s say you cannot get another customer coming in, what would you do differently?
- How would you conduct your business?
- Wouldn’t you focus more on the existing customers that you do have?
- How could you add value to your existing customers?
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- Reactivate
- What are some of the old customers, people who bought from you, but they no longer buy from you, they haven’t done business with you for a few years? Who are some of those people?
- Can you go back to them and reactivate that relationship and say: “Hey, how are things going?”
- Do you need any help?
- Is there anything that I can help you with?
- You want to reactivate some of those older customer base, because it doesn’t cost you anything. They have done business with you at some point, but somehow you lose contact, somehow you lose touch, now is the time to reach out. Pick up the phone – this is how you apply your closing skill: pick up the phone and talk with people. Now it’s time to connect, to reactivate that relationship.
- Retain your clients
- How could you retain the clients that you have?
- Now it causes a lot to get a new customer in.
- Maybe you don’t have the resources, maybe you don’t have the cash to go out and advertise to get new customers in, well, let’s retain the customers that you have.
- Maybe, I’m not advising this, but maybe in some cases, you could reduce your rate a little bit. Get some cash coming in, some cash is better than no cash.
- Out of all the customers that you have, what are some of the things that you can do in the next 30 days to retain them? Retention is key, you cannot afford, not during a crisis, to lose people.
- If they’re leaving, ask them why. Is there something that you could do better?
- Even if they’re leaving, survey them, ask them why they not buying from you anymore?
- Is it there something that you could do differently?
- Anything that you could do that would change their minds and you will be shocked, sometimes, how simple it is just by asking.
- Sometimes they’re embarrassed to tell you, they’re going through some struggles and you could tell them: “Instead of leaving us, how about we defer the payment for 30 days?” We’re in this together, versus you completely lose them. Let’s defer the payment for 30 days and we’ll revisit this, if it doesn’t cost you a whole lot to deliver your products or services.
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Dan Lok is a great mentor to get you not only in the right frame of mind, but then to give you the know-how, the tools, the skills to get there.
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