If you’re customers convert 50% of the time they come into your store, what would happen if they suddenly convert 10% of the time? If you’re company needs 1,000 people in-market for your product to succeed - what would happen if there were only 100? Not everything is flexible, but resiliency can be built into business. If you are making 30% margins, could you use those funds to invest in a process that drives next year’s margin to 35%? Better yet, what if your capital reserves were sufficient enough to survive a period of no customers for a week - a month, or a year?

Many companies will hang on, BUT BARELY

The terrible employment numbers coming out show the painful truth on the ground - not only are companies going out of business, but businesses that survive are severely retrenching. This helps pay some bills, but it accelerates a spiral downward. The premise that you must simply “cut-costs, automate, and optimize” your way out of this misses the mark. Say you do everything you’ve always done, but with less people, a few more machines, and cut everything else. What will that leave you? A 5,000 person company down to 500? $100 million in revenue down to $20 million? A “retreat to profitability” - without re-imagining the needs, standards, processes, practices and operations of your business - is simply that, a permanent retreat to insignificance.

Change occurs with or without you

These are just a few things - all of which would be considered inconceivable or simply impossible - less than a month ago. They are all now reality. Very little feels positive while we navigate the worst of this moment, but I do enjoy seeing the absurd refrain “we could never do that” laid bare:

We can re-purpose millions of manufacturing supply chains, but your organization can’t reconsider how to organize numbers on a spreadsheet?

Thousands of nurses and health professionals can work overtime in battlefield conditions, but your analyst team can’t be bothered to learn a new 2-minute routine?

Event centers can be turned into state-of-the-art triage facilities in weeks, But your chief merchant can’t use new data or insights for the next inventory order?

The truth is that you can change. Your company can evolve. That’s never been an issue. Change isn’t comfortable, change isn’t easy, and so the real question is are you willing to change? Can you commit to do what’s needed to evolve? Because change is coming with or without you.

INVESTING IN RESILIENCE