“The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The next best time is right now.” Resilience is the ability of a substance or object to return to its original shape after being bent, stretched, or pressed. Revenue resilience is the ability of your revenue stream to recover after an unexpected economic event. Resilience gives you the capacity to survive unexpected events, so you can thrive when the recovery comes.

Friction is anything that makes it harder for someone to buy from you. As you recover revenue, how can you reduce friction in your sales, marketing and production processes? Think Amazon one click. Find what you want, one click and it arrives at your door. How can you embrace technology to make it easier than ever for clients and customers to buy what they need, from you?Examples of simple new technology tools that reduce friction are proposal software that gives instant and consistent feedback, calendar software making appointments easier to set up, auto billing software, content sharing and management tools, sales engagement, and of course, communication and conferencing software.Begin looking for places to reduce friction by mapping your process from marketing to sales, to production. Determine the current cost and time in each bucket. What is your 80/20 here? What 20% of your marketing, sales and production process is dragging 80% of your cost and increasing time and friction? Begin here as these are your most significant drags on profits. Gather a cross functional team and begin to deploy new ideas and technology. Keep asking, what makes it easier and faster for clients and customers to work with us?Right now, change is easier. With social distancing and business closures, everyone’s life has been impacted in some way. Change is no longer slow, it is fast, and constant. Your clients and customers are expecting change. And they are more willing to forgive you if things don’t go well the first time out of the box with a new change.For retailers, most bars, restaurants and entertainment venues, the journey from a customer’s home to your location is friction. If this is you, health and safety may be your biggest challenge in reducing friction. Over communicate and make your safety process front and center to the client experience.Spend a few minutes right now to capture your first thoughts on areas of friction in your process. Who are the best team members to gather for your cross functional team? Make notes now while things are on your mind. Set a time line for getting started.Join us next for a look at Resilient Revenue.Mackey

There are things that we must do in life to get ahead personally and professionally.  Not all things are fun and easy.  We just need to put on our big girl/boy pants and get them done.  Maybe we should not do them with a lazy attitude, but we can make sure that we are doing them in the most efficient manner.  Here are 5 simple changes to make that will help you get things completed more efficiently.

Recovering revenue runs the spectrum from regaining your customers trust in terms of health and safety so they feel safe continuing to do business with you, to completely reinventing revenue as you now know it today. The old idea, “this is the way we do it here,” must go. Along the way, attempt to rediscover your passion

The 2020’s were already shaping up to be the most disruptive decade in our history. Accelerating technology, increasing impacts from climate change, generational wealth transfer on a massive scale, as well as a global leadership vacuum, were setting the stage for an accelerating pace of change… before the novel coronavirus came into our lives.  With COVID, it’s like we all boarded the Starship Enterprise, just as it was moving into warp speed.

If you have ever played or watched golf, then you are probably familiar with the phrase “drive for show and putt for dough.” The idea here is, your drive can be a great and an impressive shot, but you don’t win tournaments and make money (dough) if you’re not putting well. I think this same concept applies to the way business owners think of their top line revenue.

As we move past the initial shock caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, business owners and leaders are now looking ahead and planning how to finish the year in a strong financial position. Register for this free panel discussion with financial experts from the Small Giants Community.

Simply put, an engine is a machine for converting energy (fuel) into motion. And an engineer is a person who designs, operates and oversees an engine. Most business owners start out expect to be all three: fuel, engine & engineer for their startup. We bootstrap, use sweat equity, and “build the plane as we fly it” all in the hopes that little by little we find other sources of fuel to create motion within our business and build a sturdy engine to generate the profit & lifestyle we envision. We start generating cash, hiring a team, sourcing vendors, creating structure, investing in capital, etc.