How can employers balance short-term sustainability with long-term survival?
Short-term sustainability includes immediate sales, incentive plans, marketing programs and driving plans for the next six months. Your short-term sustainability strategy should be focused on your core competency.
Once you focus on the most profitable things that you do, then you match your staff to that. Too many companies are trying to do a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Because employers are afraid, they’re trying this and that, and it is wasting their resources because then they’ve got to have people who can do all those things. And that doesn’t maximize your profitability. You need to continue to invest in your strongest pieces now, and then you can gradually add complementary pieces to your business as the economy recovers.
Try to stay in balance with all the things you have to do as a management team. Recognize what your priorities really are and carve out the proper amount of time to do the things you need to be doing in order to continue your business’s health.
In the long-term, do both financial and work force modeling, so you can play out a variety of scenarios. If A happens, how will you fare? Or if B happens, what does that mean for your business? If your work force changes — and there are a lot of things that can cause that — how does that impact your long-term sustainability?
Can business owners work through this process on their own, or do they need outside help?
You must determine if you have the core competency to manage this kind of redirection. If not, you’re just going to spend twice as much time on something that you’re going to get very poor results from.
Most of the time, you’re going to need outside help. The best thing you can do is to select a team of advisers that you can work with and who can work with one another so you can develop a cohesive game plan.
But you can’t just develop a plan and set it aside. When you’re working on the plan, it’s easy to get excited, but then the excitement fizzles out and is put on a shelf. If your strength isn’t in implementing and maintaining a long-term plan, you need to get someone on board who is responsible for the continuing management of your long-term sustainability plan.
S.A. “Sam” Murray is CEO of ManagEase. Reach her at (714) 378-0880 or [email protected].
