3 Powerful Techniques That Can Really Increase Your Business Continuity

Anxious about your company stopping working due to Coronavirus? Resilience is important for leaders today, and it will prove to be a crucial dimension for measuring success over the next decade. Here are 3 effective strategies to construct continuity planning into your organization to endure and overcome 2020 and beyond.

Methods to Make Your Business Resilient

Concerned About The Future? Rest Easy!

In this series, I will show you how to secure your business and track record versus the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic and discuss some of the practices, programs, resources, and techniques that are available to small business owners, soloprenuers, and gig economy workers.

Business Continuity and Resilience Planning

In this post, I'm going to discuss what "business resilience" suggests and why it's crucial to get management in your company focusing on business resilience planning prior to an emergency.

I'll also propose 3 nimble strategies for building resilience into your company now that might assist your business endure the next worldwide pandemic.

Twenty-twenty will definitely go down as one of the hardest years a number of us have faced in our life times. For me, 2019 was right up there. I lost my papa, my pet dog, and a brand-new service within the latter 6 months of the year.

Geopolitics, economic slumps, and various other aspects can have substantial results on your operational abilities and efficiency.

Customer costs in the United States fell by ~ 20% throughout the very first 2 months of Coronavirus's accelerating spread, according to the US Department of Commerce, while the pandemic likewise interfered with ~ 75% of supply chains, according to the Institute for Supply Chain Management.

Economic Disruption and Natural Disasters?

Even before Coronavirus, many companies were struggling to plan for, respond to, resume speed and keep pace with technological change.

Sarah Bond and Gillian Shapiro of the Harvard Business Review conducted a study of 835 workers from public, private, and nonprofit firms about what was happening in their lives that needed resilience. What did they determine? They didn't point to catastrophes or the economy-- they pointed to corporate culture and their co-workers.

Social Dynamics Caused the Biggest Drain

Understanding that, in times like these, the key to progressing is thinking favorable (albeit hard), and ending up being resilient. While I've been working on my own personal resilience, I've also been working hard to make sure that my relationships, my other business, and my community and environment, are gotten ready for unexpected difficulties and difficulty.

As Diane Coutu reports in "How Resilience Works":

" Resilient people possess 3 attributes-- a strong approval of truth; a deep belief, frequently buttressed by highly held worths, that life is meaningful; and an extraordinary capability to improvise. You can recuperate from difficulty with just one or two of these qualities, however you will only be really resilient with all three. These 3 characteristics apply for durable companies also ... Resilient individuals and companies face truth with staunchness, make meaning of hardship instead of weeping out in despair, and improvise solutions from thin air. Others do not."

Why is resilience in organization important?

It indicates your business makes it through-- or even flourishes-- when others are stopping working.

Resilience Reduces Stress

Resilience is a term typically utilized in psychology to describe "the procedure of adjusting well in the face of adversity, trauma, catastrophe, risks or significant sources of tension."

Establishing an Increased Capacity to Identify Additional Sources of Stress Builds Resilience

For individuals, resilience implies you bounce back (instead of breaking down) after a crisis (like relationship difficulties, health concerns, work disputes, or financial obstacles).

Resilience won't eliminate threat or fix your issues, but it can offer you the opportunity (and clarity) to see past them while much better managing your stress levels.

Resilience Planning Protects your Business

Miriam Webster defines resilience as the "capability to recover from or adjust easily to bad luck or modification."

SearchCIO extends this definition, noting that "business resilience is the capability a company needs to quickly adapt to disruptions while maintaining continuous company operations and protecting people, possessions and overall brand name equity."

Business resilience planning is also often described as business continuity planning , and is an evaluation of the sustainability of a provided organization.

In the past, I taught week-long courses to experienced Fortune 100 companies and their executives on disaster healing and facility and business continuity planning in the enterprise, with a broader focus on details, network, and computer system security.

For these companies, business continuity means carrying out digital systems and processes to guarantee business continuity, while offering services or products that stay (or become) desirable in the face of international occasions, financial instability, or dangers to an organization's core operations.

" In the face of a crisis or economic slowdown, resilient organizations ride out unpredictability instead of being subdued by it."-- McKinsey Quarterly

During the last downturn, McKinsey & Company traced the paths of more than 1,000 publicly traded companies in various industries and with different maturity models, and found that just about 10 percent of those companies fared materially better than the rest.

While the last downturn was severe, some companies thrived despite current dangers

They found some fascinating parallels in how sustainable companies would weather a storm: how they got ready for them, how they acted during tougher phases, and how they came out of them.

With the majority of these companies relying heavily on data, analytics, and automation, it became clear that digital innovations will prove to be an increasingly important element of business continuity tomorrow.

Still, one core insight dominated: the business that survived-- those that demonstrated real resilience-- moved early, ahead of the downturn. They started preparing early, their numbers dipped less, and they came out on top.

" When the economy began heading south, what distinguished [them] was revenues, not revenue. By the time the decline reached its trough in 2009, the earnings, determined as revenues before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA), of [these business] had increased by 10 percent, while market peers had lost almost 15 percent." A resilient business responds swiftly to take on crises, recovers from misfortune so that it can exceed its competitors, and transforms itself to remain ahead of peers in the future.

In the previous four declines because 1985, just about one in seven companies increased both its sales development rate and its earnings margins, according to a 2019 BCG research study. These companies grew sales by 14% more and enhanced their margins by 7% more than the 44% of business in distress that decreased on both specifications.

" A business needs to embed resilience in every element of the company, from its go-to-market method to its operations to its most critical infrastructure. Vulnerabilities in any location might affect the business's ability to endure and prosper," says BCG.

The 3 Fastest Ways to Make Your Business Resilient

In their study, McKinsey & Co recognized 3 core techniques that helped these companies prevent downtime and develop this incomes benefit:

They produced a security buffer by tidying up their balance sheets before the dip
Most business cut expenses ahead of the curve
They concentrated on growth, even if it meant sustaining expenses

While helpful, these methods can be a bit tough for smaller companies to act on. For optimal effect, my goal in this short article is to cover 3 methods that entrepreneurs at most companies will find:

easy to comprehend,
( relatively) simple to carry out, and
repeatable across various verticals.

It is this combination of aspects that makes these strategies reliable for creating business continuity. And tested techniques can help in reducing the sources of stress that test your resilience in the very first location.

The 3 methods that match all of these factors are:

Repeating Revenues
Productized Service Offerings
Automated Client Acquisition

Method 1: Recurring Revenues build Business Resilience

While this very first technique might appear a little "on the nose," the truth is that a lot of you are running pure service companies that count on you to repeatedly "sell" every project to each and every customer, each and every time they need your aid (I know since I asked).

When you change to a repeating model, you're automating the continuation of a service over a period of time (be it every week, quarter, or month), and with it, increasing your CLV (client lifetime worth).

Knowing that, it's simple to understand why automating recurring earnings is among the most reliable methods to create resilience in your organization, no matter your company model, and it's a strategy everybody need to consider.

It might not be as easy as just changing your billing frequency though, considering that clients will require an inspiration to transfer to a repeating payment model.

For the most part, you'll need to change your rates, offer yearly or quarterly discount rates for innovative renewal, and productize your service offerings to make it simpler for customers to understand what they're buying, and why they should pay ahead of time.

Which brings us to strategy 2 ...

Strategy 2: Productize Your Service Offerings, Now!

Stop Trading Time for Money
Whether you're earning a living as a freelancer or expert, or operating a traditional "service organization," you are trading your hours for dollars. If you have a a group, your company likely still depends upon project-to-project profits to keep the lights on.

Even when your consulting business is growing, you still just have so much time to exchange for money. This makes it extremely hard to scale, and is a big factor a lot of service business are not resistant.

While service companies are arguably the easiest to start (and can be a few of the most profitable, at scale), they're likewise frequently the most challenging and pricey to grow.

To have the capability to keep growing as you rapidly adapt, you require to:

constantly discover, inform, and convert brand-new customer leads,
carefully certify those leads to sell them high-ticket offerings,
always take on brand-new clients, even when your skills and time are restricted.

By productizing your service offerings, you can reduce your sales cycles while automating 80% of the acquisition and credentials processes.

What does it mean to productize your service offerings?

From your client's viewpoint, it usually indicates a "provided for you" option with a strong worth proposition at a set price and with a predefined scope.

From an entrepreneur's perspective, a productized service is one that runs methodically, scales geometrically, and continues to produce earnings and grow with or without your continuous care and feeding. That is how you construct resilience into a service business and prosper as your competitors flail.

To be successful in productizing your service, you do not require to offer more services, you simply need to offer better ones.

Strategy 3: Automate Your Client Acquisition

The last method, and the one that increases the effectiveness of both of the previous strategies, is that of client acquisition automation.

In basic, there are 3 unique phases of client acquisition, each of which can usually be enhanced with automation:

Initial Lead Generation
Thorough Lead Qualification
Ongoing Lead Segmentation

By automating each of these 3 phases, you produce a "funnel," where hundreds of thousands (or perhaps millions) of prospective prospects come into the top of the funnel, and as you tactically certify, segment and support those prospects, hot leads come out the bottom, prepared to buy your recurring, productized service( s).

This is the essence of what the marketing world describes as a "sales funnel," and we'll go into more information on each of these phases in the 3rd installment.

This post is intentionally light on tactics and heavy on method, and it's suggested to make you think about what you've been doing up to now.

Throughout the rest of this series, my aim will be to assist you produce resilience by ensuring your business:

Exists in a growing market
Concentrate on repeating revenues
Does not count on loopholes
Automates various human activities
Concentrate on high ticket sales
Provides outcomes quick

Whether you know it or not, resilience is the crucial to durability, scalability, and eventually, the success of your service.

Does your company have a repeating income stream?

Are your services currently productized?

Are you using systems to automate your client acquisition?

Do you have an excellent structure to create resilience in your organization?

Resilience is top of mind for executives today, and it will prove to be an essential dimension for determining success over the next decade. Here are 3 powerful strategies to develop resilience planning into your business to make it through and conquer 2020 and beyond.

I lost my dad, my pet, and a brand-new service within the latter 6 months of the year.

Sarah Bond and Gillian Shapiro of the Harvard Business Review performed a survey of 835 workers from public, private, and not-for-profit companies about what was taking place in their lives that needed resilience. These three characteristics hold true for resistant companies as well ... Resilient individuals and companies face reality with staunchness, make significance of hardship rather of crying out in anguish, and improvise options from thin air.