© 2006-2010. Sigrid Caroline Schroder. All rights reserved.
REVIVAL
ALL IS NOT LOST: SURVIVING THE TEMPEST
Even "Love's Labours Lost" had a sequel - but the manuscript was lost.
What Is Next?
You do not necessarily have to write your sequel. But you are going to have to be diligent, flexible, realistic, and ready to stay the course. Do in turnaround even as you did when times were good:
Add New Value:
You cannot, of course, be everything to everyone, but you may be able to offer something new to the right one.
Secure Existing Value:
Faced with crisis, businesses often give in to slump focusing inward on blame, fear and what they personally want. ©Clarence Alford.Fotolia
They squabble, they delay, they let conditions go. They deepen the slump and the sink towards insolvency. Pinch back.
Pull back. But keep up the right appearances. Sacrifice your own gratification and compensation to free up cash, maintain the physical assets, and keep up morale. You know what happens to real property. Understand what happens to your intellectual property as you, or your constituencies, meet the tempest.
Lay Your Groundwork > Pass Go > Make The Hard Choices
Downturns are a vortex. I can help you get through it.
Your model may have to change forever to adapt to the changing world and grasp the opportunity of the future. After all the flush years, few business teams understand retrenchment. Particularly for those businesses which are collateral damage in this environment, teams have a hard time shifting from denial to corrective action. While they are still saying, "We did everything right," their market, their assets, and their business have been going to pot around them.
Plan ahead, daily, weekly, monthly. Anticipate what may, or may not, happen next. Be straightforward with your stakeholders--and yourselves. Do not rely on unnatural expectations. Do not overpromise only to disappoint or shock. Do not delay news. Do not wall yourselves off in silence only to go cup in hand to your sponsor, lender, partner, or vendor at the 11th hour when it is too late. However, do not overpaint disaster so that no one feels the need to pay you--or feels too little comfort to buy from you--thinking that you will not be there another week or another month. Accept the vortex of unexpected events, surprise contingencies, changing conditions, and short term zig zags, but try to anticipate what you can and flow chart out alternative actions and reactions. Look ahead to fend off the alternate worst case scenarios. Do not use cut backs as a crutch to eliminate real thinking. Delayering creates expenses, destroys morale and cripples your delivery of what it is you do. Cutting what it is you do makes the decline accelerate and you can hit the point of no return very fast. Customers still need to find what they want to buy from you or they will indeed go somewhere else. Get to the whys and wherefores of conditions. If you offered more, you might be prioritized higher for payment. Look now to those financial irregularities. They won't just go away. You had better know what they mean and solve them or your creditors and the trustee surely will, and you could be looking at a different set of claims and charges.
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Strategic Alliances: Now's The Time
When everything falls apart in the market, it can be time to take, buy or create market share. What if you lack the capital or see the opportunity in an unfamiliar sector or an unattainable region? You know exactly what you would do and could map it out with fast work, but do you lack the capability to see it through? In alliance with another business or another entity, whose values you share, you can build new production, new distribution, and the relationships which can grow your markets long after the downturn and the return to economic stability and growth. you nurture can be levered exponentially. With business focused internally on what is happening for them day to day and quarter to quarter, it can be difficult for you to spot these synergies yourself. I can broaden your radar. I can bridge the gap and spot the synergies on the outside. Don't work bare when you could capitalize on a strategic alliance.
Image © Eric Peduzzi.Fotolia
When Push Comes To Shove: Strategize Your IP
Now is not the time to lose hold of your IP, but you may have to fight for it, depending on what side of the turnaround you are and whether you are protagonist or just another actor. Monitor your position and stake your every claim. Yet, if it comes to a matter of survival or sharing your IP, you may have to share ownership to get on to the future. While it is crucial to prepare to compromise, so too must you not walk away on either the assumption that all is lost or the presumption that your interest is safe.
Image © Damien Bert.Fotolia
Just because performance has slid down the slope, do not assume that ethics no longer matter and that you, or someone else, can do what is needed to survive. Fraud take various forms, and you can lose what you think you have gained, whether it is your business descending or someone else's. You still have to see the forest for the trees. It is easy to lose track of which values fit in as you fight others for survival, but strategize too closely and you lose.in. When it all gets too convoluted, let's talk. 
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Sigrid Caroline Schroder
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