How to Prepare for the Unknown in Business?
Maggie Chen, CMAP
Founder/CEO, CTL Business Group; Management Consultant; Cert. Mergers Acquisitions; Investment Advisor; LION7000+
Preparing a Financial Plan to Help Businesses Survive the Pandemic
During the pandemic, most consulting cases that we receive are for helping businesses continue. A successful company prepares for multiple outcomes regardless of what is expected. Nothing will ever be quite the same again, so businesses need a future proof financial plan, as well as adapt at lightning speed if they are to survive in the new world.
?Here are 3 of our client cases (Non-Disclosure Agreement):
Susan owns several massage stores in California, USA. During the Coronavirus, the stores have not opened in several months. He wants to sell her business or find investors to invest in her business. The finance stress makes her frustrated.
The second case is Rob who has bubble tea stores in Vancouver, Canada. He had planned to extend his bubble tea business into franchising in 2020 so he rented 5 new stores in Alberta in January 2020. ?Because of the pandemic, he can’t open the stores, but he still needs to pay the rental fees. The problem is he does not have enough cash flow to survive another half year.
The third business case is an Importing/Exporting company in Taiwan. The owner, Wei Ming, has imported medical supplies to the USA & Canada. During the pandemic, temporary trade restrictions and shortages of pharmaceuticals, critical medical supplies, and other products highlighted their weaknesses. Those developments, combined with the U.S.-China trade war, have triggered a rise in economic nationalism. I felt their pressure and helped them through the dark time.
The difference between a stressed and resilient business will be bigger. What should consultants in emerging markets be advising companies to do if they are to weather the coronavirus storm? Although they all have different problems that need to be solved, there have several common areas in the three cases below.
?1. Getting Through a Financial Emergency
In light of the severe economic disruption caused by COVID-19, government is taking immediate, significant, and decisive action to support businesses facing hardship as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak.
CTL Business Group helps our international clients from USA, Canada, and Taiwan to find the right government programs, private lenders or investors to solve business financial emergencies immediately. Here are some programs that each country’s governments support in business below:
?United States:
The American Rescue Plan extends a number of critical tax benefits, particularly the Employee Retention Credit and Paid Leave Credit, to small businesses.
The Emergency Capital Investment Programs?support the efforts of low- and moderate-income community financial institutions.
The Paycheck Protection Program is providing small businesses with the resources they need to maintain their payroll, hire back employees who may have been laid off, and cover applicable overhead.
SSBCI supports state programs that, in turn, use the funds to support private sector loans and investments to small businesses and small manufacturers that are creditworthy but are not able to access the capital they need to expand and create jobs.
The Small Business Lending Fund (SBLF) provided capital to qualified community banks and community development loan funds (CDLFs) to encourage these institutions and Main Street businesses to work together to promote economic growth and create new jobs. Through the SBLF program, Treasury invested over $4.0 billion in 332 institutions, structured to incentivize increased small business lending.?
The CDFI Fund promotes economic revitalization and community development in low-income communities through investment in and assistance to mission-driven lenders known as Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) and other community development organizations. The CDFI Fund accomplishes this goal through the Community Development Financial Institutions Program, the New Markets Tax Credit Program, the CDFI Bond Guarantee Program, the Bank Enterprise Award Program and the Native American CDFI Assistance Program.
The Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization?assists, counsels, and advises small businesses of all types (small businesses, small disadvantaged business, women-owned small businesses, economically disadvantaged women-owned small businesses,?veteran owned small businesses, service disabled veteran owned small businesses, and small businesses located in historically underutilized business zones) on procedures for contracting with Treasury.
?Canada:
?Taiwan:
■Financial aid: An allowance has been established to provide guarantees on up to NT$750 billion (US$26.4 billion) in financing for businesses, medical organizations, educational institutions and workers facing COVID-19 disruptions.
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■Employment assistance: To help employees, subsidies are available to supplement salaries for furloughed or short-time workers and to encourage them to undergo training while on leave.
■ Tax breaks: For hard-hit small proprietorships exempt from revenue reporting, tax authorities are lowering assessed sales and taxes, and full tax exemptions may be granted as appropriate.
■ Industries serving domestic demand: Numerous stimulus measures have been introduced to encourage consumer spending and revitalize businesses that cater to domestic demand.
■ Manufacturing industry: On-demand technical guidance and solutions assistance for companies facing pressing technical bottlenecks are available, while traditional industries and small and medium-sized enterprises can seek subsidies to support innovative research and development.
■ Additional stimulus: The government's promotion of three major investment incentive programs aimed at overseas and domestically based Taiwanese companies has succeeded in attracting over NT$1.1 trillion (US$38.7 billion) to investment projects in Taiwan.
?2. Cash Flow Management Strategies
What do you do when your revenues stop but you still have to pay your suppliers? How do you take advantage of the range of support that governments are offering? How do you interact with the banks? We all agree that “cash control is going to be paramount” for businesses in emerging economies. You need to make sure they have solid and easy-to-tap sources of credit. “If you don’t have a line of credit in a bank, you’ll clearly have difficulties. But if you don’t, is a financial institution able to help?” The banks could also be under stress as well in emerging markets because the global flows are slowing down.
We have following practices and strategies below:
We suggest management teams with concerns about Coronavirus actively evaluate their cash flow requirements, develop appropriate actions under various scenarios, and assess potential risks in and to their customer base and supplier network. All the conversations with clients right now are about cash optimization. Cash flow management needs to be an integral element of a company’s overall Coronavirus risk assessment and action planning in the near term.
?3. Plan Ahead Financially - prepare yourself for any market condition!
Strategies for developing more dynamic, effective planning and forecasting capability
1. Create monthly financial projections by recording your anticipated income based on sales forecasts and anticipated expenses for labour, supplies, overhead, etc.. (Businesses with very tight cash flow may want to make weekly projections.) Now, plug in the costs for the projects you identified in the previous step.
2. Practicing organizations often begin the planning process by setting strategic guidance, translating the guidance to targets, and disseminating those targets to business units. In practice, the critical challenge often comes during that latter stage, when more aspirational goals of leadership come face-to-face with more realistic expectations of performance held with the business.
3. Use your financial projections to determine your financing needs. Approach your financial partners ahead of time to discuss your options. Well-prepared projections will help reassure bankers that your financial management is solid.
4. Using multiple modeling approaches across statistical, driver-based, optimization, and trigger-based contingency models can help an organization be prepared to understand and project impacts across multiple levels of performance outcomes.
5. Review your financial plan for a year, compare actual results with your projections to see if you’re on target or need to adjust. Monitoring helps you spot financial problems before they get out of hand.
6. To successfully deliver, business should challenge the existing mechanisms by which they are executing their planning and forecasting processes and developing associated scenarios. Targeted efforts using these short- and long-term strategies can bolster planning capabilities across times of crisis.
About the Author
Maggie Chen, Certified Mergers & Acquisitions; Investment Advisor; Founder/CEO at CTL Business Group – Canada, USA & Asia
Email: [email protected]
Buying/Selling Business; Mergers & Acquisitions; Business Valuations; Business Consultations; Corporate Finance; Investment; Business Training
Telephone: 1-800-301-6817; 403-9982436; 626-817-6528; 02-2656-3418
CTL Business Group:
Canada: www.ctlinternational.ca
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