Improve your way out of a tough spot!

Things for most businesses out there are certainly tough.? I speak to people from all sectors and all sizes of companies, and the common theme is that business lately is just harder.? I am sure we all have our own thoughts and theories of why things are the way they are but for this post, let's just agree things are tough.

Given that I work in the operations space, when I am talking to leadership teams, one solution that always seems to be at the top of the list of solutions, contain or reduce costs.? Now reducing or delaying costs is certainly an option when you want to improve your business and not a bad idea.? My only warning would be, is this delay in spending/investment cutting off opportunities for growth that will cost more later to achieve?? Let’s put cost-cutting aside for a minute.

The other way you can improve the outlook for the business is to improve your way out of a tough spot.

What I prefer to talk to leaders and my teams about is, whether there are areas that we could improve that would help our cash flow and our situation in the market at the same time.? These improvements often have both short and long-term benefits to the business. Let’s take a look at three areas I would suggest might be helpful:

·????? Improve the top line by finding new business from old ‘dead’ opportunities.? I often find when things are going well, sales teams often over-focus on new leads and ignore opportunities that were slow to close or stalled.? We all know that timing in sales is critical.? That dreaded phrase ‘we love the idea but now is not a good time’ is gut-wrenching but many times is true.? Budgets get frozen, the internal stakeholders are not aligned, there is not a burning need for the solution etc. I don't know how many times I have gone back through my opportunities and just dropped a simple message to see how things are going and got a response to the effect, “Oh yes, now is a good time to reconnect’ (as if it was just yesterday we spoke!).? This is even more relevant if you are trying to sell into a corporate account where decisions are made in quarters and sometimes fiscal years.

·????? House clean duplicate or redundant processes.? Again, when things are going well companies can afford to have a few processes, reports, roles etc. that are not completely aligned and mutually exclusive.? I remember a meeting years ago when I was a financial analyst at HP.? We had a half-day workshop with all the reporting teams from the product lines, the group, and the WW team. We were all asked to bring a copy of all the reports that we were producing as part of the month-end close. Amazingly there were at least 30% of the reports that we killed that day as the people that we were producing these for were not using them for various reasons.? We literarily cut our month-end close process by 30% in 4 hours!? This change allowed us to focus on other, more value-added, analyses for the business versus creating things that nobody used.

·????? Kill off orphaned SaaS products.? The amazing thing about the SaaS revolution is that firms can build an entire company in the cloud. While this is massive cost savings from the old, on-premises, systems there is another daemon that catches people out. These extra costs come from subscriptions that are not cancelled properly, users not removed, software only used by a few people because ‘they like it’ and so on.? Now is exactly the time to clean this up!? I am a firm believer in turning things off and seeing what breaks (please do a backup ?) to speed this process up.? You will be amazed how quiet it will be given that most people totally forget what tools they are paying for/using. When you are done with the clean-up, be sure to put in some controls to make sure this does not just come back in 6 months.

There are certainly other well-documented areas for improvement and transformation available to help you improve the business. All I ask is that you think about improvements first before reaching for the quick fix cost cutting.? The cycle of cuts and spending makes the business behave in a certain way and often drives business leaders crazy as their planning horizons get destroyed.