Nic’s blog
I write about building businesses, failing and building a life, not a legacy.
Zev Siegl, Starbucks Co-Founder - Ep 07 of the Curious Cult Show
Zev Siegl
Zev Siegl is obsessed with small businesses around the world. He spends his days travelling and consulting to startups to help them thrive and survive. Aside from this obsession, Zev Co-Founded one of the worlds most known brands, Starbucks.
In this episode, I talk with Zev about Starbucks, how they came to the name and if they knew that they were creating a world-conquering brand as they were building it.
We also discuss Zev’s definition of innovation as insightful, adaptive reuse of a collection of ideas and thoughts combined in a new way to solve interesting problems.
Greg Smithies - Ep 06 of the Curious Cult Show
Greg Smithies and I have a long-standing online friendship. He’s called me out on LinkedIn in when I talk shit. He’s helped me meet investors when trying to raise funding and we’ve had some very interesting debates and conversations over the years.
Greg is a talented venture capitalist, CFO and startup-spotter. He has worked with Elon Musk at The Boring Co and has invested in some of the most innovative businesses in the world.
At present Greg is looking for trillion dollar businesses to invest in. That’s a business with the entire world as an addressable market.
In this episode I talk with Greg about growing up in South Africa and taking his skills to a global market. How one finds a trillion dollar business and how, exactly, he manages to stay in front of his curiosity. SPOLIER: He believes in a bit of balance and prefers founders who can actually live a relatively normal life.
The Best Way to Sell Is to Tell a Great Story
A question I get asked a lot has to do with selling. People who are starting their own side hustle or business ofter aren’t comfortable selling. In the minds of most people selling is a hard, forceful act that involves being brave enough to sit in front of a complete stranger and sell them a product or service by talking about the product features, price and then closing the sale. That’s not how I sell. That’s not how I’ve ever sold anything because I don’t have the guts to do cold sales.
I am not a salesperson. I am a person who likes to solve problems and that’s where the story starts.
If you have a side hustle and you’re wondering how to sell your product or service without irritating your friends, family and the fools around you (what I call the “3 F’s”) then you need to get your story straight. Literally, you need to work on your story.
Selling is a form of storytelling.
You probably sit on Facebook all day telling small stories. Moaning about something or someone. Talking about your children and their experience at school (pre-lockdown) or some other tiny little gem you feel the world of Facebook needs to know.
Let’s translate that storytelling skill into a sale.
Here’s the basic structure of any good story sell:
Present your problem statement
Love your product or service (people can tell when you do)
Truly believe in your solution (people can tell when you don’t)
Talk about your solution
If you’re struggling to sell, just tell a story about the problem and why you believe in your solution so much.
That’s really what I have been doing for the last 19 years in each business I’ve ever built. I find a problem that I want to solve, I tell the world why the problem needs to be solved, I solve the problem and then I tell the world about the solution.
Many years back I realised that there was massive interest from Western businesses to work on the African continent. The key markets were Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa. The problem was none of the Western businesses wanted to send their staff to work in the continent without having any experience. The solution was to use an intermediary, my company called Forefront Africa, to engage in an initial tour of the city and introduce the business representative to the local market.
The story was simple:
Problem statement: You don’t know Nigeria (Kenya/Ghana/South Africa) but want to do business there.
I love travelling on the continent and doing business in Africa.
I believe I am best positioned to take your businesses into key markets through my network and experience.
Solution: Talk through the incredible countries, businesses and people that Forefront Africa can introduce to the company.
If you can't break your sale into these four simple steps then you don't have your story right and won’t be able to sell anyways.
The middle two steps seem like the most obvious but are often the ones that trip most people up.
If you do not love and believe in your solution then your story is going to lack the enthusiasm and authenticity required to make this method of selling really work. You can’t fake authenticity, people can tell. If they don’t notice upfront they will notice as soon as they scratch below the surface and realise how little you care for the problem and the solution.
So if you’re struggling to start selling your side hustle just use the template above and work on your problem statement, your belief in your product and the solution you present.
Happy Side Hustlin’!
Husayn Kassai - Onfido CEO Ep. 05 of the Curious Cult Show Podcast
Episode 5 of The Curious Cult show features an incredible founder and business person, Husayn Kassai.
Husayn is the co-founder and CEO of Onfido.
We discuss lifelong learning, hiring for curiosity and much more.
Onfido helps businesses digitally onboard users by verifying any government ID and comparing it with the person’s facial biometrics. Founded in 2012, Onfido has grown to a team of 350 across SF, NYC and London; received over $100m in funding from Salesforce, Microsoft and others; and works with over 1,500 fintech, banking and marketplace clients globally.
Husayn is a WEF Tech Pioneer; a Forbes Contributor; and Forbes' “30 Under 30”. He has a BA in Economics and Management from Keble College, Oxford.
Geraldine DeRuiter - Ep 04 of the Curious Cult Show Podcast
In this fantastic episode of The Curious Cult Show I talk to the inspiring author, Geraldine DeRuiter about her new novel, what it takes to research a book and where this kind of interesting research can take you.
We also discuss her badass parents and how they influence the life she lives now.
Evaluate What Matters And Move Towards Those Things - A Conversation With John Sanei
I recently hosted author, entrepreneur, futurist and all-round thinker, John Sanei on my Live Stream platform. It’s always a fun conversation that challenges my preconceived ideas when I talk to John.
Here’s the video in full:
Your Career is No Longer Safe
I have never managed to keep a job for longer than 18 months at a large corporate. I’m unemployable in those environments. But many, many people believe that they are safe, secure and indispensable at their large corporate job.
I have never managed to keep a job for longer than 18 months at a large corporate. I’m unemployable in those environments. But many, many people believe that they are safe, secure and indispensable at their large corporate job.
The global pandemic has rocked these careers and shaken our perspective of what’s safe and secure.
In the video below I discuss why your career is no longer safe and how you can start to make yourself an asset in the new world order.
Rand Fishkin - Ep 03 of the Curious Cult Show
In this week’s episode of The Curious Cult Show, I talk with my friend and founder of Sparktoro and Moz, Rand Fishkin.
Aside from being one of the nicest guys in tech, Rand is an accomplished founder, acclaimed author and an adoring husband.
In this episode, I talk about Rand’s love of risotto, his interesting fascination with frogs as a teenager, how he chooses which curiosity to follow and which to ignore as well as much more.
Hit play, subscribe, share, leave a review and send me your feedback!
What You Do vs What You CAN Do
When we become good at something we start to define ourselves by our ability to do that thing well. This becomes an entrenched belief and a self-identifier. I am a mechanic. I am a sales person. I am a teacher. These are things that we do.
But what happens when we can’t do these things? Do we redefine ourselves? Do we identify in another way? Or do we simply stop?
I am seeing a lot of people who have been stopped in their tracks under quarantine and/or lockdown. They are crippled by an inability to do the thing that makes them feel like they exist. They have been prevented from earning an income and it’s breaking them and their spirits as well as their bank balances.
In this scenario it is not “I think, therefore I am” it has become, “I Ido, therefore I am”. And when you can’t do the thing you do, you’re stuck.
It’s time to become unstuck.
We need to start preparing for what we can do, not what we have done.
In your business you have skills and a team and a preconceived idea of what you do. But what can you do right now? If you have a businesses filled with a skillset that was used in a specific way, can that skillset be repurposed? Can your team be retooled to do something else in the short term? Can you earn new income in a different way using the same people in new and interesting ways? I bet you can. It’s possible that you can’t, sure, but have you tried a new way of doing?
In your personal life, have you always thought of yourself as an organised person? Can you generate income from that? Are interested in public speaking? Do you have a knack for drawing or design? Do you learn languages really quickly? How do you take what you do every day and turn it into something that you can do to make money in the short or long term?
This is the way I am trying to see the world now. An entire space and time to redefine the skills I have and turn them into something that I can do in the world going forward.
How Do You Overcome Fear of Failure?
Lots of people are afraid of failing.
It’s just about the number 1 reason people don’t start that thing they’ve always wanted to start. It’s the reason you don’t tell that guy you’ve loved since high school that you love him. It’s the reason you don’t pitch a great idea to your boss, the reason you don’ speak up when you have something to contribute and the reason you seek comfort instead of discomfort.
Humans are scared of failing.
I don’t particularly understand this experience of life. Living with a fear of failure is akin to living with a fear of breathing for me. Failure is not something that I see as a negative and this is a key framing that helps me move on when something doesn’t work.
I recently launched a podcast called The Curious Cult Show. In it, I interview incredible and accomplished people about their curiosity. One of the questions that I ask every guest is how they cope with failure as an integral part of curiosity and innovative invention. Almost everyone so far (The Founders of EA Sports, Moz, Starbucks, Prometheus Fuel and more) have stated that they don’t really see mistakes as failures. They see mistakes or “Failings” as learning experiences. I love this perspective and it shines through when you speak to people who push the boundaries of normalcy.
The most accomplished, brave and incredible people I know don’t see failure in the same way as most people. Failing is merely the next step in learning.
Here are some of the ways that I deal with what would traditionally be thought of as failure:
Do not peg your Self worth to your work
I am not my work. If my work implodes, my company goes under, I suffer a professional setback or something goes awry it is not an indictment on my personal worth. It’s just the next step in the process of my work.
When your self worth is pegged to the work that you do, you are destined to feel like a failure. You will strive for success and only success and you will do anything to avoid making mistakes so that you don’t appear to have failed.
You do not want to bruise your own self worth. Now we’re talking about ego…
Your ego is the problem
When you do make a catastrophic mistake it will reflect upon your ability to the outside world. People will second guess your choices and they’ll make you feel like crap if you let them. That’s on them, not on you.
You let these things damage your ego because (see point 1 above) you define your self worth by your work. If you do his, your ego will be damaged when your work suffers a setback.
It’s imperative that you understand that making mistakes is part of the process. A life lived without failure is a life lived in caution, without risk and without giant leaps of progress.
Reframe failure
Failure is no an end-point. Failure is a through-point. Mistakes are simply the next step in the direction towards success.
We think of failure as the opposite of success, it’s not. The opposite of success is not trying.
Think Long Term
When you think short term, everything can seem like a failure. If you set your goals in longer batches of time the day to day mistakes and lessons seem more relevant as learnings.
If you think today matters more than any other day you’re placing too much importance on a single move. Success is the culmination of a collection of moves, corrections, lessons and mistakes. It’s not one big move, it’s not one big exit, it’s not one of anything. It’s lots of little things that accumulate over many years of consistent hard work.
Set your sites on where you want to be in 5, 10, 20 years and then start making moves in that direction.
No one cares about your failure or success
Here’s my favourite one of all: No one cares about you and your failures or successes. Everyone is preoccupied with their own versions of success and failure.
If someone points out your failures or berates your success that’s on them. That’s not a reflection of you or anything you’ve done.
Insecure people knock down other people. Ignore those people because they don’t care about you, not personally, not professionally, not in any way. They’re only commenting on you to make themselves feel better. Don’t buy into that narrative.
You can’t control other people. You can control your strategy. You can control your next move and you can control how you react when you take one step backwards.
Mmusi Maimane on The Curious Cult Podcast, Ep 02
Curiosity comes from many different places, especially so for South African politician, activist and theologian, Mmusi Maimane. Mmusi and I discuss how he engages his own curiosity, how he keeps his curious as they develop and where his curiosity stems from.
This fantastic episode is now live, listen above!
Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast, rate, review and share share share!
Starting a Side Hustle - eNCA TV Feature
Last week I was fortunate to be featured on eNCA live talking about my new book: How to Start a Side Hustle.
The book takes my 20 years of experience and distills lessons I’ve learned into a brilliantly useful guide to starting your own side hustle.
If you’re looking to start generating extra income, this is the book for you.
Don't Write off Offices Just yet - the World Isn’t Going to Change as Quickly as You Think.
There seem to be two camps in Quarantino (that’s what I’m calling the world we’re in right now); Those who think everything will change once lockdowns and quarantines are over and those who don’t know what’s going to happen.
I find it odd that no one believes things are going to go back to the way they were.
I don’t think thing are going to change as much as we might think once we’re allowed back into the world.
Before the whole world moves to remote work and burns their offices down, we need to get rid of the boss who likes to see human (not pixel) bums in seats before giving out bonuses.
Before we see citizen journalism overrun traditional media we will need to meet humans who care enough about the truth to fact check their bias.
Before we see real-world sporting events replaced by esports we will need to see the hundreds of millions of fans who attended physical games buy into the concept of pixels kicking balls and racing fake cars becoming more enticing than blood, sweat and actual tears.
Before we see colleges disintegrate in the face of MOOCs we’ll have to break down the highly regarded (yet mostly irrelevant) institutions that so many young people are conditioned to believe will give them a leg up and a better future.
Before handshakes and hugs are replaced with head nods and winks we will need to break down centuries-old habits of human connection and interaction.
The past is not left behind in an instant. The future is not created in a single epidemic.
We all wish it were that simple but it isn’t. Humans like what they like and those things don’t change overnight. We like going to bars. We like casual sex after meeting at a dirty nightclub. We like handshakes and hugs. We like meeting in person (and there’s value in it too). We like offices and we like getting away from our homes. This lockdown life isn’t for everyone. Let’s not mistake what’s big right now in our lives for what we think the entire working world wants.
Just because you want things to be different tomorrow doesn’t make it so.
We are going to go back to the normal we know before we redefine normal of our future.
The Curious Cult Show - Episode 1: Trip Hawkins, Electronic Arts Founder
I have been playing video games since I can remember. I owned Pong. I owned the earliest Nintendo. I played Sonic the Hedgehog and just like hundreds of millions of other people I have spent many, many hours playing games produced by Electronic Arts.
Fortunately, I have been lucky enough to talk with Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts for the very first episode of my newest podcast, The Curious Cult Show.
In this show I talk to interesting people about their obsessive curiosities.
Trip was kind enough to talk to me about his obsession with Dungeons and Dragons and how it led him down the path of creating a business plan at the age of 12 to build out what would become Electronic Arts.
Here’s the podcast:
Trip Hawkins, Electron Arts founder.
IT’S ALIVE! The Curious Cult Show Podcast Launches
For a long time, I have enjoyed talking to smart people about interesting things. My background, aside from building businesses, is actually journalism and I love interviewing people to extract their genius for others to hear.
This year I decided that I was going to start writing my next book. The topic of the book is curiosity and more specifically how curiosity leads to innovation in the workplace.
So I set out to interview some of the most interesting people I could find.
I’m really excited about The Curious Cult Podcast. Each episode features a person that I wanted to speak to and each episode also serves as research for the book which is coming out in February 2021.
In the first episode, I talk to the founder of Electronic Arts, Trip Hawkins about his curiosity and how it led the creation of one of the largest gaming empires in the world.
Head over to my podcast page and subscribe using your favourite platform.
The show is available on all the major platforms and I’ll be launching a new episode every week for the foreseeable future.
A shameless punt: if you listen to and like the episodes that are available, please leave a rating and review on iTunes, Spotify or anywhere else you can!
Win a Copy of "How to Start a Side Hustle" - Competition Ended 17 April 2020.
And the winners are…
Thanks to everyone who entered the competition to win a copy of How to Start a Side Hustle.
The competition just ended and the winners are:
Monica Mthabela
Viana van den Heever
Jason Brown
Darren De Lange
Refioe Peete
You will all receive an email and your free copy!
I’m really excited to launch this competition! I published my latest book, How to Start a Side Hustle last week and this week, I am giving away FIVE copies of the book.
Enter below using your email address.
Follow me on Twitter to gain two more entries.
Share this with your friends as far and wide as you can to gain even more entries!
Winner will be announced on April 10th!
Communication Is Finally Front and Center for Leaders
Open and transparent communication. Easy to write down, easy to talk about but extremely difficult to actually do. Great communication (internal and external) is something that most business claim to have, many wish they had and deep down, most want to have. For whatever reason, however, communication is very rarely a skill that businesses work on consistently and set out to improve. It’s only when communication is horrific that someone will think to step in and attempt to improve.
Communication comes easily to some people while others struggle to verbalise their frustrations or compliments. Leaders don’t realise that their ability to communicate effectively can make or break a business. Whether you are engaging with your team as a whole and telling a clear story to motivate them or talking one on one with a specific person, the way you communicate matters.
One of the surprising upsides of this global pandemic has been a rush to communicate.
I am watching people who hate video chat dive into Zoom calls. I’m seeing people who are shy of social media reach out and post how they feel without a second thought. This new global enemy is giving us the permission to finally communicate effectively and I hope it’s a trend that becomes the norm.
How a leader communicates in times of strife is a clear indication of their ability to lead and their chosen priorities. Leaders who are prone to micromanaging will double down and make their teams insane. Leaders who are clear, empathetic and concise will thrive and really take centre stage.
Right now I believe it’s extremely important for over-communication to become the norm. If you used to check in with your teams once a week then it’s time to start checking in three times a week. Your quarterly financial reviews need to become weekly financial reviews and your annual supplier call best become more frequent or those relationships will start to break down very quickly. Over-communication does not mean micro-manage, there’s a difference so let’s dive into some ways that you can and should be communicating better with your everyone involved in your business.
Talk to Your Team
The Radical Candor motto.
For years I have been practising something called Radical Candor with my teams. The premise is simple; challenge directly but care personally. In other words, address the issue and not the person. You don’t have to call John dumb. He’s not dumb, he just did something silly. Address the thing he did and care about John and his ability to improve.
The key to great communication with your team is that it’s a two-way street. Your team is filled with the people you should trust to build your business and make your vision a reality. They are the ones who speak with your customers, build your products and sell them with all their might. If you have hired the right people then you should be able to practice Radical Candor with ease.
As a leader, you also need to be able to take on criticism and listen to feedback without taking offence.
Now that everyone is forced to work remotely, open and clear communication is even more important and if you don’t know how to take on criticism and you don’t believe that the people you work with want the best for you then you’ve lost the war before stepping into battle.
Tools like Slack, Skype and others are great but they are just the tools. It’s how you use them that is key. If you are asking your remote team to check-in, check out, alert you when they’re taking a toilet break or when they are going to have lunch then you are not trusting them to be the best version of themselves. You’re just remotely babysitting them and micro-managing them.
It’s imperative to have clear goals for the day, week and month that everyone is on board with and understands. Then you must be measuring your team’s performance, not their attendance. It’s impossible to measure their attendance remotely so err on the side of trust.
If you can’t trust your team then you have the wrong team or, alternatively, your team doesn’t trust you and you are the wrong leader for your team.
Another useful tool to set up appropriate communication is to create a “How You Work With Me” document. I always have my “How you work with Nic” document at the ready to share with new team members. This document helps my team understand my expectations around comms and gives them the opportunity to shine. I also always ask them to put their own version of the document together so I know how I should be working with them as efficiently as possible.
Talk to Your Suppliers / Creditors
Your knee-jerk reaction right now might be to go silent on your suppliers and creditors. That’s the wrong move. We are all going through this crisis together and your suppliers are scrambling to survive just as you are. If you engage with them directly it’s more likely that they will be on your side and try to work things out with you rather than against you.
This implies that you have a good pre-existing relationship with your suppliers and/or creditors.
Everyone wants to make it out of this insanity with their businesses intact. That is an unlikely outcome if you shut yourself off to the help that could be out there.
Often our reaction to a crisis is to hide and hunker down in silence trying to shy away from responsibilities until the very last minute, that’s not going to work this time. When the lockdown ends and you haven’t paid your suppliers they’re either going to hold this against you when business opens up or they will have gone under and you’ll have no one to do business with.
Get on the phone, set up a video call or just drop them a message but communicate more often than less often until we all know what the next move may be.
Talk to Your Customers
If you have built a relationship with your customers then they are expecting to hear from. I’ll say it again: We’re all in this together, on a global scale. Consumers, suppliers, brands, businesses, freelancers, the government, NGOs, NPOs, all of us are in this crazy pandemic together. Your customers want to know if you’ll be around when they get out of their homes.
You may not know if you’ll be around and that’s OK. Tell them that. Reach out to them one by one if you have to and ask them for ideas, see how they’re doing and just be present.
I visit the same restaurant around the corner from my flat at least once a week. I love that place and I’ll be very sad if it doesn’t survive this mess but I have no way to reach out to them, they’re famous for not playing by traditional rules of customer engagement and that’s why I love their brand but that is making it difficult for me to support them right now.
I want to hear from the brands and businesses that I love and trust. I want to support you and I want you to make it out OK in the end.
Send me an email, give me a phone call if you have my number, I’m OK with that in these extraordinary times. Give me the ability to opt-out if I want to but for the time being, hit me up. Again, over-communicate don’t ignore that this experience is happening to us all.
Let’s recap:
Talk to your team
Trust the people you work with
Communicate with the people you trust
Practice Radical Candor (Challenge directly and care personally)
Set clear goals for the day/week/month
Measure people by their performance not their attendance.
Over-communicate rather than under-communicate
Talk to your suppliers/creditors
Do not hide from your responsibilities, they aren’t going away
Try to find a fair solution for everyone
We’re all suffering together so let’s all engage and find a middle ground
Over-communicate rather than under-communicate
Talk to your customers
If you’ve been good to your customers over the years, they’ll want to be good to you
Don’t beg but tell your customers how they can support you
There is a person behind the brand/business, be that person and talk to your customer
Over-communicate rather than under-communicate
If you have other tips for great communication in this new world, add them in the comments on this post!
Celebrate Your Victories Like A Football Team Celebrates A Goal
Photo by Jeffrey F Lin on Unsplash
There are two very specific things that football teams set out to achieve in a football match:
Score as many goals as possible
Do not let the other team score any goals
This is literally the point in every football match. Yet in every football match that I’ve ever had to sit through, I have witnessed the manager and players go absolutely apeshit when they score a goal. Any goal. Not only the great goals. Literally, any time they get the little white ball to cross the little white line into the back of the net, they go nuts.
These people celebrate as if they are playing the first football match in the history of football and their team has just scored the first-ever goal in the history of the sport. It is something to behold. Football celebrations became so intense that there are now rules about how players can celebrate and players can actually receive a yellow card for celebrating too much. FIFA Law 12 penalizes excessive, time-wasting, and choreographed goal celebrations. Incredible!
While at the gym this morning I caught a glimpse of a very average football match being shown on the screens that are plastered all over the place. The skills on display were average, the players were average, the entire experience was average. Even the fans knew it was all pretty average. But then someone scored a (pretty average) goal and everyone lost their minds. The goalkeeper, the manager, the coaching staff, the players, everyone just lost it, running onto the field, then to the corner flag, then back to the team seating area where the reserve players were sitting. It was the best performance of the game thus far.
As I continued to do my thing on the elliptical machine I found myself berating the team for celebrating so hard. I was actually irritated that they were celebrating when they were clearly a sub-par team.
Then it hit me: We don’t celebrate enough as entrepreneurs and startup founders. We should all celebrate like a football team when they score a goal.
We should be celebrating the small things more consistently. These players are galvanized in their fight to score a goal and prevent the other team from scoring. So when they do actually score a goal, they should celebrate their achievement, no matter how good or bad the goal was. They achieved the one thing they need to do to win the game.
Watching the team that conceded the goal was interesting too. As the celebrations took place, they look dejected and defeated. The celebrations reinforce the goal and the leverage that had been gained. Mentally, one team had the upper hand and the other team needed to fight back to just break even.
Celebrations matter. Ambitious startup founders often only want to celebrate the massive achievements; The billion-dollar exit, the huge fundraising, the insanely profitable annual performance. We should be celebrating when we sign a new client, a new team member joins, a new revenue milestone is reached or a new feature or product goes live.
There is, of course, a limit to how much you should celebrate. For example, I don’t believe that every child should receive a participation trophy at the end of a football match. That’s just crazy, it’s not an achievement to participate, it’s life.
When I sold my first company I didn’t celebrate at all. I was young, the exit was difficult and there was some conflict in the team. When I received the sale agreement, I hunched over my coffee table and signed the agreement, tossed it across the table and lay back on the couch and watched TV. That was it and I regret that moment immensely.
Your team thrives on success and despises failure as much as you do. So when there is something real to celebrate just take a few minutes and celebrate like you all just scored the first goal in the history of football.
The Three Questions Every Business Owner Needs to Answer Right Now
Photo by Jason Wong on Unsplash
There is a lot of panic out in the world right now and rightly so. It’s a new world. It’s a strange and uncomfortable world. It’s a world that no business owners could have prepared for but all of us wish we had.
Now that this world is upon us it’s time to jump to action and begin planning for the next 12 months of your businesses and lives. Whether you want to admit it or not it’s a bad time to be a small business in almost every industry or vertical. People are holding on to their cash and waiting to see what happens in the world.
One thing is for certain, we will emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic. To make it through to the other side, I believe that businesses of all sizes need to be thinking solely on the following three things:
How deep is the damage to your business?
How long will the bleeding last?
What does the recovery curve look like?
This seems simpler than it is for most businesses.
Let’s work through these three questions slowly and clearly.
How Deep is the Damage To Your Business?
Is your business or business model dead?
Have you lost 30%, 60% or 90% of your revenue and customers?
Can you operate at all for the next 6 weeks, 3 months, 6 months?
Will your staff stay if you pay them half salaries for a few months?
Can you start again in 2 months if your staff don’t stay with you?
Will your debtors give you a break on what you owe them and if so, for how long?
Will your landlords give you a break on your rent for a while?
Right now, every business owner and entrepreneur should be doing triage on their businesses. If you’re not, it’s time to get serious and get started. Even if your business is booming in this crisis you should still be thinking about what the world and your business will look like over the next 12 months.
The above questions are just the high-level, light touch questions to get you thinking. What you really need to be doing right now is assessing every expense, every income source, every employee, their skillsets and making copious notes on each item to allow you to make informed decisions in the coming two phases of your planning.
This is how you assess the damage and begin to retool your business for the new world. It’s unlikely that you can expect your team to continue to do the same jobs for the next few weeks or months. If they’re great people then you need to start to find them new things to do in your new business.
Once you have the information you need you can then start to think about how long the bleeding will last. But if you can’t find the wounds then you can’t stop the bleeding so dig deep and map it all out. Every inch of your business needs to be carefully analysed. Leave no stone unturned and no spreadsheet empty.
How Long Will the Bleeding Last?
This point in the process requires you to step back and take a macro view of your business and the world.
Is your industry under fire or is it going to kick back into action as soon as the lockdown ends and COVID-19 is under control? Is it going to kick back in immediately or over a period of weeks, months or years? Be honest and ask colleagues or even competitors for their views.
If the bleeding is going to last longer than your cash on hand can maintain then you have a serious problem and some tough decisions to make urgently.
I don’t think that the lockdown is going to be over in a matter of weeks, we’re looking at many months (if not many years) before anything begins to approach normalcy again on a global scale. India has put 1.3bn people on lockdown. No country recovers from this level of action in weeks.
It’s imperative that you form realistic scenarios that you can plan for. Hope for the best, plan for the worst. The next step requires you to start laying out the different scenarios you’re facing.
What Does the Recovery Curve Look Like?
If you think that your business is going to start back up at 100% when the lockdown ends then you are sorely mistaken.
Your business is under siege, the global economy is under pressure like our generation has never seen and it’s going to take time to rebuild.
The Recovery Curve is a way for you to estimate how dramatically your business can recover in the months after economies open back up. Is it a sharp curve from 20% back up to 100% in a matter of days? If so, you’re lucky. Unfortunately, it’s more likely a slow curve fraught with sharp rises and steep cliffs over a two year period. Yes, I’m serious, the global pandemic has more than likely taken your business back two years. Get your mind around this and start planning on ways to change the curve or patiently brace for the long Winter ahead.
Be honest and think about when the lockdown ends, can your business can operate at full speed immediately? What do you think your revenue will be in month one post-COVID? 50% of normal? 40%? 20%?
Plan out three scenarios; The best, the likely and the worst scenarios.
The Best Scenario
If you look at the world with optimistic eyes and all of your plans and preparations work out perfectly, what does your revenue look like in 6 months? Will you be up to 60% of where you were pre-COVID? Then, two months post-COVID are you up another 10% to 70%?
Now that you’re at 70% of your pre-COVID revenue, what does your team look like and how do you plan to bring them back on board? Will they come back? Will they feel safe and trust you?
The Likely Scenario
You have made plans, you are cautiously optimistic but you are still planning for difficult times and very slow growth back to normalcy. You’ll likely have to lay off half of your staff and cut the size of your business by at least half over the next short while. Your suppliers will suffer but you’ll survive and grow new revenue streams once you have made it through the worst times.
Do not be overly optimistic with the likely scenario. Try to pull in people who know your business and industry for some perspective here.
The Worst Scenario
This is the easiest scenario to conceptualise because humans can easily rush to the worst case. The worst-case scenario looks something like this:
The COVID-19 pandemic takes at least 12 months for humanity to contain. In this time your business is unable to operate, the world is in and out of lockdown constantly and your team struggles to make ends meet. The government subsidies are slow to move and only delay the inevitable.
How do you begin to retool your business and your team today? What do you do change the perspective of the world about your business? What will it take to either shut it all down or pivot what you have? Which is more intense, brutal and harsh on you and your team?
This might be the easiest scenario to imagine but is definitely the most intensely difficult to execute on. Lives will be impacted across the board. Suppliers will shut down, staff will lose their homes and you will lose sleep, hair, money and time that you will never get back. It’s tough out there but it could just be your Phoenix moment.
One of the ten Nicisms that I live by is: Sometimes you have to burn it all down and start again.
Once you have your scenario planning complete you need to communicate these scenarios to your team, your customers and your suppliers. Let them know what you are thinking and how you are planning.
By involving your team you give them a sense of ownership over the outcome and you help them plan their own lives accordingly. Bringing your suppliers in shows them a level of respect and trust that most businesses don’t offer in times of distress. They’ll thank you and if they don’t, keep in mind that they are fighting for their own survival, so give them a break.
Nothing about this is meant to be fun. Nothing about this is going to be easy. However, this is the new world that we find ourselves in and unfortunately there is a lot of waiting that needs to be done. There are decisions that will be made in the next three weeks that you have no control over and will directly impact your next move.
Plan out your scenarios and have your next moves mapped and ready for the next big shift in the landscape. Trust me, there is a lot of change afoot and this is the new normal.
Adapting to the New Business Normal - A Panel Stream
I recently hosted a panel discussion with entrepreneurs Manuel Koser, Adii Pienaar and Edward LePine-Williams. We discuss what the new world looks like for businesses in the world of COVID-19.
We also discussed the idea of starting a side hustle while under lockdown. If you’re thinking about then my new eBook is for you!
