Golden Opportunities In A Crisis

With global uncertainty at a high point at present it isn’t hard to get caught up in the scariness of events and forget that when volatility is in ascendency golden opportunities in a crisis often abound. The very fact that things are changing quickly and profoundly suggests that a good decision or innovation can reap significant and fast rewards. Identifying and exploiting opportunities that exist is the challenge that all business owners face in these uncertain times. So, how do we?

Use your people, use the collective brain power at your disposal.
Brainstorm with your team to list:

• Opportunities in your current market
  • To acquire greater market share
  • Take advantage of a competitor’s unreadiness
  • To expand your sales into current customers
  • To introduce new offerings
• Where can gains be made within your business?
  • What efficiencies can be gained through changes to your systems or processes?
  • What “dead wood” can be cut out?
  • Can changes be made or tested that you have previously thought about but not implemented eg. Staff working from home.
  • Where can you reduce waste to save cash?
• How can the risk be mitigated?
  • Do any natural hedges exist?
  • Use the Failure Mode Effect Analysis (FMEA) model to determine the risks involved (see explanation video here)
    • Determine the areas of the business that carry risk
      • Key personnel going
      • Heightened competitor activity
      • Significant slump in demand for your products/services
      • Supply problems due to supplier difficulties
    • Then describe in what ways, the modes, that those failures can occur
    • What are the effects of the failures on the business?
    • What could cause the failures, what triggers them?
    • Rate each of those for their level of severity, the likelihood they will occur and how easy they would be to detect.
    • Develop plans to mitigate the highest scoring risks following the analysis.
  • Think about the specific actions that need to be taken. Delegate each action to a team member and set deadlines. Document the process so it can be repeated easily.

Developing a good disaster scenario plan within your business will be of huge assistance when the inevitable crisis happens. Be it the loss of a key member of your team, a systems crash or even a global crisis like the current COVID-19 virus, you will need a well thought through plan. Test the robustness of the plan with scenarios based on the severity of the impact on your business. A strong, well developed plan will put you in a great position to survive a crisis. It will also allow you to take advantage of any potential opportunities that will exist.

Don’t know where to start? Here at Grange Gold we’d be happy to walk you through the process to help you develop a robust plan to exploit the opportunities and enhance your survival prospects. Just click here to send us an email.

As Steve Bradbury discovered, the race isn’t all about being in first at the last turn, it’s about having the resilience and persistence and the plan to be the first one to cross the finish line.

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