Leadership Lessons…Beyond COVID-19

Recently my partner Al Levi and I joined The Sharpest Tool Podcast with Josh Smith (Watch Above) to talk about weathering the storm of COVID-19.

In the last few days I know from being a business owner myself and the lessons that I learned and then working with lots of clients, I know that if someone makes a plan, implements that plan, makes some progress, they’re gonna improve their company.  Up until now, I’ve been comfortable with people finding their own speed to that. Like, if you say to your kid, “You should wear a jacket today because it’s 30 below,” and they say, “No thanks,” and you go, “Good, don’t wear your jacket,” and they go out there and that evidence is gonna color their next decision.

What we understand that’s different about this time right now, is there’s no luxury of time. You are going to survive and thrive only if you apply business basics with no excuses. You take extreme ownership to the situation that you find yourself in. I think my role, as a leader, is to up my standards and the immediate consequences, if people are gonna do things that put themselves or the team at risk.

With your service techs, if you get them the suit covers, the tyveks and the face shields…and they don’t use it…that puts the entire team at risk.

The same applies to your financials. If you have financial systems in place and our team members aren’t using them, that puts everybody at risk.

My leadership needs to step up in terms of accountability and consequences and just shortening the distance between here to there,

At this time I have 2 objectives: Our team operates safely and financial health

It’s more important than ever to use the protocol that we already had, in terms of dealing with operations. Tightening up those systems and making sure that we’re taking the extra steps of social distancing has got to be drilled and enforced everyday.

When it comes to financials, now is not the time to let your accounting drop.

Now is the time to stay up ’til midnight if you have to and make sure that every sale’s entered, payments made, deposits made. Make sure the bills are entered, credit card statement reviews and everything is up-to-date. You’ve got to have your financial house in order.

So, right now is more important than ever and always a good advice is to make sure that you have a balance sheet in profit and loss, up-to-date.

Now, I want to pause a minute, because I feel like this could be a soliloquy, do you want me to share the few numbers that are gonna make all

Right now, my Financial Quick Check is more important than ever.  This is one of our requirements, moving forward, that weekly, you want to know, on a one page dashboard report, the key performance indicators from your balance sheet and your profit and loss. And they’re no surprises.

Sales, cost of goods sold, the gross margin, overhead, profit, in dollars and percentages. Job one is make money every month, don’t lose money.

If up until this point, you were running with a minimal amount of debt, if you had plenty of cashflow, you are gonna weather this storm better.

Let this be our shining hour for making sure that we’re not caught with our pants down, as far as cash and profits, and we can use that to weather the next storm.