How to Create Business Plans That Move, Support, and Adapt
Starting and maintaining a business, as well as expanding a brand, can be challenging enough in an ordinary business landscape. Now, during a global pandemic, to evolve your business model can seem daunting and confusing, maybe even dire. But the best-laid plans for a business are the plans that move, support, and adapt to the changing times.
To address the challenge of how to evaluate your business model during the pandemic, the CWA’s Survive & Thrive Workshop offered speakers with experience during the Adaptable Business Models session. Erik Lambert of Bonfire Collective, Marc Koehler from Lead with Purpose, and career coach Sam Thiara explained the best ways to help a company survive in the most chaotic of times and offer new ideas to make a business ironclad.
Here are a few highlights from their session:
How to Adapt
From recentering and restructuring your team to crafting realistic and attainable goals for every quarter, these experts outline the best strategies and insights to keep any business afloat:
- Be clear with the company’s mission, vision, and values
- Be honest and transparent with employees, even if you don’t have all the answers
- Set achievable goals within small segments (30, 60, 90 days) - small steps add up to big change
- Show empathy during these difficult times
Hold Firm on the Company’s Identity
- Confidence with a company’s identity and what that company stands for in the community can create a brand that people will trust and flock to. Of course, it is easier said than done, but moving forward with confidence and direction is paramount now.
- Trust your strengths. Write a plan and embrace the process: being honest with what is working and what is not. Find ways to adjust accordingly with the help of experts in their fields and grow to meet the challenge.
Empathy Within Leadership
This is the time to be a leader for your team and in the industry to uplift and inspire. Keeping realistic goals at the forefront of any plan and engaging your capable workforce helps to keep everyone involved and pointed in the right direction.
- Trained and Trusted Employees: Turning to employees and supporting them with trust, confidence, and emotional intelligence will benefit the company.
- Supported Employees: The employees who carry the brand, the ideas, and the business experience to the customer – they show and give their support every day, so learning how to offer unconditional support will only boost their excitement and productivity.
- Be a Leader in the Company: Lead by example and be confident with your decision-making. Show humility and accountability when the plan has to change.
Continually striving to build a business goes a long way. Maybe when you first started your business you worked hard to craft something that speaks with clarity and can stand on its own – now is the time to do that again.
Dealing with uncertain times is never easy, but these are a few ways to thrive through these difficulties with new resolve, emotional depth, and realistic expectations. Almost every business is struggling, but there are ways to make these times more manageable and explore the opportunities that you may have been sitting on all along.
Join the Survive & Thrive Ecosystem
If you want to dive deeper into this subject and more, on-demand registration is still available! Your ticket gets you access to networking tools with all attendees, an ongoing Community Board forum, and more valuable content like this session! Once on the platform, you’ll have access to the content and networking tools for the next 6 months. Ticket sales end September 30. Register at cwameetings.org/surviveandthrive.