Planning During Turbulent Times: What's Different?

Yesterday, I was hosted by Convictional and Andrew Goodman on a livestream with a number of topics, primarily about what's going on in the economy.

One question, in particular, stood out to me:

"What should companies be doing differently during mixed economic times?

The main thing that is different during boom times versus mixed times (we aren't in a bust, it's mixed) is that your future product revenue mix is likely going to be very different going forward than it is looking backward.

As a result, your planning process must fundamentally change.

The Old Way:

- You have a sales team pumping up your current business

- You have a "New Business" team trying to incubate emerging products and channels

- Each group looks at different data, focusing on year-over-year growth primarily. Perhaps your new business group is building a few experiments with no particular timeline.

- Mostly, they don't collaborate on planning, except through the CEO and how much they allocate to each group.

The New Way:

- All managers on equal footing across the entire business looking at the same customer data, behaviors, and trends.

- All managers engaged in developing a shared understanding across the company about customer behaviors.

- The CEO leads a structured planning process to improve the firm's mission and strategy based on that new fundamental learnings.

What the "new way" allows is fresh eyes on the business. A fundamental belief going into the process that things could be different now:

- You have opportunities in new customer segments which were not there before.

- Your previous messaging is stale or tired and not resonating in this environment. You could even discover you didn't have clear messaging at all, instead, you were benefiting from economic tailwinds that have stopped

Planning is fundamental, but it really just involves a few things:

- all leaders working from the same set of facts.

- all leaders focusing on helping customers in the market, rather than defending their turf or justifying past decisions.

- working across functions - rather than in silos - and believing that every group has a unique perspective to help build the firm's path forward.

2023 will be here before you know it, and all indications that things will not just reset back to 2019. What's worse, continuing on the current path could in some cases accelerate the decline of your business.

A "new normal" may not end up looking great at all, unless you put in the hard work.

As you might expect, a big part of my consulting business is helping investors and leaders with clear structured planning processes that can help you understand and react quickly to the market. Whether that means brands, retailers, marketplaces, or SaaS - these are all connected to the same eCommerce ecosystem.