Bill Gallagher walks through crisis triage: cut costs, preserve cash, buy time. Then do a trend-focused SWOT analysis to find your core strengths, spot what's shifting in your industry, and plan defensive and opportunistic moves.
Are you in the middle of dealing with something big, a big dramatic change? Or have you had one recently? Are you worried about one coming up? Well, we've got a way, sure fire way to deal with big, dramatic changes and we've certainly had to use it in the last little bit. I'll tell you more about that in just a second. Hi everyone, My name is Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast. We're. We do shows like this, tips, deep dives, conversational gurus, interviews with entrepreneurs about their growth, about their growth as a leader and the growth of their businesses. We do all that. More on the Scaling Up Business Podcast. All of those hundreds of episodes now are available wherever you get your podcast content or on our website, scalingcoach.com the tools, the tips, the show notes, the links, all that kind of thing and more@scalingcoach.com, so go there to find it out. All right, so Listen, back in 2008, 2009, just like last year, we all found ourselves dealing with some pretty dramatic changes in events. Sometimes it's a collective thing that we all have to deal with. We all deal with it in different ways, right? Same storm, different boats, but is the concept that we talk about. But in that time we found ourselves dealing with something and two things I used for that that are good for situations like this, they were great also in 2020 as we dealt with the global pandemic and the dramatic shifts. And they'll be great again, whether you're with something common or whether you're dealing with something that is unique to you and your business, like a personal kind of crisis for you, specifically in your business or your industry. The first thing that we've got to do is triage the situation, right? Cut costs, buy some time, buy some breathing room. And that often means dramatic cost, shedding lines of business, preserving cash, holding on to kind of the egg or the core of the business. Sometimes there's some work to do to give yourself some room though, that we do that we used, we use it every year with our teams that we're coaching and scaling up. We also use it in times of dramatic shift and change. And that is our swt, or sweat tool. Sweat is a more strategic version of something like swot, the SW Analysis. The SWOT Analysis SWT focuses more on the trends piece. So what are the core strengths? What are the core weaknesses of the company, the ones that aren't going to change over time? We want to distill that down to the top five or so of things. So we want to distill out those top five or six things that are the core strengths and weaknesses. That's fine, that's similar to before. But these are the unchanging things. Then we want to look exhaustively at trends, what's going on, or as Wayne Gretzky used to say, skate to where the puck is going is what we're looking for. So where's the puck going? What's happening? What's developing in the world? You're going to start with your own industry, your own technology, your sector, your region, what's your. Which is common. But now we want to go really, really broadly. Let's go out to culture and arts and music and families and technology and go way outside your normal world. So we're going to notice all the trends really broadly. And now we want to start to connect the dots. What are some defensive strategies between where things are going and our weaknesses? What are some opportunistic strategies between our strengths and where things are going? We're going to have great insights for differentiation knowledge, novel business practices, new approaches. When we look at the SWT now, it may take you a little while. We may want to dwell on it, allow it to show up. But this is the way to deal with this. After you've set aside, you've given yourself some breathing room. These are the opportunities for the small and large pivots and the adjustments. And if you'll do this, you will find not just survival, but thriving in the face of change and chaos and drama. I hope that's helpful. We'll talk to you again soon. Like subscribe. Tune in next time. Stay with us. Keep scaling up.
