Dealing with COVID Chaos - Managing Expectations

Hey, Kevin Brown with Lead Smart Technologies. I hope you're having a great day. I wanted to spend a few minutes with you today in a video and follow up to an email I sent out yesterday to a large group of our subscribers and colleagues and clients and so forth. And what I did is I spent a few minutes on that email really kind of addressing some thoughts on my mind about what's going on in the world with coronavirus, stock market turndown, and some of the things that we're facing now and having to work remotely and not necessarily having all of our teams with us. The concept behind that was that maybe I could take some of the experience of my business partners, Tom and Steve, and put that together with mine. Together we have about 75 years of business experience. So we've seen a lot of upturns and downturns and so forth and share some thoughts and ideas about how we might be able to execute and grow versus stay stagnant or decline in this difficult market. What I really wanted to talk about today is the first in a series of videos that we'll be doing. We wanted to talk today about expectations. So, so many of us have sent people home to work. We're not working in our offices right now. Now you might have people that are already working remotely. It might be part of your sales team that's on the road a lot, doesn't get into the office very often, and that may be working okay. But now we're sending whole teams of people home, and those people are dealing with internal problems as well within their organizations. You know, their technology that they might have at home, their workspace. They might have a spouse working at home as well, child care. There's a lot of issues that go with that. So I wanted to talk today about expectations. Now, we've broken expectations down into kind of three areas that I'll address in a moment. But what I want to address today is as business leaders, whether we're founders or executives or director level people, whatever it might be, we have an obligation to ourselves, to our company, and certainly our employees to make sure that everybody's on the same page right now. So we wanted to talk a little bit about what that means today. And what we've done is we've kind of broken this down into three kind of areas that we've seen because we've talked to a lot of clients and colleagues over the last few days, and people are kind of broken up into three areas. The first one is what we like to call the spring break mentality, right Is, you know what we need to send everybody home. You guys have laptops. You can get into our system remotely, use our cloud software applications, and we'll let you know kind of what's coming next sometime soon. But just stand by. Right? That's not necessarily wrong. But is that developing a sense of confidence in your employees, in your team, that you're ready to lead the organization and that things will be okay? Probably not. Ideally, we would have a better system in place for that. We'll talk about that in a moment. The second place that we talked about people being in is what we like to call the. They're just wanting people to keep the plate spinning. Like, okay, team, we've got to work from home remotely. Just let's not lose any deals, right? Let's just make sure our customers know we're here for them, we're doing the best we can, and we'll be in touch. Right. Well, that's better than spring break, isn't it? But it's not where we could be. And where I want to talk about a little bit more today is the third area, which is what we referred to in our conversation is doubling down. What do I mean by doubling down? Well, I'd like to throw this concept at you. What if instead of having spring break, this whole environment that we're dealing with and living in now could become a springboard to growth? We go from spring break to springboard. What does that mean? Well, if you stop and think about it, you've got your teams working at home. They're not traveling. You're not doing shows and events. But your customers aren't as active as normal either. So if we took this opportunity to, instead of having our teams be on spring break, including ourselves, or just keep the plate spinning and hoping that things turn out okay, what if we took a proactive approach? What if we set expectations of our teams instead of saying, folks, just be on spring break and we'll get back to you shortly. What if we proactively identified for them? Here's what you can expect from me as a business leader. Right? Founder, co founder, CEO, president, vp, director, whoever you are, here's what you can expect from me in our organization. Here's how we want to help you through this process, and here's how we're going to come out better on the other side. That would be much better than spring break, right? What about keep the plates spinning? Well, what if instead of saying keep the plate spinning, we were saying, hey, here's what marketing is doing to really stay in touch with your teams. Here is what sales leadership or marketing leadership or executive leadership is doing to support you and, and your clients. And here's what we need you to be doing right, if it's possible based upon people's situation, we still want a full day's work and here's how we're going to do it, where we put in processes, potentially workflows, maybe new uses of technology that we have. If we're using Slack or Microsoft Teams or something like that, find a better way to use those. If we're not using those teams yet, why not take a little bit of this downtime or a little bit of this flexibility that we have and start integrating those into our business? You know, just about every business has a CRM as well. The vast majority of companies, unfortunately use that CRM as what I call a data repository or a big list of names. It's just a little bit better than a spreadsheet. Well, what if now you went and figured out how to put processes and workflows into that CRM or even yet upgraded to a better system, but found a way to get your teams working more productively. If we can take some time right now as business leaders to forget about spring break, be supportive and caring of our teams, provide them clarity of expectations of them and more importantly sometimes of what they can expect from us and how we're going to help them and their families through this situation and then enforce to them that our intent is that we want to come out better on the other side than we are today. And here's the things we're doing as a leadership team to make us there. We're going to be in great shape. In fact, I even had a discussion yesterday about the fact that the company have significant reduction in expenses right now because of lack of travel and events and entertaining and so forth. And they're looking at putting that money into making their teams better, training better, doing better things that are really going to help their organization move forward and grow in the future. That's what I'd like to talk about today. Set those expectations for your teams that, that things can be better and they will be better. Economists are telling us right now that Q2, most of Q3 are probably going to be a struggle. That's okay. We'll get through it. But Q4 is looking really positive. What are we doing today to make Q4 be awesome? That's what I want to talk about. So let's talk. Start with setting expectations. The next video you get an email from us about this is going to be talking about communications. We're going to dive into more on that. Then we're going to talk about processes, technology. They'll finish up on this particular segment with talking about training and enablement and getting people up and rolling. So dive in, dig in. Turn this downturn or spring break into a springboard for growth. Love your thoughts. If you like what you're hearing enjoying what we're doing here, click below on our YouTube channel. There's a lot of other videos there, but please click the like button and the subscribe button and and we'll stay connected. Have a great day. Be safe, take precautions and be kind to each other.