My business down down. How do I identify what I need to do to pivot and rebound my small business?

According to Subodh Nayar, Loudoun SBDC advisor, as an established business, you have some advantages over a business trying to get off the ground, but also some constraints. Being candid about those strengths and weaknesses is as important as understanding the opportunities you then have, and the threats you must address or circumvent.

Since revenues are down, any action you take must impact your “bottom line” in a reasonably short time frame, meaning planning changes that will take no more than between 15 to 45 days to either improve the product or service delivered or reduce the cost of running your business. This Agile method is critical to remain responsive to a business environment that continues to evolve.

The candid assessment of where you are and how your current circumstances shape the response to a changed market is called a SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Planning iterative changes that embrace opportunities, play to your strengths and reduce exposure to threats or require you to invest in remediating weakness is called Agile transformation.

A SWOT assessment typically means answering these questions:

1. Strengths (from the perspective of your three largest customer segments)
   1. What does your company do well?
   2. What are the qualities they would cite that separate you from the competition?
   3. Which staff members have made the most difference to your customers in the past 90 days?
   4. Which of your tangible assets have been the most important in the last 90 days?
2. Weaknesses (owner’s assessment from the past 90 days)
   1. What has made it harder to deliver your product or service?
   2. What have you seen competitors do that you think works to attract, deliver and retain customers?
   3. What are your resource limitations?
3. Opportunities (planning changes in how your business goes to market)
   1. Looking back on demand before COVID, what is different now?
   2. Do you think there are fewer or more providers of your product(s) or service?
   3. Who else might want the products or services you sell? How might you identify that customer segment?
   4. What resources (e.g. people, equipment and location) have become less important, and could therefore be repurposed or sold as a result of complying with public health protection rules?
4. Threats
   1. Who is offering the services you provide?
   2. How do potential customers feel about what you offer? (nice or must to have)?
   3. How has the current situation changed how your customers engage with you to buy the product or service? Are you seen as more or less of a commodity?

Candid answers will reveal what in your offering is invaluable and what is discretionary. It will also reveal what product delivery capacity is needed, and what could be eliminated or be liquidated to lower the cost of delivery.

Now that you know what to focus on to increase sales and/or reduce costs mapping how long each will take is the purpose of the agile change plan. To work you will need to decide what you need to accomplish in 15, 30 and 45 days to leverage your unique selling proposition. Usually that means:

1. If you know what do your customers love about your company or product(s) then what in the next 15-30 days could you do to increase sales to customers who have bought from you in the last 90 days?
2. If you know what does your company does better than other companies in your industry, then over the next 30-45 days how can you make sure potential buyers are factoring reasons to do business with you into their future purchase plans?
3. If you have determined what resources you have at your disposal that are not critical to the delivery of your USP, what alternative purpose could you implement in the next 30 days to reduce the cost of these underutilized assets?

The final step is to take each of these transformations and break them into work for the coming week. The final step is to track progress in each week with a simple sprint board:

Planned	In Progress	Complete

The sprint board is a vital part of the process, it promotes accountability, shows the current priority and quickly reveals if you are on track to accomplish the changes needed to improve the bottom line within the timeframe you chose.