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Chuck your 2020 budget and strategic plan to focus on the next 90 days

Stop putting pressure on yourself to come up with a new 2020 budget or strategic plan for your agency. Start thinking in rolling 90-day increments. What do you need to do in the next 90 days to keep going?

I don’t care if your business is doing great or has lost half (or more) of its clients. Print out the budget and set it on fire if it makes you feel better (safely, of course).

You need to keep an eye on the future and think about how you will adjust your business when things get back to some form of normal, but right now you need to focus on the next 90 days.

There’s too much uncertainty to realistically forecast revenue and expenses for the rest of the year. Instead, look at your cash, your staffing, your revenue, your government loan/grant, and anything else you know about for the short-term and manage that first.

There will be plenty of time to get back to proper budgets and planning in due course.

Transcript

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

If you haven’t done so already, chuck out your 2020 budget, chuck out your 2020 strategic plan. I don’t care if you’re doing great, or if you’ve lost half your clients.

Either way, you need to start fresh.

If it makes you feel good, take the actual document and set it on fire … safely, of course.

But you need to start thinking in much more incremental steps.

What is it that you need to do over the next 90 days? What are the things you need to do with clients, with your team with business development, you need to keep an eye to the future and think about how you’re going to react and how you’re going to act after this is all said and done.

Right now you really need to make sure that you’re getting through those 90 days, one at a time, because there are just so many unknowns, so much uncertainty.

Look, we don’t know what the situation is going to look like in may let alone July, August are next January. And so you need to think about the steps that you need to take to put yourself in the best position to survive the present and thrive in the future, but that’s all incremental. It’s not about coming up with a new six or 12 or 18 month plan or budget.

So don’t put that pressure on yourself. Instead, focus on the here and now look at your cash, figure out what you need to do in order to manage your team and your resources effectively over that 90 day span. If you set yourself up for success there, you’ll be in a much stronger position to take advantage of things when we get back to some semblance of normal or whatever the new normal ends up being.

So that’s my advice. Get rid of those plans. Don’t put pressure on yourself to come up with a new one. And instead focus on those 90 day actions that you need to take to survive now and thrive in the future.

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