Return to Growth Playbook

[My views are my own]

I’ve spent the past decade obsessed with helping companies to transform.

As a senior leader at two of the biggest business transformations of our era, I’ve been honing my “Comeback Playbook” or plan for “Return to Growth.”

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about how this “Transformation Blueprint” would be applied to the high growth disruptors that have collapsed over the past 9 months.

My top ten list for collapsed disruptors is:

1. You are at war. Preserve your cash. Reduce your burn rate.
2. Assume that the next period of boom conditions is a long way off. Your focus now should be on preservation/survival.
3. Get real with your shareholders, board, employees, and customers. Get out ahead of what may possibly be tougher economic conditions in the next six to nine months.
4. Garner alignment at the board level. You don’t have time or energy for managing the warring factions.
5. Downturns almost always result in a rationalization of competition. You want to be one of the survivors to benefit from more rational market conditions on the other side.
6. Slow the pace of growth, and focus on fixing the machine. What are the three critical path items that you have to improve/fix over the next six months. Margins? Customer churn? Overhead costs?
7. Evaluate your leadership team, and their direct reports. Conditions in the market for hiring talent are likely to become more favorable. Upgrade where necessary.
8. Coach your team. Most have probably not lived through the Global Financial Crisis or the Dot-Com Crash. They will likely need to develop new mental models for how to operate. Help them to adapt to a war environment.
9. Consider a combination with a peer. Use the merger as an opportunity to reduce overhead costs while doubling down on your best talent — especially salespeople, engineers and product development.
10. If you are generating cash (or you’ve got excess capital), consider equity repurchase. Read up on Henry Singleton of Teledyne in Chapter 2 of The Outsiders by William Thorndike.

If you are interested in engaging further in this conversation, I’d love to go on the journey with you. Please subscribe to my newsletter/blog. The link is at the top of the page on a desktop browser and at the bottom of the page on a mobile browser. Also, please follow me on Twitter, connect with me on LinkedIn, and post a comment below. I’d love to know what you think.