Podcast EP 115 | Seven Actions for Challenging Economic Times

No one knows what will hap­pen but at the moment there are a num­ber of sig­nals that indi­cate chal­leng­ing eco­nom­ic times might be ahead.

In this episode of the Growth Whis­per­ers pod­cast, Kevin Lawrence and Brad Giles dis­cuss 7 actions you can take now to pre­pare for the peri­od of eco­nom­ic uncer­tain­ty down the road.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Kevin Lawrence 00:13

Hey, wel­come to the Growth Whis­per­ers pod­cast where every­thing that Brad and I talk about is about build­ing endur­ing, great com­pa­nies in good times, and excit­ing times, and some­times poten­tial­ly, in bad times, no mat­ter what. So I’m Kevin Lawrence here in Van­cou­ver, British Colum­bia, Cana­da, and I’m here with my co host, Brad Giles, down in Perth Aus­tralia, Brad, how’s it going?

Brad Giles 00:38

Pret­ty good today.

Kevin Lawrence 01:12

Most days are good days. But that’s what we choose. And we are very, very for­tu­nate to work with awe­some peo­ple doing great things in the world. So hey, before we jump into the show, if you haven’t sub­scribed yet, please hit that sub­scribe but­ton hap­py for you to give us a rat­ing as well. So we’re gonna dig in today into an inter­est­ing top­ic. Brad was up front there talked about good times and bad times and uncer­tain times, even today, we’re talk­ing about?

Brad Giles 01:43

Well, look, we had a chat before the show. And we’re begin­ning to see a cou­ple of inter­est­ing things com­ing through. The stock mar­ket has had an inter­est­ing run since the begin­ning of the year, cer­tain­ly, in the tech sec­tors, we’ve seen some inter­est­ing times with some large changes in val­u­a­tions. And I’ve got some clients in the tech sec­tor, they cer­tain­ly talk­ing about that we’re begin­ning to see it in some oth­er areas of the econ­o­my. You know, there’s a war in Ukraine, as we know, there’s been a mas­sive stim­u­lus through most gov­ern­ments around the world in the COVID areas. And that’s shut val­u­a­tions up. There’s, you know, you go and sell or you go and buy or sell a sec­ond­hand car that can be sell­ing 30 40% above what was pre­vi­ous­ly worth because of short­ages and so forth. So yeah, we’re talk­ing about we don’t we’re talk­ing about

Kevin Lawrence 02:51

what goes up, often comes down at least for catch­es a bit of a breather.

Brad Giles 02:56

Yeah, yeah. So we don’t know. But we’ve seen enough recent­ly, to say maybe it’s time to do an episode on the sev­en actions for chal­leng­ing eco­nom­ic times. You know, maybe it’s time to start putting some nuts away for the win­ter like the squirrels.

Kevin Lawrence 03:19

So I think any­way, the thing is, we always, you know, Jim Collins calls it pro­duc­tive para­noia, we always have a good dose of pro­duc­tive para­noia and being ready for what­ev­er comes. And now it’s just a lit­tle more time to be a lit­tle more pre­pared. It’s pret­ty clear on the hori­zon, some­thing funky is going on. And some peo­ple think we’re already in reces­sion in North Amer­i­ca, some of the CEO I’ve been on a tear the last few weeks talk­ing to a bunch of dif­fer­ent CEOs about what they see in their busi­ness­es, and many busi­ness­es are show­ing signs of mov­ing into reces­sion. And thank­ful­ly, you know, we work with many endur­ing great com­pa­nies that have been around for 30,40 ​‚50 over 100 years now. We have in our port­fo­lio of clients, and with­in those they had been through all kinds of eco­nom­ic down­turns, all kinds of end­ed up terms of I want to be clear, and I was talk­ing to a CEO, but today I think the best oppor­tu­ni­ties come in eco­nom­ic down­turns. Yeah, for sure. It’s like if you’re on your game, and you’re focused and you have a strong team, a clear strat­e­gy, good prepa­ra­tion. It wipes out the weak play­ers, like I’ve learned on my first time, I was through an eco­nom­ic down­turn, I was con­cerned. And the first seri­ous one that I expe­ri­enced was a lit­tle bit in 2000. I was work­ing a lot in the Mid­dle East and the down­turn, there was just a, it was like a moun­tain slide. It was incred­i­ble. But the point of it is, is that awe­some oppor­tu­ni­ties come through for great oper­a­tors, great dis­ci­plined oper­a­tors with long term per­spec­tives do usu­al­ly very, very well. So it was a good things will come. And you know, the idea is, with all this stuff going on, you’re bet­ter to have a great plan B No mat­ter what, it nev­er hurts, as long as you don’t slip into what I call a sit­u­a­tion where you kind of cre­ate your own self ful­fill­ing prophe­cy of killing your busi­ness. And it’s almost like there’s a sto­ry of, obvi­ous­ly, we some­times we like to pick on accoun­tants on this stuff. But you know, the accoun­tant says, We got to cut the mar­ket­ing bud­get, which some­times we all should say, you know, we got to cut the mar­ket­ing bud­get, we’re spend­ing too much and you know, tough times are com­ing, so we bet­ter cut the bud­get. And then they cut the bud­get. And then you know, lo and behold, sales slows down.

Brad Giles 05:59

But don’t they nev­er say we should cut the account­ing bud­get? Fun­ni­ly enough.

Kevin Lawrence 06:02

It’s very weird. Yes. But the point of it being is that, you know, some­times you can antic­i­pate a prob­lem, over­re­act to a prob­lem and cre­ate a big­ger prob­lem. Yeah. And so you know, you got to stay oppor­tunis­tic. And that’s one of the things I want to leave around. Down­turns are good for dis­ci­pline, reset­ting sys­tems and every­thing. And as long as you aren’t crazy over lever­aged, it’ll be great. And if you are crazy over lever­aged Well, you know, it’s inter­est­ing, I went back to one of my clients start­ing nine months ago, and we were look­ing at his bal­ance sheet, and I’m like, Ah, this is not okay. Not in a boom time to have the bal­ance sheet he had, and we start­ed work­ing on this aggres­sive­ly nine months ago, and He’s way better.

Brad Giles 06:46

So he had a lot of debt is what you’re imply­ing there, right, or he did have a lot of liquidity?

Kevin Lawrence 06:53

He had a lot of debt, no liq­uid­i­ty. And he was not he was in the shape to thrive if the econ­o­my boomed and not if it changed, like he had way too much suc­cess that was at risk. It was­n’t struc­tured, right, which we believe in his team to miss team did most of the work one of the one take cred­it for point of it is, there’s lots of great things to do. And you got to look con­tin­ue to keep your eye on hori­zon of opportunity.

Brad Giles 07:23

Every time we do a pod­cast, we start by say­ing we’re all about build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies. So you can only have an endur­ing com­pa­ny if you survive.

Kevin Lawrence 07:35

It does­n’t mat­ter if you’re great. If you can’t even survive.

Brad Giles 07:39

So if you, you know, I remem­ber, in 2000, the tech crash the tech bub­ble. And it was, it was out, it did­n’t make any sense. Okay, com­pa­nies would come up with an idea, and they’d raise mon­ey. And there was no under­ly­ing log­ic to what they were doing. There was no busi­ness mod­el that had any sense to make mon­ey. And then they’re the com­pa­nies that all got wiped out. It is about mak­ing sure that we can sur­vive and endure.

Kevin Lawrence 08:24

Yes. And usu­al­ly, it’s about being a mas­ter of the fun­da­men­tals and the basics. Yeah, right. Yeah. If you have a ful­ly 100% lever­aged bal­ance sheet, I mean, hope­ful­ly your pri­vate equi­ty backed or tapped into some­thing else that has access to more cash. But if you’re a fam­i­ly busi­ness, that is ful­ly lever­aged, you’re I mean, you’re ask­ing for trou­ble at the best of time. So any­way, we’ll get we’ll dig into that. But boy, basi­cal­ly we can’t pre­dict the future. But we need to be ready. And you know, there’s a great quote we got in here. And I believe this is from War­ren Buf­fett. You know, when oth­ers are greedy, be fear­ful. And when they are fear­ful, be greedy. And right now, there has been a lot of greed in the mar­ket and a lot of cap­i­tal­ism at this past, and I love cap­i­tal­ism in lots of ways. But soon­er or lat­er that flips, and then you just need to be pre­pared to be always, you know, think­ing dif­fer­ent­ly than the herd. That’s all. So there are awe­some oppor­tu­ni­ties, what we got to be there on the oth­er side. So let’s start with our sev­en points. Num­ber one, you know, plan to look for a plan for the best look for those biggest oppor­tu­ni­ties and keep tuned into those. So it’s inter­est­ing. Anoth­er great see a shout out to BP BP and OVR. Great strate­gic CEO, one of the best I’ve I’ve worked with in terms of strat­e­gy, and he and I had a chat last week and we’re talk­ing about this and he goes, Man, I just see oppor­tu­ni­ty every­where. And we start talk­ing about it and he’s list­ing off I’m not going to give away his play­book, but he Lis­ten up, there’s gonna be big oppor­tu­ni­ties here, big oppor­tu­ni­ties here, big oppor­tu­ni­ties here, big oppor­tu­ni­ties here. And he’s going through this mas­sive list. And he’s got it, he’s got a mas­ter plan, you can, you can see, based on all the stuff, he stud­ies where the oppor­tu­ni­ties gonna be, and he might not be right and all that, but he’s going to be right on some of it. But more impor­tant­ly, he’s going to con­tin­ue to keep him and his teams tuned in onto that. So, you know, the biggest thing we have to fear is fear and los­ing sight of oppor­tu­ni­ties, because that can be self ful­fill­ing. So where can you be pre­pared to win? You know, where are your com­peti­tors gonna get weak? Like, where are your com­peti­tors, not going to be able to take care of cus­tomers, and you can eas­i­ly require cus­tomers or acquire the com­peti­tor, who’s already frail. And with a cou­ple lit­tle nudges, they’re going to be in, in har­m’s way. And you might be able to save them and help them out by buy­ing them.

Brad Giles 10:57

But don’t weak­en your bal­ance sheet. By doing that, like it’s it’s easy to get caught up in it. And I don’t know BP and I don’t know his sit­u­a­tion. But num­ber rule num­ber one, you must endure, right?

Kevin Lawrence 11:13

He’s got the bal­ance sheet covered.

Brad Giles 11:16

Yeah, as you would expect, but don’t be lis­ten­ing to this pod­cast think­ing, Oh, even though I’ve got a Okay, bal­ance sheet, like I’m going to be able to go lever­age to the hilt, and I’m going to acquire mar­ket share. I want to just point out one of the episodes we spoke about before, which is, if you’re going to in one of the episodes, we said that if you’re going to acquire anoth­er busi­ness, or some­thing like that an acqui­si­tion of some sort. You’ve got to look at it through the lens of gross prof­it, how will it change your gross prof­it mar­gin? Is it going because don’t just buy it to get an up mar­ket share? Because this cus­tomer might get wiped out?

Kevin Lawrence 11:56

And think­ing you can sit on mar­ket share is idiotic.

Brad Giles 11:59

But so many peo­ple do it, we know that you don’t know any better.

Kevin Lawrence 12:03

You got to look at your gross mar­gins and all the way down to bot­tom line prof­itabil­i­ty and how it’s going to help you. Yeah, who cares if you got share, if you lose a bunch of mon­ey, shares a vol­ume game, it’s like chas­ing rev­enue, it can be okay. But it’s got to be cal­i­brat­ed with gross mar­gin and bot­tom line prof­itabil­i­ty. I agree. 100%. Yeah. So I think your point that was very impor­tant, but is if your com­pa­ny is doing 100 mil­lion a year, and you got 20 mil­lion in cash, you might do an acqui­si­tion with, you know, five or 10, we would­n’t use all your own cash any­ways. But you might, you know, use 5 mil­lion of your cash for an acqui­si­tion. But if you’re doing 750 mil­lion a year, and you’ve only got 20 mil­lion in cash, you prob­a­bly aren’t, you should prob­a­bly hold on to that cash and try and build up a lit­tle bit more to give you a lit­tle more buffer. Again, every busi­ness has dif­fer­ent met­rics and num­bers point to that being you don’t want to weak­en your­self, you want to be able to hold through the mar­ket and make sure you got enough cash to get through to the next cycle.

Brad Giles 13:04

So num­ber two plan for the worst case.

Kevin Lawrence 13:08

So we’ve cov­ered off the pos­i­tive and all the good stuff. Yeah, flip the coin.

Brad Giles 13:13

Yeah, it’s the poop sand­wich here. Right? It’s like stuff good. It’s, it’s a bit squishy in the mid­dle, so plan for the worst case. Right? So nobody knows what’s going to hap­pen. Econ­o­mists Don’t you know, Kevin, and I don’t, but with see­ing some ear­ly signs that are mak­ing a site, start think­ing about this. So think about, and this is the pro­duc­tive para­noia. Think about what could hap­pen, and how will you react to that? Of course, be care­ful of self ful­fill­ing, cre­at­ing your own demise, as Kevin already said, but maybe what if your rev­enues dealt went down? 20 or 30%? What if there was dis­count­ing hap­pen­ing that was dri­ving your price down? And you had to respond to that, recon­sid­er the key parts your prof­it and loss around these types of changes? And how do you deal with that, to sur­vive, to endure to get through the win­ter to the spring?

Kevin Lawrence 14:22

And you can look at oth­er vari­ables like well, what if the cost of cap­i­tal or you know inter­est rates goes up by two points, or four points or six points, I don’t know. Or employ­ment goes up notably or down, where infla­tion goes up or down. Again, there’s all these vari­ables that impact it, maybe it’s the price of oil, maybe it’s the price of grain, price of steel, price of alu­minum, every­one’s got dif­fer­ent vari­ables, price of trans­porta­tion. But look­ing at all those vari­ables that have an impact on your busi­ness, one of the com­pa­nies you work with has done their CFO did a bril­liant job, picked six main met­rics like cost account­ing. Cap­i­tal I think it was costs oil, infla­tion or and all that and just mull it over for the next five years. And then we’re gonna the exec­u­tives gonna make some best guess­es of what they think, Yeah, they’ll run sce­nar­ios. So that’s, you know, sce­nar­ios, p&l hit and then capex, you know, what can you defer or accel­er­ate, maybe there’s capex cap­i­tal expen­di­tures that you can get done. Now, if you think prices are going up, or you think you’re gonna gain notable ben­e­fits from that cap­i­tal, maybe you get it deployed now, and, you know, get all the financ­ing locked up with the bank. Same thing with fundrais­ing, you know, accel­er­ate your fundrais­ing, get that done now, poten­tial­ly, as well.

Brad Giles 15:43

There’s a lot of busi­ness­es through the pan­dem­ic that have been propped up or saved by the gov­ern­ment. Yep. And, and there, they might not know it, but they are per­haps not in the strongest posi­tion. And any change in the envi­ron­ment, you know, they might have been bad going into the pan­dem­ic, they got saved, and then com­ing out of it, if we go into some chal­leng­ing times, they’re not going to make it. So you’ve got to plan for the worst case and real­ly be pre­pared for that.

Kevin Lawrence 16:14

Yeah, for sure. We don’t know if the gov­ern­ment is going to con­tin­ue to pro­vide stim­u­lus. I mean, in many cas­es, you know, increas­ing rates to kind of cool the econ­o­my off to D esti­mate do stim­u­late the econ­o­my. The final thing I want to say in this, but don’t for­get to lead well and keep an eye on what’s pos­si­ble. And the oppor­tu­ni­ties don’t allow your cul­ture to get all neg­a­tive, right? You got you’ve got to deal with it and con­front those ugly issues you have to, but you can’t allow your­self to become a neg­a­tive fear­ful cul­ture, because again, that will do dam­age. So focus on those things. And then make sure you go back to what’s possible.

Brad Giles 16:49

Talk about the vision and the mis­sion of the be hag, where are you going? Why do you exist? All of the impor­tant things,

Kevin Lawrence 16:54

all that good stuff. All right. Next thing is to antic­i­pate cus­tomer needs just step back, what’s going to change all these dynam­ics? Where are the new needs, or new demand is going to come from? It’s not rock­et sci­ence, but there will be dif­fer­ent things that pop up in the econ­o­my? And what can you think about or just go back to, you know, masks dur­ing COVID, or tram­po­lines or hot tubs trough and COVID? Who knew those would be hot, hot items, or, you know, toi­let paper as it ini­tial­ly was. And then, you know, just try stuff like try fir­ing bul­lets or before can­non­balls. If you’ve got new ideas, just test them. Make sure you’re see­ing if the mar­ket response.

Brad Giles 17:34

Yeah, try lit­tle things before you bet the farm. And when cus­tomer needs change, maybe you can try some­thing and it’ll hit the sweet spot or maybe won’t. Mov­ing on to num­ber four, man­age cash, or cash is king, my friend.

Kevin Lawrence 17:53

And Queen Yeah.

Brad Giles 17:55

And half of the Regal court. So num­ber one, right? Watch out for bad pay­ing cus­tomers. If you’re in a busi­ness to busi­ness, where you’re pro­vid­ing terms to your cus­tomers in a retail envi­ron­ment, or you know, it does­n’t real­ly mat­ter so much you’re get­ting paid when you trans­act. But if you’re a b2b. Some times in these sit­u­a­tions, your cus­tomers might not be man­ag­ing their cash so well. And sud­den­ly, they were at 14 days, then 30, then 45, and it’s slip­ping out. So you’ve got to keep a close eye on that. And then know when do we put some­one does­n’t mat­ter who it is on to stop cred­it. When do we say to them, we’re not work­ing with you any­more, to bring your pay­ments up to date be relentless.

Kevin Lawrence 18:42

about that one of my clients, that’s the best of this stuff. He said when they I’ve been through down­turns with him. And he said his tight­est cred­it tight­ens up dra­mat­i­cal­ly his cred­it peo­ple become the most impor­tant peo­ple in the com­pa­ny. Yeah. Because if you don’t get paid, that’s, that’s more than a no, you lose the prof­itabil­i­ty and the cost. Those are big losses.

Brad Giles 19:01

So just on that point, we’re going to build­ing a real­ly chal­leng­ing sit­u­a­tion for home builders at the moment. And what the all the trades have done is they’ve tight­ened up their cred­it terms to the home builders. And so rather than the nor­mal terms, like 30 days into month, they’re now say­ing, we get paid the same week that we do the work. And that’s been a mas­sive chal­lenge for the home builders as you can imag­ine, but smart for the trades. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So num­ber two, cash is king. So build a war chest. So we’ve been bang­ing on this for 115 episodes. Like you’ve got to have a lot of mon­ey put away for when the bad times can’t. That’s the only way you can often get sur­vive or hav eas­i­ly acces­si­ble as in mas­sive amounts and equi­ty and an asset you can eas­i­ly and quick­ly refi­nance shown how you need to get it quickly.

Kevin Lawrence 19:50

For sure. Noth­ing is this Lost excess stuff if you’ve got extra inven­to­ry, or extra assets that aren’t active aren’t need­ed not core, again, use that or just or at least inven­to­ry man­age it. Well now, you know, espe­cial­ly if it’s got­ten a lit­tle bit loose, okay, that’s num­ber four man­ag­ing the cash, it’s crit­i­cal. Cash is what allows you to enter and stick to your val­ues through rid­dle. All right, have a plan for your play­ers how you’re going to keep the ones that you’ve got, because some­times peo­ple get a lit­tle bit spooked. And you might need to get some new ones too. So plan for how you will keep your best peo­ple and keep them engaged. Because if peo­ple haven’t been through down­turns peo­ple can get real­ly stressed by it. And a lot of peo­ple haven’t, our econ­o­my has been boom­ing for a long time as it has in most coun­tries. And some peo­ple may have made some poor per­son­al finan­cial choic­es and be a lit­tle over lever­aged a lit­tle bit too excit­ed and ambi­tious. So just be pre­pared for high, you might need to do some spe­cial cre­ative things to help out some of your eight play­ers. And who knows what it is. And then the most impor­tant so that you don’t have to do mas­sive lay­offs, if it gets real­ly bad, active­ly per­for­mance man­ag­ing your B play­ers, your tox­ic A’s and your seats con­stant­ly. It’s the time I mean, you should have been doing it already. But in boom times peo­ple let this stuff slide. How do you make sure you stay on top of it and per­for­mance, man­age that. And don’t keep any under per­form­ers in your sys­tem, at least you know, treat them respect­ful­ly and give them chances. But if it’s not going to work, let’s move on.

Brad Giles 21:33

Let’s move them on. And then num­ber six, ensure your core dis­ci­plines are tight. I live in a cycli­cal econ­o­my min­ing based econ­o­my, right. So it’s always on the way up or on the way down. And what we say is that you lose mon­ey at the bot­tom and you lose mon­ey at the top because things are things you know, there’s this one day in the mid­dle of a cycle where it’s this opti­mal envi­ron­ment where you can make mon­ey. It’s a bit of a you know, it’s a bit far­ci­cal. But the point being is that things get slop­py. Dis­ci­plines get slop­py in a boom envi­ron­ment. And so what we want to do is to know that the way to sur­vive the way to what to do is to bring those core dis­ci­plines tight. So that is the meet­ing rhythm, under­stand­ing the data, and under­stand­ing the pri­or­i­ties for every­one and writ­ing those dis­ci­plines, mak­ing sure that those things are get­ting done.

Kevin Lawrence 22:39

And even some of the cost dis­ci­plines they get loose. Some­times this com­pa­ny scales, just stay­ing tight. And every depart­ment has core dis­ci­plines, just back to the basics. And you know, in think­ing some­times a lit­tle more respon­si­bil­i­ty. And then final­ly, if the worst hap­pens, and again, hope­ful­ly this con­ver­sa­tion is a waste of time, and the worst does­n’t and it does­n’t become, you know, a hard core adjust­ment. But if and when it does come time to cut, there’s lots of dif­fer­ent strate­gies. And Brad and I have both seen, if you have to make a cut, cut notably deep­er than you think you need to and do it once obvi­ous­ly, it’s the last resort, to need to cut peo­ple, ide­al­ly, if you tru­ly live your val­ues and val­ue your peo­ple. But when there are cuts, it’s hard. And it’s not fun at all. It’s also a great incen­tive to make sure you’re an A or an A plus play­er for those of you lis­ten­ing out there who are in charge, because then you don’t get cut, we gen­er­al­ly almost nev­er cut the A plus­es or the A play­ers. Con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, we do every­thing we can to keep the best one but cut hard­er than you think you need to and ide­al­ly ear­li­er, but the most impor­tant cut based on your val­ues. I remem­ber it in the Mid­dle East, and I will nev­er remem­ber the state of the rest of my life. Because I almost threw up in the board­room. And I’m not jok­ing. We had to make some seri­ous cuts because that mar­ket was a land­slide. It was incred­i­ble. And we went through and I was run­ning the flip chart with the chair­man and all of the CEOs Chair­man the board and the CEOs in the room. And we’re not­ing what our strat­e­gy was. The last one was peo­ple. Yeah, it was like man­ag­ing inven­to­ry man­ag­ing payables, excess spend­ing, exec­u­tive com­pen­sa­tion, actu­al­ly bonus­es exec­u­tive con­ver­sate it basi­cal­ly but the cut­ting employ­ees is the last one and we did­n’t have to and because they stuck to their val­ues, they want­ed to take care of their peo­ple that have been loy­al to them and that’s what you want to be able to do. Which you have to make a lot of oth­er deci­sions right not to have to do it and some­times you can’t avoid it.

Brad Giles 24:44

Every­one who’s been through that chal­leng­ing sit­u­a­tion and come I’ll say close to the wire. Always wish they had cut hard­er and ear­li­er. Yes, you speak to them and I’ve spo­ken to a lot of peo­ple throw that they always might they always have that wish? Like zip cut based on your val­ues? And yeah, no, that is through those cuts, know what will hap­pen on the oth­er side? You know, yeah, think about three 6, 12 months, what does it look like? And why are we mak­ing these tough choices?

Kevin Lawrence 25:20

It’s fas­ci­nat­ing haven’t been through orga­ni­za­tions have had to make some of these cuts. And it’s not fun and nev­er desired. But it’s actu­al­ly kind of good for the orga­ni­za­tion and the soul. It fresh­ens things up. It’s shock­ing how all of the work still gets done. Yeah, like always, all the work gets done. It’s also why I’m a freak about try­ing to man­age SG and a growth or over­head growth. Yeah, because when your over­grown over­head grows too fast, it also has to get cut. And it’s not, it’s not fun at all. So if the worst case hap­pens, just stare the prob­lem in the face and be aggres­sive about it. And then you can build rebuild stronger, but hope­ful­ly we don’t get there. So sev­en actions to deal with a poten­tial of an unhealthy econ­o­my or an econ­o­my that fades for a lit­tle bit. So num­ber one, plan for the best look for the big oppor­tu­ni­ties and how you’re going to thrive and cap­i­tal­ize on it. Keep your eyes on the prize. And then also plan for the worst. What do you got to do to look at sce­nar­ios to make sure that your income state­ment and bal­ance sheet can han­dle it so you can come out the oth­er side and get to ben­e­fit into the next cycle? Antic­i­pate cus­tomer needs, pre­dict what’s going to hap­pen and be pre­pared? You know, what’s the next ver­sion of the masks that is gonna go through the roof in terms of demand? And then cash is king, start man­ag­ing it now be on it, build it up or oth­er­wise con­tin­ue on there and sell stuff.

Brad Giles 26:44

Num­ber five is have a plan for a plan is how are you going to keep a play­er’s? How are you going to acquire a play­ers from your com­pe­ti­tion when your com­pe­ti­tion get into trou­ble if they do. Num­ber six, ensure that your dis­ci­plines are tight, go back to meet­ing rhythms, pri­or­i­ties, get­ting the right data, go back to the basics. And then final­ly, if the worst hap­pens, cut hard and cut ear­ly. Make sure that you’re doing the right thing and you’re con­nect­ing to your val­ues and you have a longer term plan. We don’t know what’s going to hap­pen but we know we’re see­ing enough signs to talk about it. So this has been the Growth Whis­per­ers pod­cast and we have inter­est­ing and some might say wor­thy of read­ing newslet­ters. Each of us Kev­in’s is at Lawrence and co​.com Mine is at evo­lu­tion part​ners​.com​.au And also if you’ve enjoyed this episode, you can sub­scribe and maybe even rate the pod­cast. It’s been great to chat to you today. Look for­ward to chat­ting to you again next week.