How to take advantage of the Lockdown

Adjusting to hard times by re-evaluating your resources.

Empty Paris after the Government declared an official lockdown.

Through these hard times, I feel like we need to be honest and look for more ways of adding value not just to others but to our selves. These ideas are meant particularly for entrepreneurs, but can also help non-entrepeneurs.

There are 3 main areas getting major disruptions: Time, productivity and interactions.

• TIME

Regardless of our professional activities, our time can be priced in the market, based on our income, revenue generated, added value or any other monetary metric. The first disruption of the lockdown is, the price of our time, let’s think our hourly rate just plumbed, this means it dramatically decreased its value.

Because we just hit the black Friday price of our hourly rate (we internally call this the Black Friday time paradox), this means we can allocate time to activities we usually thought-about a waste of time, but in reality, we are transformational for our companies.

1.-Writing the Company Manifesto

For us, the Manifesto means:

When hired for it, we mean by manifesto, how we accomplish it, who we are, what makes us special and how we do things around here. That includes mission, vision, and values. Last but not least a Wiki, is a document that explains how mission, vision, and values are lived and implemented inside our organization.

2.- Documenting processes and building manuals

This is the fastest way of optimizing your company, write the top 5 most recurrent or revue generating processes, and describe:

• Stages
• Time
• Stakeholders

Then try to understand bottlenecks, efficiency opportunities and how to scale them.

3.- Creating or identifying your personal or your company sophistication

Most companies struggle when asked, what’s your company superpower? what made or will make your company a success?

Hint: is not price, it is not delivery time, it has to be super specific and super sophisticated.

• PRODUCTIVITY

We tend to measure our productivity on external factors, sales, revenue, growth, KPI’s, etc. But in a lockdown, most of those external factors are going to be in standby for the short term, so this means, are we no longer productive?

In uncertainty, we need to build it!

So, the first step to take back control is, how we will measure our productivity?

If productivity describes various measures of the efficiency of production, the only thing that we need to choose which goals can be accomplished while in lockdown?

You can focus on:

1.-Developing a set of digital tools for:

Time management: You can check out, asana.com, monday.com, taskmeister.com among others. There are also some methodologies for it, like chunking. Chunking is the grouping together of information into ideally sized pieces so they can be used effectively to produce the outcome you want without stress or shutdown.

2. -Define how will you measure your life success:

Can you imagine choosing only one metric for measuring how successful you were in your life? it sounds a bit extreme but it is an amazing exercise to attach metrics to your priorities, what means success for you? your company your family? your partner?

Your starting point should be Clay Christiensen's book How Will You Measure Your Life? You can learn some more here.

3.-Learn a set of skills. We regularly upgrade the operating system of our smartphone or our computer, sometimes, when time is available we should think of updating ourselves. This means, which skills can help me evolve?

The biggest advice we give while boosting up founders or c-level team member is, forget about the obvious skills and make a leap of faith, are you a CFO? learn about service design instead of financial reporting 2.0, are you a CMO? think about psychology or web development; we like to think that by adopting radical skills we can transform the way we conceive our day to day activities.

• INTERACTIONS

By now, I’m sure you have heard about social distancing, a term applied to certain actions that are taken by Public Health officials to stop or slow down the spread of a highly contagious disease; this means, avoid social interaction, and because of that your will disrupt how you do (past, present, and future) business.

This means it’s gonna be hard to get new customers and to avoid losing existing ones; here are some actions that we are implementing with some of our clients:

1. -Because of the Black Friday time paradox, our client had a lot of cheap time, so we decided to create yearly strategies for clients and prospects, with simulations that showed the impact of working with us; this means, a lot of hours put into it, but is a mechanism that generates: fidelity, curiosity, word of mouth and keeps relationships alive.
2. -Post-sales are one of the most forgotten or underrated areas of the sales process, this means once your customer got the product/service and the pay for it, the relationship is over; but because the overtime, we implemented a calendar for everyone in a 500+ employees company to schedule 10 min calls with clients to understand the experience of being a client and offer them 30% off of their next transaction. This mechanism optimizes interactions that generate: empathy, learnings, customer development, and customer satisfaction, also word of mouth and keeps relationships alive.

*When I talk about we, I am talking about my team at Indip; Indip is an international firm focused on working with clients to solve problems and making companies better. If you are interested in our services, please reach me at pablo@4founders.org