COVID-19: Thriving in a time of uncertainty

Webinar Summary: How Advisors & Entrepreneurs

To watch the webinar click this link.

Click here for a downloadable version of this report.

We began our session by polling our audience of 100 entrepreneurs and advisors.

On a scale of 10 to1 (with 10 beings “you will get through this crisis with minimal impact.”), where do you place yourself? One person responded with 2, but the majority of respondents put themselves between 4 and 7.

From what we are seeing, most people are optimistic, despite the unprecedented place we find ourselves in.

We must all keep three things top of mind:

Never let a crisis go to waste
We’ve been given the gift of time.
Move from the outside in.

Move from the outside in.

We have a tendency to focus inward during difficult times. Now, more than ever, however, we need to work from the outside and work our way in. Think about what you can do for your ideal client. What can you do that’s most valuable for everyone in your social circle, including friends, family and clients?

We have been given the gift of time.

The current crisis has given us the gift of time. How you use this time over the next few weeks or months will be a key determinant of leveraging the crisis and the growth of your business. When planning at The Covenant Group, we start at the top and work down—we also start at the bottom and work up.

Work ON your business

Working from the top means working ON your business. This approach best addresses your business model which is what looks at the viability of your business, Return on Investment, and the creation of shareholder value.

Work IN your business

Working from the bottom means working IN your business. You do this when you focus on the procedural aspects of how you grow your business. Successful businesses are built on replicable processes. A process is a pattern or methodology that is distinguishable, repeatable and transferrable.

If you don’t take time to work on your business, you’ll waste the crisis.

Now is the time to redefine your business. The tagline of The Covenant Group is Redefining Performance. You now have an opportunity to redefine performance and take your business to the next level.

Never let a crisis go to waste.

A mantra that should be front of mind for you right now is never let a crisis go to waste. The opportunity today is to redefine work. For example, a business where the primary focus is face-to-face, is now forced to operate differently. As a result, we must innovate. Innovation is the application of novelty that works. Today, that’s primarily about finding new ways of interacting through the use of technology. It’s about leveraging technology.

One of our clients provides an example of the successful leveraging of technology. Breathe Life facilitates the online sale of life insurance and related products. Their platform supports financial advisors and allows them to interact seamlessly with their clients online.

In focusing on the notion that we should never let a crisis go to waste, our work at The Covenant Group addresses four cornerstones that are critical to growing your business and creating a sustainable enterprise.

The four cornerstones

Strategy is the alignment of three elements:

What are the outputs or objectives you want to achieve?
What capabilities and resources do you have to realize them?
What opportunities and challenges does the environment provide?

Structure is a system of roles, role relationships, and policies that define accountability and authority. How is your business structured and how can you make it more effective and efficient in these unprecedented times?

Systems and Processes are critical to the growth of your business. A system is defined as a detailed set of methods, procedures and routines created to carry out a task, perform a duty or complete an action. You have the opportunity to think through how your systems and processes can optimize your effectiveness.

Financial Management. How can you create revenue with minimum disruption? Given the unprecedented nature of what we are experiencing now, we will address each of these areas in this and future webinars.

Risk vs. Uncertainty

The only thing that’s certain is death and taxes. The original meaning of risk included the notion of hope. We can, for example, calculate the probability of rainfall which can be good or bad. Heavy rain can cause flooding, It can also alleviate drought.

Today we use risk largely to reflect danger or harm. We can know the probability of rain falling. We can know the probability of someone developing COVID-19 and the likelihood of it spreading. What we don’t yet know is how many people will comply with guidelines given by public health officials.

It’s important to distinguish between risk and uncertainty. In times like this, risk refers to the mathematical models or the assumptions we use in order to know the degree to which we are exposed. Models used to calculate risk are only as good as the assumptions embedded in them.

We can only have certainty in a world where we know all the risks, variables, and know that our assumptions are completely accurate. Uncertainty arises because we live in a world of incomplete information or unknowns. We should not conflate risk and uncertainty.

What role do you play for your client in a context of risk and uncertainty?

Your job is to help clients understand how they’re going to mitigate risk. All models are imperfect, incomplete and can be improved. They are only as good as the assumptions made when developing them. That’s where uncertainty comes in.

We cannot remove all uncertainty unless we know all the variable and all assumptions are one hundred per cent correct. The real world never works like that. People buy insurance, in particular, because the world is uncertain. Insurance is just one of the tools we use to reduce our exposure to risk, while understanding there’s uncertainty ahead of us.

Don’t conflate risk and uncertainty

What we know is that there’s risk to our health associated with the virus and economies and markets will be impacted. There is economic and financial risk. We can mitigate or eliminate risk by diversifying assets, going to cash and making sure we are well-financed.

There are things we can do eliminate risk personally and for our clients. People conflate risk and uncertainty. We all know we’re in uncertain times. Your job is to help others manage risk in a time of uncertainty.

Today, we’re dealing with complex systems, politically, economically, socially and technologically. The more complex and highly evolved the system, the more inherently unstable it is, and we’re experiencing that today.

Taming Complexity

Instability poses risks with regard to how we work and live. We can’t address complexity with complexity. We have to take what is complex and make it simple, without removing the complexity. At The Covenant Group, we coach our clients and educate them on how to address complexity. The antidote to complexity is inquiry. It’s asking questions and establishing simple guidelines. One simple guideline first introduced by Alex Mackenzie: there are four types of tasks. When we’re given the gift of time, we have an opportunity to think and act differently about the tasks we choose to perform. The four types of task:

Important and urgent
Important, not urgent
Urgent, not important
Routine

Most of us live in a time-compressed world. The tendency is to focus on those tasks that are important and urgent, or routine. We know that high performers do what’s important when it’s not urgent. Today’s gift of time gives you an opportunity to focus on what’s important when it’s not urgent. For example, it is a great time to be working on your business and spending time on developing a methodology for growing your business differently in a time of unprecedented change.

What do you focus on in a time of crisis?

High performers we work with work on what’s important and not urgent, not only in times of crisis but all the time. You’ve been given the gift of time and that’s an opportunity.

We want to emphasize the importance of maintaining the momentum you are about to build with you into the future and long after the current crisis has abated. We don’t know when, but we know the crisis will end.

How can this crisis become a gift?

The management guru Peter Senge once write about a Jamaican man who was given a terminal diagnosis. He was told he had just three months to live. He redefined his life to do all the things he dreamed of doing. He returned to the doctor's office two months later only to be told he had been misdiagnosed. He wasn’t ill. He was, in fact, in fine health. The man began to cry and when the doctor asked why he was crying he said, “I’m scared. I’m afraid I’m going to go back to my old ways of working.”

This crisis has changed the way we think about work and each of us needs to find things we want to maintain long after the crisis has passed. These things are most often found in our bucket of important but not urgent things. One coaching client recently said, “I’m afraid my children will remember this as one of their favorite times because Dad was home.”

This is an opportunity for all of us to redefine our work.

We want to use this time to really think about those things that are often defined as working ON your business. We all learned in school how spaced out study time is better than cramming. We perform much better. So too when we take time to work on our business. It can be a differentiator. For example, it’s well worth your time to learn how to spend time mastering the conversational environment.

WEBINAR HIGHLIGHTS

Leverage technology to save time.
The high performers who spoke during our webinar started using online meetings to save time on travelling to their clients. Leverage people, capital, and technology to meet your goals.
There’s a difference between a conversation online and one offline. Practice and be intentional with your online conversations.
Grasp the opportunity to maximize your ‘Windshield time’ or idle time where you were previously unproductive.
Work to redefine or redesign your work.
Use technology to draw simple pictures online with clients.
Get people to act by listening. Online listening is different because you lack some standard cues.
Stop talking. When you ask a question, stop talking and listen.
Planning is often interpreted as if there is only one person involved. Yet, rarely do people exist in isolation.
Knowing what you know frees your mind to focus on the conversation.
You are responsible for the communication.
If the client gets lost, it’s your fault and your responsibility. Own the communication.
Design your environment for your success and build in some buffer i.e. room for unknowns.
Unfold your story in a way that control’s the client’s attention.
Help clients see problems they didn’t know existed.
Physical presence is unnecessary if you manage cadence in your interactions.
Make the sale easier by creating the conditions for your reputation to precede you.
Master the conversational environment. It’s not just what you say, but how you say it. When you’re face-to-face, that includes your body language and your tone of voice and tempo.
When you move with confidence you create confident clients. If you move with uncertainty you create uncertain clients.
Be better people for others than we are for ourselves.
Are you asking your clients the right questions?