Covid-19 Recovery

Dear Owners and Sales Managers:

Are you looking for real answers to the existential challenge that the Coronavirus and the business lockdown has created?

Yes…I know people have popped up from everywhere, offering trainings, paid and free advice. About being agile, being proactive, embracing the suck, and all kinds of magical thinking and feel good “The Secret” advice.

You don’t even have to get on those calls because I can summarize in advance what they are going to tell you:

• You have to find the silver lining that exists in every dark cloud
• Everything passes, you just have to out-wait, out-smart and out-work this situation
  
• The Chinese symbol for danger is the same symbol for opportunity
  
• Prepare now, prosper later.

Let me ask you. After a nuclear holocaust, do you think those emerging from their bunkers will resume life as normal again?

Sure, we’re not going to emerge from our lockdown bunkers into a nuclear wasteland, but we’re not emerging into yesterdays healthy world either. Those trite solutions and the explosion of experts who don’t actually own a business attempting to survive won’t be much good.

So let’s talk about what will work – what really needs to be done NOW while we’re in lockdown and how to reboot sales as we come out of this crisis.

Healthcare has constricted 50% in Q1 of this year – and bigger cuts are coming.

Consults in just the last two days included…

• An Orthopedic Implant Company
• Three Independent Service Organizations
• Several hospitals looking to restructure their purchasing agreements
• Two Urgent Care Centers wanting to renegotiate their service contracts
• A PACs company
• ​A finance company
  
• A Radiographic Equipment Manufacturer
  
• A Healthcare Consumables Distributor
  

Every one was facing draconian short falls in revenue while expenses continued to explode. Everyone was asking

“just what do I do now to survive?”

As you can see, my consulting business has turned from “how to increase sales and profits” to a “how do we survive this COVID 19 shutdown” problem solving.

So, what advice are we implementing TODAY?

Not just to survive this chaos…

But to set ourselves up for a Canon Shot Recovery once America stumbles out of our forced shutdown and ready to resume our lives?

One of my capital equipment sellers says, “All major capital equipment expenditures are on hold until hospitals figure out their budgets. I don’t expect that to happen until next year.”

A reseller told me, “I can’t survive on only  emergency funding of critical replacements.”

One service company has 9 engineers playing ping-pong in their office because PMs, installations, and routine service have all been put on hold

Warren Buffet famously said, “When the tide goes out, you find out who’s been swimming naked.” In every case, someone was swimming naked… not only the client, but the client’s client as well… and this is key.

The Coronavirus and the government’s response is the tide going out. We get to see who was swimming naked. What companies were successful only because the rising tide that existed before COVID-19 was raising all boats. Who was and wasn’t prepared. Who has the vision and courage to take the necessary steps to first SURVIVE, but then to rebuild stronger, better, fitter, more profitable.

In every one of the businesses facing crisis, we get to see who was swimming naked. Those who shore up those weaknesses will propel forward when the immediate crisis is over.

In every one of these situations, the solution, while not immediately obvious, has been found. As I worked with each of those companies, a profitable and sustainable way forward was forged.

The equipment manufacturer pivoted to rentals and a pay-per-use model. Jason, the owner,  cut costs and eliminated waste. Jason has a kind of x-ray vision to see what needed to be done, where to cut, what to minimize, and perhaps just as important, what to improve.

Owners and managers like Jason who know what to do today, tomorrow, the next day – and what not to do – will be the ones who live and thrive beyond the lockdown.

Many of your competitors will not live to see that day. Therein lies a big opportunity for you.

You need three things:

1. ​What to do (and not do) right now.
2. ​A lens for how to see into the very near future – because the strategies and methods you’ve been using up to now is obsolete. There is a new normal.
3. ​An action plan – a COVID-19 Recovery Playbook, with practical tactics, strategies, and methods to restore predictable sales and profits to your business.

That’s why I’ve created the COVID-19 Recovery Program. To equip you with a roadmap to navigate back to healthy revenue and sales.

But first we have to talk about the second point: the need to see things differently. Please don’t blow past that second point because...

When the world shifts, all the clocks are reset to zero.

This means: We don’t know, can’t know, what the future will look like. All the expectations, norms, budgets, buying processes, goals, objects, processes, systems and best practices are in a state of chaos and confusion.

All are subject to a mass reset.

Everything is up for grabs.

That is why so much, if not most, of the advice I’m hearing is wrong – it’s based on a presumption of knowledge – of things they can’t possibly know. Some examples that I’ve heard just this week are

• There will be pent up need for medical equipment and services
• Medical equipment will always need to be upgraded and replaced
• These delays will only increase demand later
• Increased caseloads with fully booked schedules will create opportunities for buying and expansion

These may or may not be true. We don’t have any real data to support any of these suppositions. We need more than an opinion that a roll of the dice won’t crap out. That’s the lesson we should have learned from the ACA bomb that exploded our healthcare norms the first time.

When a Black Swan event occurs, all clocks reset to zero. Normal dies. New normal exist. Things don’t go back to how they were.

Normal is Dead!

We need to stop basing our plans on guesses and have predictable and executable strategies. This is the  MAJOR lesson I learned when ACA crushed many of our businesses

I believed, at the time, that more sales cured all ills. That there was no problem great sales and marketing could not solve. I believed you didn’t have to outrun the ‘bear.’ All you had to do is to outrun the other guy.

I was so wrong.

You can’t outthink, outrun, outsell or avoid ‘Black Swan” Events. More on that in a minute. The key idea here is that Massive and Unpredictable events happen that we proactively react to or get obliterated by them. In short,  normal is dead. You must take action.

It may be necessary to run from many of the unprofitable products, distributors, and marketing/sales efforts that have been limping along for years

Or that you’re sitting on a gold mine of opportunities that with a slight pivot you can mine.

What’s singularly important is that you find out which path to take…AS FAST AS HUMANELY POSSIBLE. This is the exact reason I’ve created COVID 19 Recovery for Medical Device sales and service companies.

COVID-19 RECOVERY is rooted in a practical understanding of the Medical Device Business – and how an elevated, removed perspective on every crisis helps you make correct decisions for your business.

Black Swan Events

In 2007 Nicholas Taleb wrote a book called “The Black Swan.” A black Swan is an unpredictable event that has extreme consequences. Black Swan events are extremely rare, have a severe impact, and in hindsight often appear obvious. Black Swan events cause catastrophic damage to an economy and because they aren’t predictable standard remedies and forecasting tools are mostly useless.

Survive – Adapt (Pivot) – Build Smart

Become Antifragile (which was the very subject of Taleb’s next book: Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder).

Taleb says, "Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better".

Most businesses become immobilized by Black Swan events, hoping that normal will return. They hunker over their desks bemoaning the state of their balance sheets, dreading the drop of their 401ks. Most people seem to lie awake at night fretting, pacing like a frazzled parent waiting for their daughter to return home late from the prom, imaging all kinds of dark disasters that may have occurred to her.

Others are wandering around, dazed and grasping at straws, trying to wade through the Five Stages of Grief. Most are stuck in the “Bargaining” stage right now, hoping that the Payroll Protection money the government has borrowed to give them will see them through.

Some hold out hope that a new anything will bring normal back. A new healthcare policy, a new recovery package, perhaps even a new president. They hope some of the  free advice gurus are bloviating will be correct. Capital spend will explode, demand will burst forth like the rock Moses struck in the desert. Somebody will do something to resurrect Normal.

Coronavirus feels so much like 9/11. People walking around in a stupor, doing wrote things that ‘experts’ are telling them to do – regardless of any science or truth underpinning the opinions. Owners and managers distracted, glued to the news, stuck to the television screen like an agile eater on the side of a fish tank.  It’s like 9/11 because there is a BEFORE and an AFTER and the two are totally different.

Instead, you can become “The Six Million Dollar Man -- Steve Austin. “Be that man. Better than before. Better, Stronger, faster” (or woman, I’m just riffing on the TV show, perhaps dating myself in the process).

Coronavirus is your official summons to forge ahead. To officially move on from Normal into whatever we face in the future.

I’ve often compared sales to an airplane in flight. It may need repair but doing them is almost impossible. We need the plane flying, delivering the revenue that keeps the machinery turning, the business humming and paychecks cashable.

Well, our planes are grounded. Let’s get some repairs done. While we’re at it let’s do some upgrades.

So often we know what needs to be done – we just don’t do it. The government’s response to COVID 19 and the restrictions placed on our businesses making makes acting now critically important.

Truth: Doors you have been accustomed to traveling through effortlessly are SHUT.

Truth: Other  doors that were sealed tighter than a bank fault are suddenly standing WIDE OPEN.

Truth: Not everyone will survive. Less competition. Aggressively take that market share.

Truth: Healthcare will always been needed. You will always have opportunity here, in this space.

Black Swan events cause great swaths of devastation. However, they also create opportunities, innovation, and the evolution of better businesses. The trick is knowing where to direct your gaze.

Black Swan events require courage, grit, a willingness to adapt, and an work ethic of dogged persistence. But those alone aren’t enough

You also need a game plan. The kind based on X-ray vision, like Jason had.

Everyone is wringing their hands about COVID-19 and the problems are obvious enough. The adverse headwinds of healthcare are felt by all of us. Provider consolidation, reduced reimbursements, low cost goods from Asian markets, hyper-competition ravaging margins, GPO contracts, OEMs relying less and less on distributors, Amazon getting into the game. On and on.

Yet what’s not nearly so obvious is that THIS may be your BIG BREAK. But it’s camouflaged. It can only be your big break if you recognize it for what it is. Your chance to not just fix your ‘sales airplane’, but to supercharge it.

(Please note: I'm NOT looking to take advantage the loss people are experiencing or making light of the situation.  I realize that many medical device sales and service companies are in dire straits right now. Almost everyone is shaken. I’m not minimizing of the loss of life and the devastation this pandemic has had on our lives.)

The cracks that the shaking this pandemic and lockdown have caused has created fresh virgin soil where you can plant.

RIGHT NOW is when things are breaking – cracks in the ground – more surface area – making room for new growth.

This is why I am teaching for the first time, a new science based real--time online training called COVID-19 RECOVERY PLAN. It will continue across four high-density online presentations complete with study guides, an action driven playbook,  and shortcut cheat sheets.

The COVID-19 RECOVERY PLAN

Okay, I’ll come clean.

Remember when I said, some owners, like Jason, have X-Ray vision to see what needs to be done, where to cut, what to minimize, and what needs improvement?

Well, it really wasn’t ‘x-ray vision.” It’s science. I’ll let you know how it works in a minute. But before I do, let me remind you:

When a magician reveals the trick, it doesn’t seem so impressive.

Those of you who know me, know that I spend the first half of my healthcare career as an engineer, and ultimately as a VP of Operations and a Radiology Manager. When I made the transition into sales I never believed sales should be based on relationships alone, or any unpredictable set of factors that were out of my control, including milk runs and delivering donuts.

What made me successful in sales is that I created predictable selling systems, much like LEAN did for manufacturing

I’ve applied those same principles here

• The 80/20 Rule
• Boston Consulting Groups: Star-to-Dog Profit Analysis
• 130% Profit rule from Bain Capital
• Google’s OKR System (Objectives and Key Results)
• Warren Buffet’s Managing Matrix

And many other proven successful techniques for building the business Taleb described.

COVID-19 RECOVERY ACTION PLAN, isn’t a pep talk. It isn’t based on opinions about the future or guesses about what needs to be done. It isn’t advice that generates more marketing dollars or consulting services for me.

You will discover and ACQUIRE:

This is not a drive-by shooting of dirty hacks and shallow techniques. Or publicly traded stocks you’re supposed to buy or short in the next 30 days. And it’s not gonna be “obvious” stuff like “switch all your conferences from hotel ballrooms to Zoom.” (There. I already told you that one. Now we can move on.)

This is deeper. It’s more fundamental. Business game changing. Life altering. You will be employing these strategies next week, one month from now, one year from now, five years from now and 20 years from now.

How many online trainings can make that promise with a straight face?