April 07, 2020

Starting Over

Excluding the minority of companies that have been unimaginably blessed by a worldwide pandemic (I'm looking at you Walmart and many online food brands), the rest of us will have to reboot our businesses at some point in the next few months. 

We'll literally start over. 

I know I've had to start over ... nobody cares about File Power when your business isn't allowed to be open. Nobody cares about Merchandise Forensics when you're not open. The majority of my project work over the past three years has no meaning in this world. I have to temporarily focus on saving companies money RIGHT NOW ... it's different now.

Some of us won't have access to a significant share of our Fall Assortment. Gonna be hard to sell stuff when you don't have merchandise to sell.

Some of us will have to liquidate millions of dollars of Spring Merchandise at a time when nobody wants to buy it and/or can't afford it.

The smartest marketers (hint - that's you) are already planning a reboot of the business ... and the smartest marketers are not going back to what they've always done (largely because the world won't ever be the way it was ... that world ended the moment Tom Hanks told us he tested positive on March 10). 

There's no way you are going to send a tepid email on a Thursday morning saying "We're All In This Together" and then offering the customer 30% off instead of 20% off. We aren't all in this together. Some people are making a killing off of a pandemic and many people are not able to pay rent, or are sitting in cars for miles waiting for food from a food bank ... and others are dealing with much, much worse. "We're all in this together" simply isn't good enough. It's time to craft a plan.

It's time prepare for the rebooting of our businesses ... literally and figuratively. Use the time you have in April to put your plan together. Most of us are starting over, whether we want to acknowledge the fact or not. May as well get a head start reinventing the future. You've spent your entire career ... either 40 years or 40 months ... preparing to do something amazing. You're about to get your chance. I'm confident you will shine!!!!!

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