A friend of mine, Rick Telberg, the President of Bay Street Group LLC started a LinkedIn discussion question as follows:

Question Details:
For a possible article for accounting firms and business advisers and strategists: What are the essential elements for leaders and managers in this economy?

Here is the response I posted:
For what it is worth Rick, I don’t think the success factors in this economy are any different than they have ever been. The fundamental factors of success in business have remained relatively constant over time.

The differences in this economy are the ramifications if we fail to focus on these critical factors that lead to success. There just isn’t any margin for error. Our safety nets if we fall have evaporated so much that if we fall we are likely to die as opposed to just being shaken up or slightly injured.

The Mission Critical Factors That Successful Businesses Know:

1. What are your most profitable products/services?
What product/service lines are you going to drop? Which ones are going to get supported by your finite inventory dollars?

2. Who are your most profitable customers?
Which customers are you going to no longer serve? Which type of customers are you going to build a marketing and sales plan around to get more of them? Which customers are going to receive a special incremental allocation of your finite customer service resources to make sure that you don’t lose your A & B customers.

3. What are your expense drivers?
What happens to your operating costs if you double your business? What happens to your cost structure and operating margins if your business volume gets cut in half?

4. How to keep control over your cash flow?
Can you accurately project your next 30, 60 & 90 days of cash flow?

5. What critical success factors apply to your business?
If you try to proactively manage 100% of your business you will fail. Proactively manage the 20% of your business that is yielding 80% of your results and reactively manage the remainder.

6. How do you identify, measure and monitor key performance indicators that are directly related to those critical success factors?
What you can measure, you can manage and what gets measured gets done.

7. What is your Strategic Plan for the next 18 months?
How are you going to compete and win by being different? What is your unique and compelling value proposition for your targeted customer? What are you going to stop doing because you cannot build a sustainable competitive advantage there?

Thanks for initiating the discussion Rick!

Please tell us your essential elements for leaders and managers in this economy.

We would love to hear from you!