Survive

What’s the first imperative for any business? It’s not profits. It’s not people. It’s survival. Can’t grow your profits if you go under. Can’t take care of your people with no profits and no company.

I was with a team recently and some of the members were excited about all the upside on a specific type of deal and frustrated that other members of the leadership team didn’t seem to get that the company was losing out on a ton of upside. They were missing that the owner/founder actually didn’t care that much about the upside. He had institutional memory of a time they tried to capture too much upside, the market dropped, and it almost resulted in going under. Address THAT old fear with your plan. What’s the risk mitigation? How can we capture some of the upside AND protect ourselves from the downside. Now you’ll get the ear of the whole leadership team.

Survive first. Don’t over leverage. Don’t get too excited during a market run. Equal and opposite reactions – the drop will come. Plan for it. Don’t be a doomsayer and don’t swing to the opposite extreme. Do be measured. Have a plan that addresses the upside and the downside.

By the way, they rinsed their plan and more explicitly hit on the risk mitigation aspect. Result? Whole team is stoked to move forward on a deal that could have some big time implications for their growth.