Whether your business is open or closed, chaos, questions and confusion dominate your daily life. When you look outside to experts and to the government for help, the path forward becomes more complicated. While relief appears to be on the way, current reality says:
- Federal guidelines and regulations for CARES act or SBA loans remain days away from publication
- Complexity of workforce safety and work scheduling require increased attention, creativity and caution
- Raw material and supply chain logistics challenge every avenue you pursue
However, the biggest challenge is how to personalize the promised relief for your specific business needs before it arrives. Some suggestions for your relief plan:
- Use your 13 week cash flow model, or similar models, to create a financial baseline
- Use your customer backlog data, productivity throughput, workforce staffing status and support services performance to gauge forward capabilities
Create contingency scenarios based on:
- Support for workers on layoff through enhanced unemployment benefits
- Potential loan forgiveness from CARES act provisions
- Forgiveness and repayment provisions from SBA disaster relief loans
- Reaching marketplace stability in 60 days, 90 days and 120 days
While the outside world copes with an hourly crisis focus, your business needs the stability of a near term plan. I have been touched by the stories of leaders sharing just a few, straight forward planning steps with employees and their grateful response that someone is thinking about tomorrow and the day after. As useful information becomes available, we will do our best to share it with you. Meanwhile, we encourage you to use the Alliance Facebook website to communicate your thoughts and suggestions for your peers as we cope with breaking news and how to react to it.