Resilience: The ability to recover from setbacks, adapt well to change and keep going in the face of adversity.
Americans have always had a love affair with the underdog. The person who overcomes impossible odds to conquer the unbeatable foe. It’s the stuff movie scripts are made of. It’s also the stuff successful businesses are made of. They find ways to manage the vagaries of business cycles (or pandemics). They overcome obstacles. They are resilient.
Business Resilience: The ability of an organization to quickly adapt to disruptions while maintaining continuous business operations and safeguarding people, assets, and overall brand equity.
To say the resilience of small businesses is being tested is an understatement of magnitude. One recent survey reports that nearly 7.5 million small businesses are at risk of closing their doors if the coronavirus persists over the next several months. . The country lost 20,000 businesses, large and small, during the Great Depression. No amount of federal assistance will keep a far greater number of small businesses from being swamped by the Covid-19 tsunami.
The survivors will be the ones who demonstrate resilience based upon sound business practices followed well-before the virus struck. Our research points to ten performance metrics will continue to do so in the future. Here are four of those ten metrics:
- The greatest percentage of revenue coming from MORE THAN one or two clients or customers.
- Continuous innovation
- Ongoing financial planning
- A well-articulated branding strategy and value proposition
The ten metrics compromise the muscle of business resilience. Unfortunately, it’s probably too late for many small businesses to start building this muscle. It’s akin to trying to salvage the furniture when the house is on fire. But for those businesses that have paid attention to these metrics (we might even call them fundamentals), they will prove themselves the underdogs of the today but the heroes of tomorrow.
To see how your company stacks up against these metrics – take our Resilience Quotient Quiz.