Financial Headwinds

by Jason Ogden | Sep 13, 2022

So let’s talk about financial headwinds.

The last time that there was something man-made was the financial crisis in 2008, 2009. And around that time I heard a saying pretty frequently in a lot of different environments, and it was that revenue is vanity, that profit is sanity, and that cash is reality. You could probably add a more modernized version of it and say that valuation is insanity, but that’s not what we’re here to talk about.

So financial headwinds. All right. If you’re dealing with a reality where profits are sanity and cash is reality, what are the types of things that you focus your energy on during a moment like this? And I think the best way to make it real is to share some things that we’re working on here within our business.

So within the profitability segment, we’ve done a couple of things so far in the last 90 days. Number one, we’ve sunset a product offering. It was one that I really thought was going to take off. We operationalized it very quickly. We got it into market pretty quickly. There was a lot of ask about it in prospect conversations, and after we got the business data on it, it just didn’t make sense for us or our clients, so we sunset that. So we pruned a little bit for profitability, and then we worked as we always do and we’re in a constant state of we work on creating efficiencies within our business and how we deliver services.

So if you think about results and quality of work as being fixed and non-negotiable, then the game becomes how do you deliver them more efficiently and more effectively? We have, as of today, over 148,000 recorded man hours, what does it take to deliver marketing services to our segment. So that serves as a baseline and an incredible wealth of intelligence for how to do that and to get better. Sort of in that vein, as well as shifting over a little bit into durability and resilience, we’ve also automated a key routine business practice that required a good number of hours from a wide variety of team members. We’ve brought in automation to help with that so that drove both profitability and some durability because our team is now freed up to focus more on client services and getting the results that we want. And lastly, on the durability piece is, you know, investing in our people. And one thing that we have coming up in the next quarter that I’m really excited about is some adaptability training from one of our partners. They’re going to come in and use improvisation tactics to help teach our team how to adapt both within big, big changes and small changes.

So those are a few things that we’re working on right now. I’d love to know what you all are working on to face financial headwinds.