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This week, Dan is joined by Bridgepoint Consulting’s Director of Technology, Vijay George and Manuel Azuara, Bridgepoint Managing Principal, is back to discuss how to lead through crisis. From how to prepare as best as possible as an organization, to how to lead with compassion Vijay and Manuel share what they have learned over the years that can help guide companies and organizations through unexpected obstacles.  

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Transcript:

This is a founding media podcast if welcome to growth and scale insiders I’m your host Dan Dillard on this series experts from Bridgepoint consulting will be joined by current C. suite level leaders to discuss strategy trends financial development processes and more on this episode we’re gonna dive into a timely topic how to lead to a crisis with interglobe currently having to change house doing business we’re sitting down with manuals were engine principal at Bridgeport in V. G. George director of technology at bridge point to discuss the bridge which is done to repair for moments like this from how to find new avenues of revenue before cost cutting to testimonials before disaster strikes businesses have to be nimble in order to change and make real time decisions let’s jump in and hear more from manual in project cinnamon thank you both for being on the show glad to be here Dan glad to be here as well I’m really interested in this topic leading through emergency or crisis especially in light of financial health or another crisis affecting us currently we should probably talk first about some background gives the audience a perspective on your current roles manual this is your second half so we have you on so some may know you a bit already but let’s recap your time with Bridgepoint and what you do there sure thanks Dan lead our finance accounting consulting practice and a managing principal of the firm former CFO’s have a finance background and as we’ll talk more today so much about this crisis time is having seen it before and not overreacting so looking forward to talking through this visit here also with Bridgepoint what do you do there so I’ve been with the with bridge point three years this is my third year and Lead Through a Crisis I’m the director of the technology consulting practice Lead Through a Crisis prior to bridge point I managed Lead Through a Crisis technology teams I was the CIO for the state comptroller’s office and prior to that LCRA and so I’ve a number of companies with their technology strategies roadmaps and pretty cool manual during the national crisis local crisis or any crisis seems like every decade we face one two or three this ticket has already started off with our first right out of the gate is this something you should plan for an address in this part of the business plan you know Dan the the easy answer Vijay Lead Through a Crisis chocolate this you know the easy answer is yes look up the hard answer is especially what we’re going through today there’s almost no way to plan for entire shut down right so let’s be real Lead Through a Crisis it’s gonna be very difficult but as you go through your business planning there should always be that conversation around worst case scenario in in whatever you know what’s the short list of things we can do to do some downside protecting VJ especially as we think about technology and anything that we’re doing today that may take us a little bit too long to do you you know integrating that integrating those things so that you can produce answers quickly these helpful to do when you’re not in a crisis for just trying to do it when you’re in a crisis having certain systems I’m sure earliest thinking ahead and you’re you’re quite right I mean that that the to be able to think ahead about just what possibly could happen there’s just no way to to to deal with that but potentially having some emergency here’s what our emergency situations are and here’s the basic flow through might be something that yes so a lot of times when companies are putting other forecasts they’ll do Lead Through a Crisis high middle low right in especially in times of economic boom V. lo usually doesn’t get a ton of thought and it’s not low enough right and so when you build that high medium low forecast should take the time to say okay this is the low as we feel today because we’re all humans and there’s a lot of psychology in this and what happens if it’s thirty percent lower than our low or forty percent lower than our low Lead Through a Crisis in in in thinking about what would have to happen not only in the business right Lead Through a Crisis but but process wise thinking through well okay free I’ll just give an example right so you know let’s say we have to do a cash flow forecast and updated every month you’re thinking through processes like that to say okay what if we need to update that three times a week are are we prepared you are we integrated enough do we have access to data quick enough to be able to do that and there’s nothing like having gone through it before because it rice’s will expose every crack you have been a process in about two seconds no kidding visit in a nutshell can you explain what a for me to think about this in terms of system architecture if they want to keep up with something unexpected crisis mine you know that’s a very good question and from my perspective I think a lot about operations right so I think back to my time at at LCRA or even to this state and I think about business continuity during during crisis during a disaster those kind of things now that involves you know thinking of just systems that you know okay what are our backup systems what happens when we don’t have those systems in other words you know what what happens if our payroll system goes down what do we do is our backup plan go tell the the bank to re run the payroll from last time and then we we reconcile afterwards you know what are those kind of things that you would want to do to continue your business lower the impact to your to your employees to your customers as much as possible but there’s a lot you you could think through and do when you’re thinking about it and it doesn’t have to be any one specific disaster but if you think about okay hurricane coming through well you know I always had to think through that what if a power line gets cut to my data center what happens if not one facility is not available all right what happens if there is a pandemic and people couldn’t come in to work so when you think about all of those things you start going okay how do I have redundancy in my systems what are what are ways that allow people to work remotely what are things that I can do to help my functional side of the business continue while you know your I. T. systems are coming back up right so while you’re going through a disaster you want to you know keep the business going moving forward as much as possible but there is some thinking that needs to happen before that but what’s what’s kind of interesting about it is that it you know the same lessons apply whether you’re thinking about hurricane or about your building being gone right and Lead Through a Crisis so that as Lead Through a Crisis you know as a lot of people say it’s not really the the plan itself is the process you went through to get to the plan that will help you when you you know when you get to the crisis and then you go okay it didn’t it didn’t go exactly as my plan but I know the process I’m going through to be able to continue the business arctic continue the the operations that makes a lot of sense and not and I imagine that Lead Through a Crisis certain businesses have to think about certain things that may not affect others for example if you’re a a online business and you’re gonna have a surge of people during the crisis I imagine you have to see some of that the space on the previous roles of we’ve noticed for example the zoom you know has a lot more people using online data so they’ve got to beef up their systems I what what do you do in that situation if you’re a company that’s going to have a lot more traffic in a short period of time you know one of the things that you need to think about especially as as you’re thinking about it is reading some redundancies and eliminating as many single points of failure as possible so for instance you know a lot of times you think of your internet connection now in this point your with you’re completely reliant on your internet connection well you know do you have agreements in place with not just one provider but with multiple providers you know do you have the ability to go zoom but also you know maybe maybe our backup is Lead Through a Crisis web conferencing or or Microsoft teams or something like that right yeah that makes less sense yeah one of the other things I think that gets missed a lot is that people also have to exercises while you’re going while you’re in normal state if you will that allows you to kind of switch because if everybody’s trying to figure it out in the crisis that’s really not going to happen that’s really interesting it reminds me of fire drills in school right yeah or tornado drills in school you reach a we can talk about what just happened with us right zero so this is a leadership team meet every Monday morning and you have probably ten people in the office five people remote well a month ago so before all this was going down here locally we were having construction our office so we decided to make the meeting one hundred percent remote in teams and it worked fantastic and it works so well that everyone’s like Hey we kinda like this maybe we’ll do this every week then this happens and we’re like oh can you you were already doing it spoke perfect accidental brilliance sometimes well that’s that’s what I’m also seeing Lead Through a Crisis as businesses are strict forced to work from home a lot of things are I know for my businesses it’s adapt ation but then also you like Lead Through a Crisis new way of doing business that is an option ends there might be some better better ways to do things yep exactly this is a manual can you walk me through maybe a process that as a company I should have in place for emergencies Lead Through a Crisis we talked about the high medium and low but let’s just talk about the framework within looks like sure you know Dan the a lot of times when people do a crisis planning it’s really easy to think about how do I need to scale my business down right it’s it’s easy for people’s brains to grow to wrap their head around expenses and I say easy in a relative sense none of it’s easy let’s be clear but but to be able to say okay you know here’s how I have to scale down here’s how you know some of their fortunate decisions we have to make the interesting thing though in some things we’ve been talking to people in the last couple of weeks about two years you should you should spend the same amount of time and effort thinking about the additional revenue generation activities you could be doing right and so it’s really easy to focus on the cuts or the things we have to slow down but there are other opportunities out there too and if you don’t spend time thinking about the revenue capabilities you could be seen then you’ll never cut enough because you just you just can’t get there then you’re not it’s kind of this vicious cycle right spending all my time thinking about cuts Lead Through a Crisis I’m not doing anything on the revenue generation side which means I never cut in US type of things so we saw that a lot actually in oh wait no nine so some of this is just learn to going well before we challenge some of our teams and some of our client teams that before we talk we we know we have to talk about the expense reduction that’s a given but before we talk about that let’s spend some time talking about other revenue generating ideas and let’s challenge ourselves to not cut as much as we think we need to cut because we can find other avenues of revenue that’s really interesting because I find myself asking a simple question is where else can I provide value as a business owner right and some doing things one way and it’s working however now that you’re in a new scenario what other things they might not thinking about her having not thought about that provides added value to this as a service right that’s I think that’s what I’m hearing you say is let’s let’s look at those things right right in in back to one of Vijay’s points about your testing some of these things a lot of folks and finance departments get in a bind to win they can’t produce data and information analytics fast enough because they’ve been used to say a monthly cadence of quarterly cadence but when it comes down to crisis time it has to be a daily every other day week Max cadence on producing some of this information so we can make real time decisions and if it takes you two days three days to produce information that’s looking back two or three days then then you’re behind and so through route when the organization is performing well those are the kind of questions to ask going if we had to do this every day could we do it right in what what are the tools we need to put in place or what of the processes we need to change to be able to produce meaningful accurate data quickly so many one of things we talked about for was that you know I’ve got a twenty year background in wealth management and see some lease prices ins and what I’ve had to do is provide leadership to clients when it comes to market crashes of because there’s high fears is this something that also affects businesses from a standpoint of like let’s say cash flow I would think that’s a high concern do I have that right here yeah absolutely and the first name again this is just learned right so when you think about I’ve been in the business arena since nineteen ninety five so you’re going through the tech downturn of the late nineties go through nine eleven you’ve gone through oh eight oh nine crash and now and now so this is just a learned a thing it’s not natural but the first thing to do is bring you I mean that is the first thing is he keep a clear head find a quiet place to to chest think clearly it’s hard to do I mean it’s a lot easier again relatively speaking because we’ve been through three or four from now to know that but if you’re going through it for the first time it can be a glitch can be vomit inducing right I mean this is difficult and Lead Through a Crisis you know it’s definitely no no laughing matter it’s hard is really hard so if you can just just take the time to read the breeze with your leadership team I mean Vijay you know we have these calls it right now twice a week we’re just saying Hey let’s talk about what’s going on and what are the positivity is were seen out there and try and as much as you can keep that positive mental flow because the negatives not gonna go away it’s rare and it’s happening right but the but it takes effort to to keep that positive flow you know the other thing I think of is Lead Through a Crisis as we’ve gone through a few of these is you always come out the other end right there isn’t not it somewhere right and so what are the opportunities that you see as it comes out on the other side how well have you prepared the organization too you know shoot out of the gate right so that you’re using the time the lessons all of those things to identify those things and set up better infrastructure around you to be able to rise up when when it’s time right in addition to just producing it what the smart thing to do around failures learning from and growing from it and this is a society or natural disaster or these are failures that happened and what we do to grow from them and become better so that makes a lot of sense feature and you know there there was a saying and in a lot of I. T. shops especially in cyber security sake don’t let a crisis go to waste right so it’s always hard to get cybersecurity funding in the you know those kind of findings when nothing’s happened right so when something happens and now you’ve got the attention or the focus around it and some of those other things that we would not get the priority but will set you up longer term for better growth and better outcomes you know let’s let’s see what we can do it right so look for the opportunities in the dish into just dealing with the crisis moments that’s so funny I find a lot of parallels Lead Through a Crisis backed him again the wealth management business Iran and and just kind of the needs of the business one of the things that you pointed out as during crisis you’ll find that when markets are going up you know you can throw darts at the wall to make money right Lead Through a Crisis markets crashing that’s one of the phone structuring is like I’m not doing something right so your point is a is like when the crisis are happening is when you have to step up and say here’s what we’re doing differently and and is the smarter on that note menu one of these you said was was exactly the advice I give which is great it is like to meditate breathe you gotta find you’ve got a shut out the noise and it’s gotta be quiet because we’ve got this masterful sub conscious mind is always working but we got it set up so we can listen to a lot of answers directly here so a three hundred percent one of the things that Lead Through a Crisis this makes me think about manual is how do you prepare for cash flow situations as a business one of these I’ve noticed in some of these I was reading here as of late is a lot of small businesses Lead Through a Crisis have like twenty seven days of cash flow when we advise you know the clients begin back look much it’s like six months Kathy a living expenses and prepare for this things are even up to a year how is that business how is that different for businesses and how do you do that is that maintain healthy banking relationships credit lines like what do you do to prepare for things like that it’s different for different types of businesses and and for the size that you are Lead Through a Crisis you know if you’re if you’re a small business Lead Through a Crisis maintaining six months of cash flows very very difficult right if your nonprofit maintaining six months of six months of cash flow very very difficult it’s a good target to happen should be striving for that but the reality is it’s a really hard thing so Lead Through a Crisis as you as you grow up in size of companies the V. CMP relationships right making sure that you have access to those lines when you need them if you’re already a P. backed company you know one of the things we saw the last few years right we’re in this decade long growth period in business and for the last three years everyone’s kept saying well it’s going to turn into minutes gonna turn into minutes and so we’ve had we’ve watched clients get into new private equity relationships and ask the question Hey what are you gonna be there for us when this turns if we all agree that this is going to turn in within the life cycle of you owning us you know Mr Mrs private equity firm what what does that look like in so any get understanding what do you have access to you know if you waited till now right I mean trying to get a line of credit today it’s to not happen it’s like to live in in in understanding you know there are a lot of people that have lines of credits they have in place they feel good but back to Vijay’s point maybe they’ve never drawn on it Lead Through a Crisis they don’t even know the mechanism or or or what the covenants are where you need to be as a business to be able to draw so it’s a real interesting how many people have a line of credit having drawn on it you should test that out once or twice a year even if you draw it and pay it right back just so you know what that looks like right in order to prepare me Vijay you have to test it it’s just a little bit there put it there is Senate there the heart of the question is when we’re busy up markets the company is doing really well and you just kind of like maintaining your life the things you don’t think about his cash flow is coming in is maybe I should be having that relationship with the bank that P. E. the credit line and does the things that we’re not thinking about during those times sometimes and and I find myself questioning at what point do we need to do that I think you just answered as like you know when that’s happening should be on our list to set like let’s establish this even though we are not needed at the moment yeah always send those relationships will always be there right I mean Lead Through a Crisis if you have a banking relationship now especially if you have if you have a debt you have you have leverage on your balance sheet now and you have debt you should be you should have already been talking to the bank regularly even if there was nothing going on right just to you know we talk about or just to establish that relationship we talked earlier about times of crisis stressing you’re showing all the cracks in the business it also exposed the cracks in a relationship right whether that be a business relationship more unfortunately home relationship or whatever that is in all the principles are the same you have to work on all these things throughout the lifecycle that makes complete sense would jump into another train of thought here is it was really curious because I see that you have experience working for both the state on the LCRA Lead Through a Crisis what was your experience like there as opposed to the corporate world Lead Through a Crisis and perhaps how quickly companies can act Lead Through a Crisis you know that is that’s a very very good question so LCRA it’s kind of a it’s kind of it’s own unique beast it straddles between private and public in in a lot of ways right so it had to rely on its own revenue generation Lead Through a Crisis yeah it didn’t get a preparations and things like that so during that yeah two thousand seven crisis for instance when when the credit markets seized up they had to immediately take measures to reduce cash flow and things like that right they had to they had to cut projects in freeze things and all of those and that was very interesting learning experience for me because you know when you think about these big long system wide projects and you have to figure out okay this three year project where you’re in the one and a half year mark you had to figure out we’re like we’re like cut where to lay all of those kind of things had to be there right N. lessons coming out of that it made me realize that even if I’m in long year long multi year projects and things like that how can I break it up into monthly long three monthlong chunks where I’m actually delivering value as I go because at any point if it didn’t have to get shut down you still have some value you realized instead of you know these long projects that that take forever right yeah I’m always curious about Lead Through a Crisis that just like in public facing services and the companies or government agencies that have to face bureaucracy and then you have emergency response services that seem to be very efficient and organized as a dastardly disaster relief national emergencies and I’m just thinking about that systems it must require to be able to scale fast I know that with things that that we’re facing right now is you know there that’s what we’re facing right now is that as a nation is how do we get how do we scale what’s needed across the nation and some I’m just curious the experience there yeah M. my last experience at LCRA I went through multiple crisis over there right we had the not just the financial crisis but we actually had you remember that two thousand seven rain bomb I don’t at the end yeah twenty eleven fires that impacted the whole region here and things like that in multiple hurricanes and things like that that tested and tax star communication infrastructure and things like that in it made me really appreciate entities like that that Tom what they do on a regular regular basis is the amount of testing the amount of inter communication that they do the amount of exercising that they do two manuals point you know when when the when the hurricanes hit is not the first time you want to go Hey does my equipment rack talk to the Houston police department right you wanna get all those tested tested up front you want to have those relationships built before so that when that crisis does occur you’re able to seamlessly work together you know Lead Through a Crisis that was that that was probably my best experience because our infrastructure had to be up at L. C. array when the public infrastructure was down right so a lot of times we think about you know the the the easiest example to think about is Lead Through a Crisis our firefighters if you will right they probably spend more time training to fight the fire than the act putting out the fire right in that importance of what they do gives us that that predictability of they’re gonna respond they’re going to be here they’ll have the equipment they know how to communicate all of those kind of things right so that gets lost a lot of times when we are in a good period right like granulocytes and it’s like we’ve been in ten years of a good financial of trying take we don’t we don’t think about the don turn right but we got to continuously tested exercise it think about it and Lead Through a Crisis you know be prepared for it D. J. that’s just something we have to do better as as corporate citizens we we we and we’re all guilty of this right we do not we don’t practice enough we don’t practice disaster management enough that’s something that the public sector the first responders do way way better than the private sector is we just we don’t practice in that you know you know how many of these we have to go through before we all start start using that part of our brain of which we ought we ought to practice at least you know at least once or twice a year we should practice this okay question for both what’s the one piece of advice you’d offer leadership of companies they’re dealing with keeping up the company staffed in the second part of that question is long term versus short term cash flow needs PJ will start well you know leadership in a lot of ways right one is you know around the send a clear message to your teams are too as manual said let’s calm down right we will get through this let’s be clear and calm this is so so help your teams with that and then help your clients you know reach out to your clients and those kind of things right so those are two of the the important things to do immediately as you’re going through this right because those are who you’re gonna rely on right your your teams and your clients to help you navigate through this as you go through right Lead Through a Crisis I forgot what the second was just it you might have asses not long term versus short term cash flow needs silence let manual do that well I’ll start with with the leadership one because I’ll give two answers damn ones you no one will be the answer in crisis mode unlike a lot of folks are today want to be an answer outside of crisis mode and in so in crisis mode why he remained seated earlier but were you just calm down at the same time listen to your leadership team you hired a fantastic leadership team for a reason all the answers don’t have to fall on your shoulders as the as the CEO listen to your leadership team have them help every everyone who’s here wants to have an actionable item right and so have the leadership team is part of the answer in giving the whole firm involved for what can everyone do you instead of you may be sitting at home or not knowing what to do or uncertainty give them some clear direction but that leadership team is so important you you hired them for a reason they should be bringing tremendous value and for what a time to grab those brains and say Hey let’s think about this together and everyone body can take their piece of execution so that doesn’t offer like it’s falling on one person’s shoulders Lead Through a Crisis outside of crisis time I would say is you’re hiring that leadership team these are the things you should be thinking about right could every person on this leadership team lead this company regardless of what may happen and so if you have that group of leaders just so you know what at the drop of a hat any one of these people to pick up the reins and lead this lead this company through crisis you will hopefully assembled a pretty awesome our leadership team one that’s empowered to help one of the things that that made me think about is some of these companies that are actually stepping up during crisis Lead Through a Crisis you mentioned insurance companies but there’s so many other companies I think mark Cuban had opposed the other day of in these times is when companies will make the reputation of the next ten years because they step up and they’re not only were taking care of their own employees but they’re taking care of what can we do for others and I think that’s a big piece of what we were talking about calming your mind and part of that is like immediately when you think about others your mind gets call exactly right that’s it in what’s been fascinating is it is reliving through this today everybody is remote right I mean just about everybody’s remote and it has really been neat to talk to other companies in in by the way people have been mmhm wonderfully accepting of hate let’s just talk let’s have a video chat how are you handling this how are you guys doing how are you and your family in in people almost welcome the distraction of having this conversation versus thinking through some of the hard hard business issue so don’t think that people don’t want to share and don’t want to talk to you because they do it so we’re all going through this together yeah that makes a lot of sense it makes me think of you know some of positive silver lining around these kind of events is it does bring the human out in you not that we’re not human everyday but it allows you to show that more because you’re not doing all the things that normal business cycle does like okay let’s stop slow down and reach out and Lead Through a Crisis it just brings us closer together for sure well I learned a lot today and I’m sure many of our audience did as well thank you both for being here and sharing the knowledge and experiences thank you Dan thank you Dan thank you again Bijan manual it was a welcome distraction to talk to you both about solutions during this time we need to be empathetic leaders and innovative thinkers to get through this together if you enjoyed this episode please make sure you subscribe and may be shared with a friend or coworker Rosenstiel insiders is created in partnership between Bridgepoint consulting and founded media to learn more about Bridgepoint please visit the links emotions thank you for listening