I warned y’all that that the Federal Reserve was going to make running our businesses more difficult this year.  These repetitive ¾% interest rate hikes are supposed to control inflation- and they probably will- but in the meantime our cost pressures are immense and the economy is roiling under their yoke.

I also told you it was time to plan.  To be able to handle the buffeting of the economy.  And, with a bunch of our clients, that’s exactly what we all did together.

We learned these rules back in the 1980s, when there was a recession in these here United States.  And, that was when we were spinning off an R&D project, along with some of our key personnel, to produce and market a novel medical product.

The spinoff would involve three key personnel.  Eventually, those folks would become the CEO, the COO, and the CQO of the new entity.  We spent a month developing our business plan (which included marketing and operational aspects) – but our initial output was going to be limited to about 10 customers (we only had two or three assured at the time).

We also used a very modern method (one that was not prevalent back then) to announce our new venture.  Back then, the normal “company birth” involved an announcement that it had arrived, maybe with press announcements, and an advertising blitz.

Ours was closer to a product drop.  One that is more the norm now that we are in the social media era.

We had arranged to appear at the biggest medical conference for our sort of product, without telling a soul (other than the meeting conveners).  We didn’t have a professional booth ready (it would take four months for the system we wanted to be produced), so we brought along a popcorn popper and a ton of kernels.  We figured the aroma of the popping corn would bring folks to our niche (both our business niche AND our location at the conference)- and it did.  While we only picked up three new customers, we acquired significant data on a bunch of other interested users.

Within 45 days of “launch”, we had to modify our business plan.  Both because our production requires had trebled and we needed to address our new delivery requirements.  (We started out using UPS to ship our products; now, we were growing large enough to strike deals with LTL (less than truckload) common carriers.)

At 120 days, we had to modify our business plan again.  And, we needed to obtain new production equipment, because we were making 10 batches a day of our product- and if we purchased larger vessels, that would mean we’d only need to make one or two batches a day.  We also made sure that production room could easily handle three or four batches a day with the new equipment.

These sort of analyses are what all of our companies should be doing now.  To adjust our business operations- and our staff’s attitudes- to the new situations created by the cessation of the pandemic (it’s now an epidemic).

Tomorrow, we’ll look at what other companies are doing, so we can learn from them.