Rock Your Strategy

Tag: people

  • Using OGSM to Build Your HR Strategy (With KPI Examples)

    Using OGSM to Build Your HR Strategy (With KPI Examples)

    Most HR strategies live in a slide deck that no one else in the business reads, references, or holds the HR function accountable to.

    OGSM for HR works by translating your company’s Strategies into people-function Goals and Measures. Instead of a standalone HR plan that runs parallel to the business, you build an HR OGSM that cascades directly from the corporate OGSM — so every people initiative traces back to a strategic bet the organisation has already made.

    This guide shows you how to build an HR OGSM that cascades directly from the corporate plan — with worked Goal examples, HR-specific Strategies, and a section on how to use it in budget and leadership conversations.

    HR strategy has a credibility problem. Not because HR leaders lack strategic thinking — it’s because the formats HR typically uses to communicate strategy (the 40-slide annual deck, the values posters, the competency framework) don’t connect to how the rest of the business plans. The CFO has a financial plan. The CPO has a product roadmap. The CHRO has a presentation.

    OGSM changes that. A one-page HR OGSM, built from the same framework the board uses for corporate strategy, is something every executive in the room can read, challenge, and hold the HR function accountable to. That shift — from HR as a support function with a deck to HR as a strategic function with a plan — is what most people-leaders are actually trying to achieve.

    Why Does HR Need a Strategy Framework at All?

    The honest answer: because people decisions are strategic decisions, and right now most organisations don’t treat them that way.

    Think about what’s actually inside an HR strategy: hiring plans, capability development, culture, performance management, compensation. These aren’t administrative choices — they’re the mechanisms by which a company builds the capacity to execute its strategy. Hire the wrong profiles and your growth plan stalls. Let attrition go unmanaged and your institutional knowledge walks out the door.

    The problem is that annual HR decks tend to list activities — programmes, initiatives, policies to update — rather than outcomes. The result is that HR leadership spends a lot of time defending budget for things that are hard to connect to business results.

    OGSM solves this by forcing the HR function to answer the same questions every other part of the business answers: What are we trying to achieve? How will we know if we’ve achieved it? What are we doing to get there? Expressed in a format that sits comfortably next to the corporate plan, not in a separate binder that only gets opened at the annual people review.

    I’ve seen HR teams go from defending headcount in budget reviews to setting the strategic agenda, simply by putting a one-page OGSM in front of the leadership team. The framework doesn’t change what HR does — it changes how clearly HR can show why it matters.

    How Do You Build an HR OGSM?

    The process follows the same four-layer logic as any OGSM, but each layer is interpreted through the lens of the people function. If your leadership team needs a shared grounding in the framework first, the full OGSM guide is the right starting point — then come back here for the HR-specific application.

    Step 1: Derive your HR Objective from the company Objective.

    Your HR Objective should be a direct expression of what the HR function needs to achieve for the company to hit its corporate Objective. If the company Objective is “become the most responsive B2B software provider in the UK mid-market,” the HR Objective might be: “Build the hiring engine and talent capability to power our scale — attracting, developing, and retaining the people the company needs to win.”

    The Objective is qualitative and aspirational, but it should be specific to your planning horizon. “Attract and retain great people” is not an Objective — it’s a job description. In my experience, the most common mistake at this stage is writing an HR Objective that sounds inspirational but doesn’t trace back to anything specific in the corporate plan.

    Step 2: Set Goals in people metrics.

    Goals in an HR OGSM are the quantified outcomes you’re committing to by year-end. They should be directly measurable and clearly linked to business impact. Good HR Goals typically come from three categories:

    • Acquisition: time-to-hire, offer acceptance rate, quality-of-hire scores
    • Retention and engagement: attrition rate, employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), regrettable loss rate
    • Capability: internal promotion rate, learning and development hours, performance distribution

    Aim for three to five Goals. Too many and the function loses focus. Too few and you’re probably not capturing the full scope of what’s at stake.

    Step 3: Define Strategies as people programmes and directional choices.

    HR Strategies are the choices you’re making about how you’ll move the needle on your Goals. They should be specific enough to brief a programme against, and they should map back to the company Strategies — each HR Strategy is the people-function response to a business-level strategic bet.

    For a company scaling aggressively into a new market, an HR Strategy might be: “Build a structured talent acquisition capability, shifting from reactive hiring to a proactive talent pipeline in our three key skill families.” That’s a directional choice that implies resourcing, tooling, and process decisions.

    Step 4: Set Measures as the KPIs you’ll track to know if the Strategies are working.

    Measures in an HR OGSM are the leading indicators — the data points that tell you whether your Strategies are executing before you can see it in the Goal outcomes. If your Strategy is building a talent pipeline, the Measure isn’t “time-to-hire” (that’s the Goal) — it’s “number of qualified candidates in active pipeline by role family” or “percentage of hires from proactive pipeline vs. reactive posting.”

    What Do Good HR OGSM Measures Look Like?

    This is where many HR OGSMs stall — not for lack of data, but for lack of agreed benchmarks. Here are five HR KPIs that work well as OGSM Measures, with the ranges I’d treat as credible targets for a scaling organisation.

    Time-to-hire: ≤21 days. Measured from job approval to accepted offer. Anything above 30 days in a competitive talent market is costing you candidates. The benchmark tightens for senior roles, but 21 days is a solid target for the majority of hires.

    Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS): ≥30. Measured quarterly via a simple survey (“How likely are you to recommend this company as a place to work? 0–10”). A score of 30 puts you in the “good” range for most industries. Above 50 is excellent. Below 0 is a serious retention risk.

    Internal promotion rate: ≥25%. The percentage of open roles filled by internal candidates. Below 20% is a signal that either your development programmes aren’t working or your hiring managers don’t trust internal talent. Above 40% may indicate you’re not bringing in enough external perspective.

    L&D hours per employee per year: ≥20 hours. Twenty hours is roughly one learning day per quarter — achievable without dedicated learning infrastructure. Below 10 hours suggests learning is something the organisation talks about but doesn’t fund in practice.

    Retention rate: ≥88%. Equivalently, voluntary attrition below 12%. Above 15% in most sectors becomes structurally expensive — replacement costs typically run 50–150% of salary when you factor in hiring, onboarding, and lost productivity.

    These are starting points, not universal standards. Industry, company stage, and role mix all affect what “good” looks like in your context. But having explicit targets agreed at the start of the year changes the nature of the people review from a discussion about activity to a review of performance against plan.

    How Do You Connect Your HR OGSM to the Company OGSM?

    The connection is through cascade logic: every HR Strategy should trace back to a company Strategy. If you can’t make that link, the HR Strategy either doesn’t belong in the current year’s plan, or you need to go back to the corporate OGSM and ask whether it’s capturing the right things.

    In practice, the cascade works like this. The corporate OGSM includes a Strategy: “Scale our commercial team to triple revenue in the DACH region.” That Strategy implies a set of people requirements: specific hiring profiles, a different onboarding model, possibly new compensation structures for a European market. The HR OGSM captures those requirements as HR Strategies and Goals — not in a generic way, but in direct response to the specific business bet.

    This is the mechanism that gives HR strategy its credibility. When the CFO asks “why are we investing in this capability development programme?”, the answer isn’t “because L&D is important” — it’s “because Strategy 2 in the corporate OGSM requires us to build the product capability our current team doesn’t have, and this programme is the specific bet we’re making to close that gap.” That’s a different conversation.

    For a deeper look at how cascade logic works across the whole organisation, the OGSM cascade guide is worth reading before you build the first draft of your HR OGSM. And if you want a template to work from, the OGSM template includes a format that translates directly to HR use.

    The people function doesn’t need a separate strategy process. It needs to be built into the same one everyone else is using.

    Rock on.

  • What Comes First: People or Strategy?

    What Comes First: People or Strategy?

    It seems like a question of preference or belief such as Pepsi vs. Coke, Pampers vs. Huggies or Nutella vs. Nusspli. But far from it. Whether in large corporations or small businesses, choosing to put people first or put strategy first can mean the difference between success or failure. 

    Whether you are leading a small business, a team or a large corporation, always put the people first. Hire the smartest and most agile people you can find who best align with the values of your business. And jointly you will figure out the best possible strategy and execution for your business. 

    If you are like me, you may find this counterintuitive at first. After all, isn’t it the inspiring vision and well-defined strategy that motivate people to achieve results? And am I not a little dramatic to say that whether to put people first or strategy first can mean the difference between success and failure? Well, yes and no. Let’s explore this further. 

    People come first

    If I had a dollar for every time that a colleague, professor or past superior told me that “structure follows strategy”, I’d have a nice purse collected by now. And there is a point to that statement. 

    Before you start drawing organizational charts and boxes with names, you do want to figure out where the business is going and how it is going to get there. And then organize according to that strategy. But that is not the question.

    When the question is whether to put people first or strategy first, then it’s absolutely people first! People… not organization or structure. 

    No matter what your endeavor, what your business is, what team or organization you lead, surround yourself with the best people you can find. If you have a team of A-players, a team of movers and shakers, doers and believers, a team that trusts each other, debates each other, and helps each other solve problems, a team which challenges itself to greater heights, you can virtually achieve anything.

    When choosing team members, hire for attitude first and aptitude second. I forgot where I first heard this phrase, but when you google it, you find tons of relevant hits. It’s often extended by “hire for attitude, train the skills”. What it means is that you first want to probe for values and character traits which fit your business, your team, and yourself. Don’t get blinded by amazing test scores, knowledge and skills. Those are great, but the hard skills can be trained. Hire for integrity, work ethic, team work, and grit, and then the hard skills are the cherry on top. 

    When recruiting, never settle for “good enough”. In my experience, you are much better off holding out for the “right” person than hiring the first good person you can find. Don’t settle. Be rigorous in your search, clear in your expectations, and live up to the standard you aim to set. 

    Who Before What

    Now that makes sense but let’s come back to people and strategy. And this is where I like best the analogy from Jim Collins and his classic book “Good to Great”. In “Good to Great”, Jim Collins explains that his extensive research of great companies found a key common denominator: who comes before what.

    Collins describes leading a business like driving a bus. The business leader is the bus driver. Typically new business leaders set a direction first and then drive the bus in that direction. Collins’ research however suggests that the greatest companies first figure out who should be on the bus (and who shouldn’t) and in which seats they should be before determining the direction the bus should go. 

    When I first read “Good to Great” I found this surprising. I myself had always thought that you start by describing a vision for the business so compelling that people wanted to strive to get there. What I had neglected is that I was blessed with teams who inherently were motivated to pursue that vision. But even that wasn’t really the point.

    It started making sense to me when further exploring Jim Collins’ analogy. He wrote that people come first because imagine you have people on the bus because of its direction. This works out fine as long as the bus is going towards that direction. What if shortly into the journey you figure out that the business is heading in the wrong direction? What if the environment around you has changed? If people on the bus are only there for its direction, you have a problem. If you have great people on the bus who are there to be with other great people, then you will quickly be able to adapt and change direction. 

    So get the people off the bus who are there for the direction. Get those people on the bus who are there for the joint journey. Put the right people in the right seats. And then jointly figure out in which direction the bus – or the business – should be going.

    In Good to Great Jim Collins argues that the continuous, disciplined approach of putting people first and strategy second was one of the key differences between companies that were merely good and those that were truly great. 

    According to Collins, great leaders understand that there are three basic truths: 

    1. If you first choose the right people, you can more easily adapt to a changing world.
    2. If you have the right people, you don’t need to worry about motivating them.
    3. If you have the wrong people, even the greatest strategy only achieves mediocre results.

    So following these principles, spend a major portion of your time and attention on assembling and developing your team. Once you have assembled a great team, then jointly define the strategy and jointly drive execution to deliver great results. 

    Using OGSM to develop strategy in a great team

    When you are ready to develop strategy, consider using the OGSM methodology as a process and catalyst for your strategy. 

    OGSM stands for Objective, Goals, Strategies, and Measures and is a one-page business plan that describes WHAT you aim to achieve and HOW you are going to achieve it. Developing your strategy using the OGSM methodology greatly benefits from discussion in a great team. Click here to learn more about the OGSM methodology and how it can help you simplify strategy and deliver excellent results. 

    Now over to you. What is your experience with people vs. strategy? Feel free to drop us a note below. We’d love to hear from you. 

    References

    Collins, Jim (2001). Good to Great: why some companies make the leap… and others don’t. New York: HarperCollins.

    Top 10 OGSM tips to rock your strategy.

  • What Should Small Business Owners Focus On During A Crisis?

    What Should Small Business Owners Focus On During A Crisis?

    Economic crises can be challenging times for all of us but a grave pandemic such as COVID-19 and the ensuing economic fallout are particularly damaging to small businesses. In steering through this crisis myself, I thought I would write down lessons learnt about how small businesses can survive and thrive through economic crises.

    During times of crisis, small businesses must focus on what matters most: your people, your customers, and your cash flow. It is about survival first and then about being prepared to take advantage of the recovery thereafter. 

    While you are in the eye of the storm, the situation can be damning and it may seem like there is no end in sight. But hold tight and keep in mind that in every crisis there are challenges and opportunities. Here is what I learned during these difficult times and how you can succeed too. 

    In crisis, focus on what matters most 

    Whether your small business is hard hit or coasting through, at times of wide-spread economic crisis it is important to focus on what matters most: your people, your customers, and your cash flow – in that order. Everything else is secondary at this time. Nevertheless, look out for opportunities to benefit from the crisis.

    Take care of your people

    As the old adage goes, your employees are your most important asset. And it does sound like a cliche, but far from it. Your employees run the business. They are in touch with your customers. They make your products. They provide your  services. For many small businesses, it’s the employees that make the business special. Take good care of your employees at all times – and especially during a crisis. 

    The crisis may be a major cause of concern for your employees. More than ever, it is important that you listen to your employees’ concerns and anxieties during a crisis. Will there be enough business to keep the lights on? How will the crisis affect their jobs? Will they be able to keep their jobs? Will I be able to earn a living and put food on the table? These may be just a few of their questions and concerns. Be receptive and empathetic to your employees’ worries and needs.  

    Your employees look to you for leadership, guidance and a steady hand that navigates the ship through the storm. Communicate as openly, transparently and as often as you can about the situation of business. Tell your employees about the health of the business, what you are doing to keep the business going, and what they can do to help. Be honest, truthful, and candid. Don’t sugarcoat things. Your employees can handle the truth. In fact, anything but the truth may cause further concern and further distraction. 

    At times of crisis, try everything you can to keep your employees. Whether your employees may have been with you for a long or a short period of time, they hold very valuable knowledge and skills about your business, about your customers and about your business partners. This is knowledge you don’t want to lose. And as you navigate through the crisis and prepare for recovery, you want to have your knowledgeable, skilled people around you to support a recovery out of the crisis as quickly as possible. 

    If your business struggles through the crisis and gets under cost pressure, cut all other costs first before considering layoffs. Explore all options and find ways to retain your employees. There may be measures available to cut costs that you haven’t thought of. Consider the following measures:

    • Stop discretionary spending: cut out all the extras, such as free snacks and other office perks. Stop any non-essential travel or entertainment expenses. Delay any non-essential business expenses such as software or hardware upgrades. Freeze bonuses and new hiring. 
    • Offer unpaid leave: consider additional vacation time for employees. Even if it is unpaid, holiday time may be a good compromise instead of layoffs. 
    • Reduced business hours: check feasibility to shorten the workweek or closing your shop early when foot traffic is slow. Reduce salaries in accordance with reduced work hours. 
    • Temporary pay cuts: this may be a tough pill to swallow but is still better than layoffs. Make this measure temporary and allow employees to plan for it. This will go down much better if you as the business owner and the most senior leaders take a bigger pay cut than workers and front line employees. As the business owner, lead the way. Demonstrate that everyone’s in it and allow the broader shoulders to carry the larger load. 
    • Work-from-home arrangements: see whether working from home would be a feasible way to keep the business running and cut expenses. Consider to sublease space that you don’t need or to negotiate a reduced office or shop rent. 
    • Government support programs: I know this may not be popular or may require careful consideration. But check whether there are federal or local government programs available to you. Seek advice and check the fine print. There may be strings attached to accepting government money to retain employees.  
    • Reduce contractors or part-timers: if all other ways are insufficient, consider reducing part-time hours or contractors first before considering employee layoffs. 

    Whatever you do, speak openly to your employees about the situation and that you need to take action. You are all in this together. Maybe you and your employees can jointly find ideas to cut costs or increase productivity that will take pressure off the business. It’s amazing what a joint brainstorm can do. Find solutions that work for everyone and that allow you to retain your employees. Besides helping the business through the crisis, involving your employees will foster greater trust and may actually boost morale. You will be surprised what is possible when everyone sticks their heads together to jointly find a solution. 

    When in crisis, making it through the crisis immediately becomes the top priority. When you are on the other side, you will need your employees to build the business back up and you will be glad to have them.

    Take care of your customers

    Whether you are in the B2B or B2C space, take care of your customers at times of crisis. It is in difficult times that true partners and reliable suppliers separate themselves from the rest. 

    Remember that it is your customers who you are in business for. They pay for your products and services. Their satisfaction ultimately determines your success – and how you steer through the crisis. 

    In an unprecedented crisis such as COVID-19 with stay-at-home orders and social distancing measures in place, customer behaviors can certainly change and customer needs may too. Demand for certain products or services may suddenly decline or shift to different offerings or channels. 

    Consider these consumer examples: 

    • People no longer shop at the mall but purchase daily necessities online
    • People no longer go to movie theatres but watch movies at home
    • People buy fewer leisure products and luxury goods and instead buy more hygiene products and cleaning supplies
    • People do not dine out as much and instead cook at home or order home delivery.

    While some of these changes may be temporary, others may have a longer lasting effect. For example, consider someone who has signed up for a home delivery service or an online streaming service during the crisis. Once this person has become accustomed to the conveniences, he or she might be reluctant to change back. If this applies to your business and you have seen your customers’ behavior change, don’t despair. What you still have in any case is the relationship with your customers. So lean in.

    Similar to being there for your employees, be there for your customers – through thick and thin. Speak with your customers to understand their situation, their needs and their concerns. Identify ways how your business can help your customers through the crisis. This will strengthen your relationship and put you in the pole position to support your customer also during a recovery after the crisis.

    Besides your ongoing business which led you to the supplier-customer relationship in the first place, look for new ways to support your customers or look for alternative business models to serve your customers. For example, are there other products or services you can help your customer with at this time of crisis? Can you shift your offering to another channel or media, e.g. online via webcasts, podcasts, or video conferencing?

    Consider the real life example of training and development consultancy Glo Training in Hong Kong. Started in 2018 by Principal Instructor and business owner Gary Lo, Glo Training aims “to inspire and transform lives through creating unique learning experiences in 3 areas: personal growth, professional skills and coaching” (www.glo-consulting.institute). When the pandemic hit, corporate clients cancelled training and sent their employees into home offices. Gary adjusted and shifted his programs online. Since the start of the pandemic, Gary has provided more than 70 webinars and has recorded numerous online video courses. You can find Glo Training’s YouTube channel via this link.

    In addition to serving your existing customers differently the way Gary has done, changes to your offering may allow you to pick up new customers who you weren’t serving before. 

    Imagine the fictional example of Tony’s Pizza I have written about in a separate article (see the Tony’s Pizza example here). Tony decided to transform his pizza parlor into an Italian family restaurant. During this COVID-19 crisis, Tony’s pizza delivery service with the added menu of the family restaurant may appeal to new customers who would previously not have ordered only from the pizza menu. 

    Take a look at your business and your existing customers. Audit yourself and check whether you can transform your existing business in a way that serves your existing customers differently and picks up new customers. 

    Ask yourself these questions. The list is non-exhaustive but might get your own creative juices flowing:

    • Can you provide your products and services to your customers online? 
    • Can you turn your knowledge & expertise into a service for your customers? 
    • Can you give your customers access to your equipment and machinery? 
    • Can you mobilize your business from a physical shop to a business “on wheels”?

    Find ways to keep in touch with your customers and remain a valuable partner and source of information, hope and courage also during the crisis. Remember that strong customer relationships come out stronger after the crisis when weathering the storm together. 

    Take care of your cash flow

    Last but certainly not least, take care of your cash flow. When the crisis hits and the business stops in its tracks what matters most is liquidity, i.e. cash. 

    According to businessdictionary.com, liquidity is “a measure of the extent to which a person or organization has cash to meet immediate and short-term obligations” (source). And that is what it is about in a crisis: having sufficient funds to pay salaries, pay bills, and survive.

    At any time really, but particularly during times of crisis, as a small business owner be the master of your cash flow. Closely manage your cash inflows and your cash outflows and aim to achieve a net positive cash flow. A positive cash flow means that your cash inflows are larger than your cash outflows. Hence, your cash balance increases.  

    Cash inflows

    Your cash inflows are primarily the payments you receive from customers for the products and services you provide. In accounting terms, these are cash flows from operating activities. Cash inflows can however also come from bank loans or credit lines. These are called cash flows from financing activities. Finally, cash inflows can also come from investing activities such as selling assets including e.g. shareholdings, property and equipment.

    During a crisis review all your cash inflows and identify assets that can be turned into cash most easily. These are usually accounts receivables and inventories which together make up your working capital. 

    Accounts receivables are your customers’ outstanding bills to you. Follow up with your customers and make sure you are getting paid. When a crisis hits, your customers may be similarly affected and might likewise require to manage their cash flows. Place an emphasis on bill collection to reduce the risk of bad debts. 

    If a customer has payment problems, work with your customer and agree on measures to get paid. Consider for example creating a payment plan in installments over time instead of a lump sum payment all at once. This might create just enough flexibility to help both you and your customer with cash flow. 

    In addition, try as much as possible to reduce your working capital by turning your inventories into cash. Inventories are your raw materials and in-process materials held for production and your finished goods held for sale to your customers. Review all your inventories and find ways to reduce them and turn them into cash. 

    For example, review aging or slow moving stocks and consider a promotion or sales event to clear them at reduced prices or discounts. Check whether you can bundle products and move slow-moving goods in combination with products that sell well. 

    Cash outflows

    Your cash outflows can equally be categorized into operating, financing, and investing cash flows. Review all your cash outflows and identify ways to minimize your cash outflows at times of crisis. 

    Minimizing your cash outflows effectively means reducing your expenses and outstanding payments as far as possible. Review again the list from above for ways to reduce your expenses. Stop or significantly reduce:

    • Discretionary spending
    • Entertainment expenses
    • Business travel
    • External hiring 
    • Avoid any non-essential spending at this time.

    This may include your investing activities – review these next. If your business is capital intensive, there might be large opportunities to preserve cash from reducing capital expenditures. Investments may include the purchase of new equipment, machinery or other property. Check whether you can postpone these activities or avoid them altogether. 

    Next, review your accounts payable. Accounts payable are your open bills and invoices towards your suppliers (for sake of accuracy, accounts payable also count towards your working capital). These may of course also include interest expenses towards banks or other creditors. 

    Speak with your suppliers about payment extensions to postpone making payments. Make sure to discuss and agree on measures with your suppliers or partners instead of deciding unilaterally to delay or withhold payment. This may cause late fees or penalties – especially when dealing with creditors, utilities or government entities – which will increase the burden later. Instead try to make deals such as agreeing on payment plans (see above). You may be surprised how accommodating some of your partners might be. Just ask! 

    In any event, try to reduce any other expenses before you turn to your personnel expenses. As noted above, take care of your employees and work with them to make it through the crisis. There are several measures discussed above that might help you manage your cash flow without letting go of your people. Your people are your most important assets. Involve them in the process. Exhaust all your options before letting go of people. 

    One additional thought which might be a bit late if you are already fighting the crisis. Here it is anyway: If your business depends very strongly on your cash flow to run the business, then you want to make sure to have enough of a cash cushion to make it through a crisis. Jim Harmer and Ricky Kessler of Income School advocate for private persons to keep cash reserves that cover 3-6 months of expenses. They call this an emergency fund. The same holds true for businesses! 

    If you don’t yet have an emergency fund, consider creating one as soon as you can. This is cash you leave in the bank and that you don’t touch unless you have an emergency that requires you to tab into your cash reserves. If you have to use it, fill it back up as soon as you can. Again, as I said, it might be a bit late right now to build this fund if you are already in the crisis. But make sure to begin building such a cash cushion as soon as you can. 

    If you are hit hard by the crisis, try to avoid any cash out that is not essential to keeping the business running. Maintain a net positive cash flow to build a cushion that allows you to survive the crisis and come out stronger on the other end. When the situation improves you want to be able to use your cash to take advantage of the recovery. 

    Take care of yourself also!

    One more thought: besides your people, your customers, and your cash flow, don’t forget to take care of yourself! Focus on your health and well-being and find time to reflect, recharge, and re-energize. Your business and your people need you at your best in times of crisis so invest the time that you need. 

    It’s easy to forget about yourself while being there for your team and keeping the business afloat. But just like on the airplane, when we are told to put on our own oxygen masks first before helping others, make sure you’re OK yourself so that you can help others. 

    When investing in yourself, consider both your mental health and your physical health. Make sure that you get plenty of sleep, eat well, and get sufficient movement. These times are stressful so make sure that your body and your mind are ready to cope. Your business needs you are your peak performance ability.

    Conclusion

    When in crisis, focus on what matters: your people, your customers, and your cash flows.

    Focus first on survival and helping your business weather the storm. Then look out for opportunities to come out of the crisis stronger than you were before.

    How are you managing through the crisis? Where do you place your focus? We’d love to hear from you. Feel free to drop a comment below. We hope you are healthy and well and are finding a way to cope. Take care!