CEOs - Are You Rightly Shaped For A Resurgent But Cherry-Picky Post Covid-19 Economy?

Four business friends: James, Gilbert, Mary and Julius recently engaged in an animated future-of-work session. They discussed what they would all do differently moving forward. All four of them are in different sectors of our economy.

Their discourse reminded me of Dr. Spencer Johnson's book: "Who Moved My Cheese". Dr. Johnson created this four-character story to help him deal with a difficult change in his life. It showed him how to take his changing situation seriously but not to take himself so seriously in the process. It's about dealing with the problem comprehensively without becoming the problem yourself.

First, let us see what the four businesspeople collectively believe before we can hear them out individually.

They all think that the writing is now on the wall. We await the official Government pronouncement as we did for the closing-day announcement in high school, to mark the end of a time in our lives that we shall never forget. We have been subjected to supervised boarding-school type timings and containment measures now for far too long. Whereas the digital world's economic activities carry on like clockwork, the physical world's 24-hour economy must restart because some people have to work at night to afford giving mama mboga business. In turn, mama mboga gets to pay her loan to the bank and that in turn also completes the cycle for more people to get roped into the active financial relevance fold.

All four agree that 2020 has been a difficult year for everyone. Practically all plans got badly disrupted and in many instances, businesses collapsed or painfully changed their modus operandi. The virtual world took over and made them appreciate Zoom supported meetings. Their kids now attend online classes without complaining much about playtime beyond the neighbourhood. And surely the silver lining for them from the pandemic season is their renewed respect for efficient operations. Work From Home -WFH has improved their respective revenue per head ratios whilst keeping overall costs low. The aftermath of these scary period means that there is no more fear left in them and like the proverbial Phoenix, they must rise from the ashes and thrive against all odds.

For James, a medium-sized financial services company owner, it is all about working with essential staffers. He started the year with a complement of 100 employees but he painfully whittled them down to just 30 people. The hardest times forced him to let go of many who were just like family. James reckons that his leaner team now delivers just as much in output as his bigger one did in old times.

Avoidable expenses such as office tea, newspapers and excessive space and furniture, are now done away with as everyone today WFM. The savings have helped James's company to finance several new home office setups for a totally fresh line of customers. The staff love WFH because they can easily supervise house chores and school work whilst enjoying significant savings in cost and time associated with commuting. His old office block helps him to maintain a physical address on just a tenth of the space he had in January of 2020.

James's lessons include finding his optimum functional operating size, a new product line and the will to let go of excess weight for a lighter take-off.

Gilbert is a big landlord. He has several buildings across town that he has continuously let out for years. One thing is clear in his mind. For him to survive the effects of the dark period, he must work like never before. If he sits back and blames the government, then he shall have only succeeded in prolonging the pain.

Gilbert, at the onset of the pandemic, had his total occupancy reduced to just under 30% and had no new enquiries to consider at the time. The maintenance cost of his empty buildings shot up. He is now remodelling the unoccupied buildings into housing units. This entails plenty of interior design work. His long-time banker was hesitant to support the redevelopments because of depressed cash flows, but he found an overseas-based financier with friendly terms. So the lull period has given Gilbert the space to complete the redevelopments in 18 of his 25 buildings.

What got him into action was a feature aired on television of a school owner who turned his facilities into a chicken farm in the absence of students. He knew for sure that things had changed completely.

Gilbert's refurbished units are quite appealing as they have been tastefully finished and are reasonably priced for the cost-sensitive urbanite.

Enquiries are flowing in. Most of his penthouses in the CBD are now taken up and the demand for the houses downward the buildings is quite promising.

Gilbert feels sorry for those who haven't figured out what to do with their buildings now that economic activity is on the upswing albeit, with a totally new market segment.

His lessons include going abroad for cheap and ready financing, thinking outside the box for workable solutions and scanning the environment for hints that change is now needed.

Mary was a big restaurant chain owner. For a while, the social distancing rules kept customers completely away. She absorbed the rent and employee costs for only so long, then she had to let go of several units and staffers.

two months ago, Mary teamed up with the owner of a small delivery company. She organised her commercial presence online and began by offering a 50% discount on all deliveries. Her kitchen is now a beehive of activity and the delivery bikes are on the road till 8:30 PM daily. Hopefully, they will be out much longer when the curfew is lifted.

She has found a steady market that her business now serves at a fraction of what it cost her previously.

Her lessons include the fact that every business model has its unique pricing strategy and sweet spot, which in her case is now about cooking for a market that she never knew existed at all. She was one of Gilbert's big tenants but now, they are just good friends.

Finally, Julius shares his perspective. He is in the car repairs and modifications business. He is known for creating pleasurable soft-feel experiences in hardy cars such that when driven around, they demonstrate markedly better interactions with our varied roads. The slump in business meant that he had to lay off most of his people. And quite unlike his first three friends, he has not physically altered the shape or form of his workshop.

Julius argues that car models have hardly changed. When people get back to their monied past, they will return to his workshop. During the pandemic, he opened up for old car models enthusiasts who had restoration and rebuilding projects. He got several of them and they paid him good money. Such enthusiasts are a moneyed lot and would also bring in their regular-use cars for routine maintenance and extensive repairs. He has now dedicated one part of his shop for the rebuilding of old cars.

Julius has had to set up an online portal through which rebuilders can log in to set up their projects, as they await to be slotted in once a work station within the shop is available to take in the vehicle. Before then, estimates on the cost of parts and works are keyed in and the prospective rebuilder begins to organise himself, as the computer-generated tentative date given approaches. The portal also features snippets of how other completed projects progressed through to the finished product point. It has proved to be an excellent marketing tool.

Two weeks ago, Julius got a good order to fix a fleet of 100 company cars that had remained locked up at his client's car yard. His heavily van-dependent client just got his biggest customer opening up again for business and the cars are urgently required back on the roads.

Julius's lessons are around keeping his facilities available to a market that he had never imagined existed before. He has also learned to step up his marketing efforts online.

All four accounts of events have some similarities around staff layoffs and finding different ways of ensuring the continuity of their businesses. Agility is the new normal. We all must now figure out how to handle the possibility of never getting to do what we comfortably did in the past. If you have encountered difficulties during these hard times, then it is a sign that you must find new skills and knowledge for there is already a surplus in the market of those that you possess. If anything, the ever converging technologies as seen with every new advancement, will increasingly make sure that less of you are ever needed in any field as stand-alone service providers.

And yes, not everyone is on the same side of the fence with the four business friends. Things are different on the other side.

For many people, the resources to go it alone are in short supply, yet we must thrive. This calls for something to completely change. Our selfish-natured goals to experience personal financial freedom in isolation and at the expense of others, must now be transmuted to the spirit of collectively investing with others. When there is no more cake to eat in the first place, then you can't have it. It's time to add your crumb to those of others to make a reasonably sized cake that in turn, will snowball into a respectable force.

Trust is a very rare component in our daily living because many amongst us have never learned to respect others well enough to separate the acquaintances best suited for business purposes from those better left for social reasons. It's time that we braved the new facts. And what you lose in personal decision making, you make up for it by having an army that will cover more ground faster than you would have when alone. We must transform from being the lone Leopards to becoming the busy bees. Individually lighter but collectively focused and efficiently dedicated to the objective at hand.

Vetted groups are an easier means of attracting financial resources and now is the time to join in or team up with others who want to bounce back to gainful economic activities.

One-man consultancies are now favouring a blended approach. One that gives them access to the benefits of pooling together whilst maintaining their independent identities. So now, people run their outfits as stated in the Registrar of Companies records and then augment their offerings by taking up membership in a professional outfit as individuals. The professional body normally has a dependable reputation and that is what rubs off positively on the members through referrals. There is a distinction between the professional associations set up to self-regulate and the types set up purely for lead generation within and across geographies. So build your expectations accordingly.

James, Gilbert, Mary and Julius have managed to keep things afloat as individuals. Sadly, this will not be the case for the majority as a personal reconfiguration to a ready team-player attitude and shape, are critical as we move forward into a future that is now coming at us in unprecedented ways. Even the older folk have no real experience to pass down because ironically, technological dependencies have created an awkward need for reverse mentoring. The elders are learning the ropes from the younger ones. This unusual future scares the inexperienced both old and young alike and it is only by pooling together that we can make a better sense of it.

A critical point to note is that those who have survived the storm thus far will only get stronger in the wake of the ensuing economic momentum as they move in to take up the market share slots vacated by several collapsed outfits. To take on such steady firms, we must spread our risks and our span of reach by pooling together as a courageous army equipped with determination and driven by the collective belief that: Together Everyone Achieves More -TEAM.

When the economy bounces back, it will reward those who are rightly structured and aligned to its new approaches and severely punish those who are obviously out of step, for the rest shall surely match on to prosperity. Poor things, we are creatures of habit and as we all know it, old habits die hard. We must now be creatures of malleable habits so that change is an opportunity to shape up rather than a rigid-natured death call.

For the numerous furniture makers along Ngong road, perhaps the time has come for them to have one entity that owns all the tools and work stations under one presentable roof. The economies of scale that will accrue from such a setup will be of immense benefit for them all. In the arrangement, every participant shall pay an annual membership fee. They will also have a defined revenue-sharing structure with this entity. Membership will obviously come with several benefits besides getting everyone specialised along distinct product lines, in order to optimise output whilst minimising internal competition.

This arrangement will enable them to fetch better margins as well. Money shall flow swiftly and reward this kind of orderliness. The cupcake mentality must change to a birthday cake thinking. Why own 100% of a cupcake instead of 10% of a birthday cake? The 10% portion in the latter is way bigger than the 100% of the former. It is also easier to set and maintain structures and quality standards when under a bigger entity. The so-called 'Kariobangi Light Industries', must now work towards gaining some useful weight but legally too.

Affinity groups will take the front seats while the individually structured people and entities get overtaken in the new dispensation. I have always known that team dynamics as a topic is urgently needed within our business circles and more so amongst emergent youth groups to save them from our bad old habit of: "me, I and myself, solo".

Hats off to those who have made it unaided. Majority of the very successful people in Kenya made it through rare connections to government tenders or through the additional trappings accruing from their proximity to power. Unfortunately, not many people shall ever have similar opportunities. So it is best that they pooled together to create the next big thing that can win big government tenders in a fair manner. On this, nature is packed with lessons for us. The small fish in the ocean come together and form into an incredibly huge shoal when a big threat shows up, and that is enough to ward off the intruder as size matters in the wild world of survival. So we learn from them that there is safety in numbers when under attack.

And on dry land, wild dogs confidently hunt in a pack and normally prey on wildebeest sized animals. They instinctively initiate the attack when perfectly spread out in a V-shaped formation. Then they literally isolate and wear down the target through a fast-paced chase as they repeatedly penetrate its flesh with deep blood spilling dog bites. These actions starve the muscles of richly oxygenated blood, thus inhibiting their efficient functioning. Theirs is an endurance race that gets the victim's heart to work for them as every beat serves to empty its system of blood. Eventually, the animal collapses when the life-supporting fundamentals within it can no longer hold. And the dogs happily descend on it and strip it bare to the bones. From this, we learn that many hands working in tandem lighten a heavy task when a winning approach is applied. Patience, coordination and dedication to your part are the key ingredients to success when working together as a team.

There is also the urgent need to relook at things before the pandemic struck us. As we know it, life was already a tough call owing to the infringements in the economic dynamics in our country. Corruption had reached unprecedented levels and huge resources had found their way into private hands. Financially, the majority feel chocked. The newspapers carry eight or more pages of auction-related advertisements weekly but there is no one left out there who can buy what is going under the hummer except, those who privatised our money, of cause.

The demonetization of the old currency, for many people, worsened a bad situation. It was a necessary exercise to reign in on the undocumented elements in the economy but equally, it came as a disruption to many innocent people who were caught up owing to the informal nature of their operations. Previous political upheavals have taught people to always have some spare wads of money just in case an escape from an unfriendly situation is necessary. It is normally the kind of money that a clan can comfortably restart life afresh with. That kitty in its scattered form around many families was locked out of circulation simply because it was outside the banking system. Yet it still is clean money.

There are several other instances of unwarranted occurrences in other spheres of the economy but one thing is clear, life is tougher now than it was ten years ago. Ten years of hard work for a big portion of our population was mercilessly rolled away and the proceeds now neatly line the pockets of the dishonest few, who ironically, smile at our unsightly difficulties. Again, here, people suffer individually in silence. The need to come together for economic empowerment is crucial. Turn your ego-driven enmities into powerful ally-seeking opportunities.

I meet many people who were previously quite wealthy or just economically stable, but today, the good old life is gone and sad that it's for no fault of their own. Some have coped well with their new challenges but others are struggling with a shame tag around their necks. Ego is a worthless title deed to keep walking around with as it has no bankable commercial value. Just as Dr. Spencer Johnson intended, we must focus on the problem and not make ourselves the problem instead. New social skills must be embraced by such people who are now at their wits end, for the practical solutions to their problems lie with others who view life very differently.

To surmount the resurgence as positively contributing participants, we must pick our pieces and add them to those of others in a structured manner so that we emerge stronger together. Twende kazi.