You either have cash or you don’t. It isn’t complicated. It isn’t even especially interesting. However, it is vitally important. Cash flow is all about the process of pricing for profit, collecting payments, and forecasting what lies ahead. When we do this well, we give our businesses the opportunity to flourish. When we fail to do this, we set our companies up for failure too.

We can’t create work. No matter what marketing initiatives we start or how many new studios we set up, we can’t make customers engage before they’re ready. While we wait for business to return, we need to restructure our businesses so they’re healthy and prepared enough to weather the storm the next time a crisis strikes. We’ve learned that our businesses can’t survive on their own in this kind of crisis. Our business models have failed us. But we’ve also failed ourselves.

Change is necessary for the survival of your business — especially in this pandemic. As you’ve searched for ways to meet new needs during this time of upheaval, you’ve shifted your marketing to promote new streaming capabilities, studio space, and other creative services to offer clients. While some of you have seen some success, others only hear crickets. Why aren’t more customers responding? You need better marketing.

Your next normal may not be so normal. We know business won’t suddenly come back full-throttle. It will open in stages. Now, most of us are beginning phase one (or we can at least see it in our near future). As talk buzzes of restarts, we’re left with a lot of noise and questions. How do we manage our teams, operations, and finances if the rules change every few weeks? How do we know when to move from one phase to another?

Sometimes we’re just stuck. We can’t see a way through many of the obstacles in front of us. We feel like our minds are spinning... like a stalled computer. We know there’s a pathway out of this pandemic into the new normal, but we can’t seem to move past the spinning color wheel and onto the next great thing. If you’re stuck, it’s time to get out of your day-to-day brain and figure out how to creatively solve the problems in front of you. To do so, you need a strategy.

What have you done lately to increase your customers’ perception of your value? If your answer is “nothing,” you’ve trained them to think of your value as minimal. Maybe you looked at the pricing structure we discussed in the previous webinar and thought, “My clients won’t pay that!” Why? You taught them what to expect. Your customers’ price sensitivities are a trained behavior. That’s actually good news. You trained them to have low expectations for your pricing… and you can un-train them.