Employees are struggling. Sales cycles are stretched. Margins are thinning. Budgets are being cut. The world stage is an unending stream of troubling news. And every single day, I get emails about webinars, eBooks, podcasts, and blogs with the newest, shiniest silver bullet that will solve all problems. But here’s the thing: I’ve been around long enough to know there is no silver bullet. The burdens we each carry personally and professionally are really friggin’ heavy. As always, we have to find a way to push through it until we find ourselves back on steady footing.

Remember a while back when I wrote about training materials, best practices, and knowledge sharing? Times like this underline the importance of having standard approaches across our businesses. Why? Because being able to find where we have deviated will help us return to center.

There is a reason for every core value and mission statement that we have. There are reasons for policies, SOPs, workflows, and handbooks. They exist to create benchmarks for our businesses to use as a measure of success. Can they change over time? Heck yeah, they can (and should). But we all know the fundamentals upon which we have had the highest achievement and seek to replicate and exceed that achievement each year. At times, accomplishment comes more painstakingly than we would like, or not at all. It is during these times that we are often reactive and pivot.

Sometimes a problem lies in process or with people. Sometimes we have changed the process and the people. Sometimes a problem is external (Covid, ASF, HPAI, inflation, to name a few). But when we let ourselves get caught up in putting out fires and slapping bandaids on everything, we lose sight of what brought us success in the beginning. What are the core values of our businesses? What is the mission statement on our website? Are we still entirely focused on those things?

I think we can all safely say that the answer to that question is not “yes” every day. I think we know that we get sucked too far into the trenches to pull ourselves back and make sure that the constants are still where they need to be. I think we take for granted that the basics are all being covered and we are firing on all cylinders. It’s critical to check on this. It’s crucial to do a baseline checkup to make sure there aren’t more variables than we thought. It’s imperative to ensure that we are keeping the big goals front and center through everything we do.

The problem with pivoting arrives when we do it too often without assessing impact. As with any good experiment, only one variable should change at a time in order to know what works. But in business, this simply isn’t always possible (too many moving parts and too many departments). But when deviation has become the norm and we still have not found the answer we seek, we need to hit reset.

Sales people should be calling on customers and prospects. Marketers should be putting out worthwhile content that helps drive awareness. Quality should be making sure product is consistently up to the customer’s expectations. Procurement should be leveraging relationships and data to preserve margins. You get the idea — the basics. You’d be amazed if you go check up on these teams how far some have strayed from the fundamentals and what that can mean for an organization.

So let’s go talk to our people. Seasoned and new employees all appreciate a pulse check and any help we can give them to do an amazing job. Make sure that recent fires haven’t burned down what we built. Re-center. The success of our brands depends on execution on every level — starting with the basics.

Back to Basics (the struggle is real)

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