Your priorities will shift as your recovery takes form and progresses. And not only will your business have to conform to changing conditions, such as remote work, but your partner network must adapt to you.
Maximizing your partner network — a key advantage in business resiliency — requires a plan with defined goals and aligning your partner network to your strategy. To adapt and overcome, you’ll have to address obstacles such as:
- Lack of visibility
- Fluctuating needs
- Prioritizing essential partnerships
Envisioning Recovery During Uncertainty
Proactive recovery planning begins before the dust settles. While no one knows what’s in store for businesses in the coming months, preparation will be the key to survival and peace of mind.
Download Guide to Disaster Recovery Planning
According to a recent publication by McKinsey and Company, there are five horizons you pass through on the road to recovery:
- Resolve: Address the immediate impact of the economic downturn on the business, employees, and partners.
- Resilience: Plan how you will handle immediate cash flow challenges and related obstacles.
- Return: Conditions won’t remain this dour indefinitely. As soon as possible, begin creating a detailed plan to scale your business up quickly.
- Reimagining: Realize that this turn of events might forever change your business. Explore avenues for reinventing your business.
- Reform: Understand the changing external conditions, such as the regulatory and competitive environment, and how your business might exist in them.
Consider how your business might proceed through these stages in six months, one year, and two years. Who might your essential partners be? What role will they play?
Identifying Critical Recovery Partners and Operations
Recovery-critical ecosystems will contain at least three partner categories: sales and marketing, technology consulting, and financial partners. Each will bring discoveries and information that will be invaluable to your recovery process.
Sales and Marketing Partners
Under normal conditions, sales and marketing partners – including channel partners, marketing agencies, and sales partners — are often used transactionally rather than strategically. This relationship may change depending on how much your business needs to adapt to:
- Shifting to online selling
- Adapting messaging to impacted clients and customers
- Developing new products based on changing marketplace
- Leveraging the spike in internet activity
Technology Partners
Technology partners are not only instrumental in helping businesses navigate the shift to online work but also in other transformational initiatives as well. In recovery, technology partners will assist with:
- Ensuring application and website stability
- Troubleshooting tech issues for remote employees
- Re-allocating for increased needs in bandwidth, VPN, and tech support
- Winding down operations that no longer require IT resources
- Maintaining network security in the face of new threats
Financial Partners
Lastly, financial partners are wellsprings of knowledge during challenging economic times. Drastic changes in revenues have prompted business decisions regarding employment, and new legislation regarding relief and taxes will require expert recommendations. Your financial partners will help you overcome:
- Navigating COVID-19 tax developments
- Staying informed of economic forecasts
- Understanding loan and relief resources
- Making decisions regarding cutbacks and reallocations
- Helping laid off or furloughed workers understand their entitlements under new legislation
Communication and Alignment
Most often, maximizing your partner network will change your relationship with the players within it, and a recovery plan will be the centerpiece of your partner communications moving forward. Your robust recovery strategy will contain timelines, goals, and metrics, including:
- Sales and revenue goals
- Crisis communications frequency and impact
- Worst- and best-case, threat-risk scenarios over 6, 12, and 24-month horizons
- Timeline for establishing reworker mobility/remote work capability
- Supply chain issues and other business challenges
Trust the Process of Recovery
It can be hard to focus on external partners when there are so many decisions to make internally — especially during a time of turmoil.
However, your business network will be critical to your business resiliency. Ensure that you’re planning for the future, involving critical partners, and communicating your needs so that your partners can adapt to helping you recover faster.
Disaster recovery doesn’t have to break the budget. With this guide, you can simplify your DR journey and actually save money.
Ready to start on the road to business recovery?
