Winning today’s Battle for Business Survival

The Mission Plan: Battlefield Strategies for Crisis Management

The bottom line in business these days has become both simpler and more challenging: all businesses globally are in, or will soon be in, a state of financial crisis. Destructive forces not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930’s have ravaged our economy. Small businesses, those with fewer than five hundred employees, not only employ about half of all U.S. workers; they comprise 99.7 percent of all employer firms, according to the Small Business Administration—some 27 million businesses.

Today, a great number of those businesses find themselves in a fast changing, brutally challenging, and dangerous Darwinian struggle for survival. You need to be almost compulsively vigilant over your own cash flow and operating costs; you can’t trust people’s credit anymore. You have to be aware of the changing character of your customer, a long-reliable ally in business who now may be having problems with loans and other obligations. Listen carefully and you might pick that up. That’s why I cannot overstate in this manual the importance of what I call CCC—constant customer communication.

The need for a practical, thorough survival guidebook is greater than at any time I can recall in more than 25 years of experience. In my CPA and consulting practice at my accounting firm of Nelson, Mayoka & Company, I’ve done audits and tax planning for corporations, partnerships, and individuals; worked on numerous mergers & acquisitions and IPO’s; done international tax planning for multi-billion-dollar Japanese firms listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange; served as an expert witness in court; provided CFO functions for large public and private firms. Over the years, I have worked closely on tax, audit, fraud, corporate governance, and strategic planning with businesses across an entire spectrum of sectors—from the low-voltage industry to banks.

That’s one key reason why I’ve created The Essential Financial Crisis Planning Manual: Winning Today’s Battle for Business Survival. A financial mission plan requires strategic analysis of your business’s focus, direction, and short-term goals. It must be fluid, dynamic and it must embrace a commitment to change. Do the means always justify the ends? Not necessarily. This isn’t a manual about business ethics, but about above-board crisis management. It’s about being strict and maintaining sharp focus as you fight to stay in the game.

Make no mistake: you don’t need to drill down too deeply to realize that the target audience for a crisis-survival manual is, virtually, all small businesses. Their owners are the people who need and want this information the most right now. The crisis management strategies presented here could just as readily apply to plumbers and sheetrock installers as they could to executives I’ve worked with in defense contracting and the garment center.

My approach to crisis analysis and optimizing solutions has for years been my passion, my calling, if you will. I decided to put pen to paper and get down to the brass tacks and help business owners do the problem-solving they need to do now to keep their doors open. We’re talking about survival.

Mark Mayoka, is a C.P.A. with over 25 years of diverse Strategic Business experience.He has just recently published the Financial Crisis Planning manual for the Low Voltage Industry, which has received brilliant reviews and is helping 100’s of businesses.