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While change is sometimes hard to accept, now more than ever before, it is the time to embrace it, which means getting comfortable with uncertainty and working on the skill of adaptability within your organization. While doing this on an infrastructural level is essential (as we discussed in Part 1 of this series) adaptability on a personal level is equally important. The good news is that it is a skill that can be learned and improved upon, as needed.

Arguably, in the current business environment that we’re witnessing globally, adaptability is the most critical soft skill a person can develop, both personally and professionally. Soft skills refer to those underlying skills that people use to do their jobs, like time-management, creative problem solving, and interpersonal style. While those remain important, adaptability will drive most business success and growth in 2020 and beyond.

What Does This Look Like on the Ground?

• Acknowledging the uncertainty, along with the need to adapt. While this may seem obvious, many companies are accustomed to utilizing long-term strategies for their daily operations. As many experts agree, this method of approach doesn’t work so well for the current climate.
• Accepting that things won’t be perfect (at least not at first). Another significant component to encouraging and modeling adaptability is that sometimes it will be messy, and that’s OK. A workforce that feels comfortable making course-corrections when necessary is one of the major components of building adaptability into your business. If something isn’t working, it becomes clear quickly what needs to be changed.

RELATED: GJM COVID-19 Resources

• Taking one step at a time. Again, long-term strategies are taking a real backseat in these uncertain times. Long-term goals or outcomes are fine, but planning one step at a time how to achieve them is going to be a more prudent and less frustrating means of getting there. Things are likely to change along the way, so you can get ahead of that by building a solution around the changes, rather than having to undo an existing strategy and lose precious time and resources.
• Encouraging and fostering emotional intelligence in your workforce. This refers to the ability of a person to empathize and control their emotions and usually involves some level of self-awareness. A workforce that has a higher level of emotional intelligence will be better at adapting to continued change, be better at collaborating, and more generally have increased efficiency, overall.

Every organization is different, so how this looks may be different for some. The most valuable aspect of adaptability is that it allows your business to respond to exactly what it needs, no more, no less.

Established in 1996, Gilmore Jasion Mahler, LTD (GJM) is the largest public accounting firm in Northwest Ohio, with offices in Maumee and Findlay. Locally owned, GJM offers cloud-based accounting and provides comprehensive services including assurance, business advisory, tax, risk advisory, healthcare management and outsourced accounting. The Firm’s professionals specialize in industries including construction & real estate, healthcare, manufacturing & distribution and utilities.

As small and mid-size businesses around the country and the world work to stabilize in the wake of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, the economic upheaval caused by the coronavirus crisis brings a wake-up call. Just how prepared was your business for such a devastating event and how would your company or organization fare should disaster strike your technology infrastructure?

Such a “disaster” can cause significant disruption in operational and/or technological process capabilities for a period of time for businesses, which in turn affects the ongoing operations of the company and can, in fact, threaten its very existence. That’s why all organizations should be considering disaster recovery, which involves a set of policies, tools/applications and procedures to help enable the recovery and continuation of critical technology and systems following a disaster.

Some examples of potential disasters:

• Natural disasters like floods, tornadoes and hurricanes
• Infrastructure break-down (i.e. utility disruption, pipeline bursts)
• Human error or threats (i.e. cyber-attacks)

According to global IT services provider phoenixNAP, statistics show about 93% of businesses without a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan in place that suffer from a major data disaster are out of business within one year.

As consumers and business operators, we’ve seen an increase in attacks in which companies are locked out of their systems or data was held for ransom. Such attacks can be costly. On average, businesses lose over $100,000 per ransomware incident due to downtime and recovery costs. As these attacks increase, so should your focus on the importance of data back-up and recovery processes and controls. Without sufficient back-ups and defined processes for recovery, companies run an increased risk of delay or error in financial reporting. phoenixNAP says about 96% of companies with proper backups and Disaster Recovery plans in place were able to survive ransomware attacks.

Disaster recovery can be considered a subset of what is considered “business continuity”. Business continuity involves keeping essential aspects of your business functioning when significant disruptive events occur. Disaster recovery focuses on the IT or technology systems supporting your critical business functions.

What Is a Disaster Recovery Plan?

A Disaster Recovery plan is simply defining the strategy for recovering critical technology resources to ensure the continuation of critical/vital business processes in the event of a disaster. 

As most organizations are very reliant on information technology to conduct business, it’s critical to have a plan in place that can be easily implemented to minimize down-time. This plan defines the key processes for recovering critical technology platforms and telecommunications infrastructure within a specified timeframe. 

Tips for Creating a Disaster Recovery Plan

Identify Your Team

Establishing a Disaster Recovery Team (DRT) is a critical initial step in establishing a DR plan. The DRT should be a cross-functional team consisting of IT leadership and other individuals as needed who are responsible for carrying out the tasks outlined in this plan and providing expertise needed to recover from a disaster. It’s also important to involve key business stakeholders who would be involved in helping manage the downtime and recovery and ensure alignment with overall business continuity.

Create an IT Inventory

Ensuring that the organization has a real-time and up-to-date IT asset inventory listing is important in order to focus on the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for critical systems/applications. An IT asset inventory lists all key hardware and software (i.e. applications, servers, databases, etc.) and their relationships with one another. RTO is the goal for how quickly to restore technology services after a disruption, based on the acceptable amount of down-time for the specified technology. For example, a recovery time objective of 48 hours with local accessibility for payroll services means that the payroll application must be up and running within 48 hours as well as locally accessible. RPO is the goal for the point at which to restore data or information after a disruption, based on the acceptable amount of data or information loss. For example, an RPO of four hours for your financial reporting application means that the application data must be backed-up every four hours so that no more than four hours of data entered into the application is lost after a disruption.

Get Your Plan in Writing

Creating and documenting a plan involving these objectives is key to building out a realistic DR plan. Your organization will likely find during this process that there will be gaps between the current IT infrastructure and the determined recovery objectives. That said, it’s critical for your organization to work through these to ensure that the plan can be carried out as needed for the fluid continuity of the business.

What Else to Consider

Other important items to keep in mind when creating a DR Plan include:

• Determining channels for communicating disasters and next steps to your employees
• Obtaining stakeholder buy-in on the plan and its execution in order to ensure that the plan can be followed through on if necessary
• Testing and practicing your plan to help you find and correct issues, as well as enable more accurate and efficient execution 

With these simple actions, you’re on your way to having a plan. COVID-19 reminded us all that catastrophic events do happen. The businesses with a Disaster Recovery plan in place are likely to be the ones to weather IT outages. Now’s the time to pull together your team and establish your plan so should disaster strike, you’ll be ready.

If you have questions creating or cleaning up your DR plan, Gilmore Jasion Mahler’s (GJM) Risk Consulting Team can help guide your business in building out that plan, determining the gaps and testing your DR plan. To start the conversation, reach out to Director Matt Hoverman at mhoverman@gjmltd.com, Manager Tim Schloz at tschloz@gjmltd.com, or Senior Associate Reid Mankowski at rmankowski@gjmltd.com.

GJM Senior Associate Reid Mankowski contributed this blog. Reid joined the GJM Risk Consulting Team in 2019. Reid has significant experience in testing and leading IT general control and business process SOX testing for large and medium size companies, primarily in the manufacturing industry.

Established in 1996, Gilmore Jasion Mahler, LTD (GJM) is the largest public accounting firm in Northwest Ohio, with offices in Maumee and Findlay. Locally owned, GJM offers cloud-based accounting and provides comprehensive services including assurance, business advisory, tax, risk advisory, healthcare management and outsourced accounting. The Firm’s professionals specialize in industries including construction & real estate, healthcare, manufacturing & distribution and utilities.

This year has introduced businesses small and large to unprecedented levels of uncertainty. Even being intimately familiar with the adage in business, “the only constant is change,” very few companies were prepared for the changes that 2020 has brought us so far. These changes are still taking place and will likely continue for some time to come.

So, how does a business stay afloat, even grow when so much uncertainty abounds? In this two-part series, we hope to be able to answer that question and give you some tangible recommendations as to how you can make your business more “uncertainty-proof.”

Strategic adaptability is a term that is bandied about a lot but is much more critical now than ever before. Simply put, strategic adaptability refers to having the infrastructure in place for your business that allows it to evolve when necessary. You’re probably already doing this on some level, in looking at customer preference changes or for sudden changes in the cost of goods and services.

RELATED ARTICLE: Protecting Your Business from Disaster

The original idea behind strategic adaptability is to make your business as adaptable as possible. While it may seem impossible to plan strategically for an infinite number of outcomes, there are some basic things that almost any business can do to increase its adaptability and afford itself some protection from so much uncertainty.

1. Digitize, Digitize, Digitize

If you have been putting off your business’s entry into the digital era, now is absolutely the time to stop procrastinating. The more of your infrastructure that is digitized, the more easily tasks can be handed off, done remotely, altered, and more efficiently coordinated. Recent research indicates that this sort of adaptability for businesses is precisely the ingredient needed to avoid disruption in providing goods and services.

Gilmore Jasion Mahler itself is actually a good example of a business that has successfully transitioned to a mainly digital infrastructure. Maybe the changes our firm made will help your business too.

When the firm moved its Maumee headquarters to a new building last fall, leadership took the opportunity to embrace some additional digital platforms, including Microsoft Teams, which allows virtual meetings and all phone calls to happen through the computer desktop, no handset necessary. The firm had also transitioned earlier to some cloud-based solutions in a number of other areas of client service prior to the pandemic. For example, secure document storage.

“I feel we’re very lucky,” says GJM managing partner Kevin Gilmore. “When the COVID-19 crisis hit, we had made some smart decisions and had the digital infrastructure we needed in place. Our team was able to seamlessly transition to remote work without missing a beat. Had we not made those infrastructure changes, I imagine we would have had much more difficulty transitioning to a remote workforce.”

The manufacturing sector is certainly proof of the power of adaptability during the pandemic. Many car companies and other manufacturers quickly retooled to start producing ventilator components, face masks, face shields and other PPE to meet the needs of overwhelmed hospitals and other healthcare providers.

2. Build Adaptability into Day-to-Day Management and Labor Practices

What does it look like, on the ground, for a business to build adaptability in to the day-to-day?  

For one, it requires management to take an active role in recognizing the uncertainty and establishing a resilient team to work with; it may also be the time to evaluate which of the old ways aren’t working for a business in the current climate. Focusing on practical solutions and priorities is also key to building this adaptability into daily operations. It’s useful to start with what outcomes you desire and work back from there, adapting the infrastructure as needed to achieve those outcomes. Encouraging collaboration and adaptability in your workforce is another quality shared by companies that are faring well in the current climate. While this may involve some training, these skills are more important now than ever.

Part two of this series will address some of the ways that organizations can help their workforces build the vital skill of adaptability.

Your business can access the latest information on the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on industry in the GJM COVID-19 Resource Center.

Established in 1996, Gilmore Jasion Mahler, LTD (GJM) is the largest public accounting firm in Northwest Ohio, with offices in Maumee and Findlay. Locally owned, GJM offers cloud-based accounting and provides comprehensive services including assurance, business advisory, tax, risk advisory, healthcare management and outsourced accounting. The Firm’s professionals specialize in industries including construction & real estate, healthcare, manufacturing & distribution and utilities.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought countless financial concerns for businesses across the country as many struggle to thrive, or even survive. In this GJM Q&A blog we tackle a question any business will need to answer if they've received a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan and a valuation is in the cards.

Question: How does a PPP loan affect business valuation?

Answer from Jeff Denning, CPA, ABV, CFF:  

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an enormous impact on the business sector. The U.S. stock markets were initially affected in late February. Accordingly, appraisers of closely-held businesses have generally considered additional investment risks, lower projected profits, and lower growth rates in valuation engagements using ‘as of’ dates from late February to the present date. 

If your company received a loan through the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), an appraiser will need to take that into account when working to arrive at a value for your business. A business appraiser should separately consider any PPP loan payable balance, offset by unused cash in the PPP account, if any, as of the valuation date and the probability of a forgiveness amount. The consideration of the use of the loan proceeds should be in management’s profit and cash flow projections and then part of the appraiser’s overall probability and scenario analysis under an income approach to valuation.    

Jeff Denning is a partner with Gilmore Jasion Mahler, LTD and has 30 years of accounting experience, with a focus on providing services as an accredited business appraiser, forensic accountant, litigation consultant, and expert witness. For the past 20 years, his career has been focused on performing business valuations, accounting investigations, and damage calculations; preparing hundreds of expert reports and appraisal reports; and providing accounting and financial expert testimony.   

You’ll find more resources related to the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on your business at GJM’s COVID-19 Resource Center.

Established in 1996, Gilmore Jasion Mahler, LTD (GJM) is the largest public accounting firm in Northwest Ohio, with offices in Maumee and Findlay. Locally owned, GJM offers cloud-based accounting and provides comprehensive services including assurance, business advisory, tax, risk advisory, healthcare management and outsourced accounting. The Firm’s professionals specialize in industries including construction & real estate, healthcare, manufacturing & distribution and utilities.

Just as with so many industries, technology is transforming the accounting industry. Gilmore Jasion Mahler CPA Jeff Denning works with many different business owners to determine the value of their businesses. He says there’s no question technology and artificial intelligence, or AI, are changing things. The real question, he says, is whether or not those changes are a good thing when it comes to trying to figure out what your business is worth.

Jeff Denning has over three decades experience as a CPA. His expertise is business valuation and forensic accounting.

Established in 1996, Gilmore Jasion Mahler, LTD (GJM) is the largest public accounting firm in Northwest Ohio, with offices in Maumee and Findlay. Locally owned, GJM offers cloud-based accounting and provides comprehensive services including assurance, business advisory, tax, risk advisory, healthcare management and outsourced accounting. The Firm’s professionals specialize in industries including construction & real estate, healthcare, manufacturing & distribution and utilities.