How Fortus are tackling the Covid crisis

22 May 2020

Like so many other businesses during this pandemic, The Fortus senior team have been focused on, not only how we adapt our own business to deal with the challenges it’s facing, but how we also help and support our clients to adapt.

our Covid-19 plan

We have made sure decisions are well supported, consulted and inclusive. So, what did we do AND what shall we do now:

What we did:

  1. Our Team: We, like all businesses, put the team health and safety first. Our structure had already evolved as Fortus and we made sure we had senior Directors looking after manageable teams – was and is everyone ok? And can we help? We wanted to be as honest with the team and vice versa.
  2. Our Clients: We wanted to support our clients as much as possible, in doing so this helped them in being more secure. We knew discretionary spend projects may be delayed or in some cases cancelled. However, we are confident these will return – our clients are too entrepreneurial to retract for too long.
  3. Our Brand: We had just launched a new brand in a pandemic. We were going to make the most of the situation and the still audience we were fortunate to have.
  4. Our Cashflow: We have always invested in the long-term. We’d review our plans for the next 6 months and pushed projects back where we could. Cash flow was (and still is) so important. We had used the furlough scheme, which was between 5% – 10% of workforce, and we also reviewed the various opportunities available to us and decided whether any were suitable.
  5. Our Pipeline: We have built a strong sales & business development culture and whilst this was not the right time to sell to clients, there were strong cash generative initiatives that were more relevant than ever and would help them now. We expanded our reach and talked to our clients and supported them to just do it!
  6. Our Alliances: We took the decision to look at new alliances across our own profession and offer support to small independent firms where we could. There have been some good new relationships formed as a result, right across the country. Could we help them, if so how?

WHAT WE NEED TO CONSIDER

Much of the above remains our core focus for the foreseeable, however some topics need to be brought back to the table:

  1. Our Team: Continued regular team contact and offering them a new choice in how we want to operate in the future. Where are their new efficiencies and how do we protect them?
  2. Our Strategy: Our long term strategic planning is firmly back at the table!
  3. Our Leadership team: let’s all get the right people focusing on the right areas, those good at ‘crisis management’ should still remain on all COVID type projects. Let’s now start to have our eye back on the future.
  4. Our Data: In part also due to our restructure our heads have been reappointed to the quality of our data, financial and operational. However now more than ever our reporting and assessment needs to be more accurate and faster. How can we refine this even more?
  5. Our Cashflow: We took the decisions to park the ‘nice to haves’ however, what we are not prepared to compromise is the investments we had planned across new people development & culture projects. We remain committed here more than ever.
  6. Our Competition: Let’s speak to them and understand their challenges, there may be opportunity, we may just learn something ourselves. Our market is changing like many others and we want to be at the front, not following.

This should carry us through the next 3 – 6 months until something else changes! But we all know the here and now is more important than ever. Now is just a time to lift the head a little and get the longer term plans back in order. Well, that’s what we’ll be doing – what about you?

If you want to chat through the Fortus Beyond COVID plans in more detail contact Chris Timms.

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