Survival Strategies For Corporates

Survival Strategies for
Corporates
How to Survive the Covid-19 Crisis in 5 Steps
Tony de Bree
TONY DE BREE
SURVIVAL STRATEGIES
FOR CORPORATES
HOW TO SURVIVE THE
COVID-19 CRISIS IN 5 STEPS
2
Survival Strategies for Corporates: How to Survive the Covid-19 Crisis in 5 Steps
1st edition
© 2021 Tony de Bree & bookboon.com
ISBN 978-87-403-3830-0
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SURVIVAL STRATEGIES FOR CORPORATES Contents
CONTENTS
About the author 6
Introduction 8
1 Definitions 10
Introduction 10
1.1 What is a business model and a revenue model? 10
1.2 What are organisational economics? 12
1.3 What is the corporate model canvas©? 12
1.4 What is a survival strategy? 19
2 Step 1: Stay positive and deal with adversity 20

Introduction 20
2.1 Stay positive 20
2.2 Successful people deal with adversity 21
2.3 How to learn from adversity? 22
2.4 How to help others to deal with adversity? 23
3 Step 2: Identify the biggest problems 25

Introduction 25
3.1 The impact of Covid-19 26
3.2 What was your burn rate & runway prior to Covid-19? 26
3.3 What is your biggest problem? 28
3.4 What is your burn rate & runway since Covid-19? 29
4 Step 3: Describe your current corporate business model 34

Introduction 34
4.1 Your current Corporate Model Canvas © 35
4.2 What if your company is big? 39
5 Step 4: Design your new corporate business model 40

Introduction 40
5.1 Creative ideas for your new business model 41
5.2 Different survival strategies for corporates 42
5.3 Your new Corporate Model Canvas © 44
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SURVIVAL STRATEGIES FOR CORPORATES Contents
6 Step 5: Implement the new business model fast 50

Introduction 50
6.1 What is a survival plan? 50
6.2 What are the short-term goals of a survival plan? 51
6.3 Implementing your survival plan and fast 52
7 What’s next? 54
Endnotes 56
5
SURVIVAL STRATEGIES FOR CORPORATES About the author
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

This eBook is written by Dr. Tony de Bree EEP MBA (1957), a born survivor and storyteller.
He is an experienced digital strategy & change consultant, a high-energy speaker and lecturer,
a successful online entrepreneur and a coach & mentor for C-Level executives, students,
startups, scaleups, SMEs and works councils.
Dr. Tony de Bree EEP MBA
His personal mission is:
“To empower and educate as many people as possible so that they can take care of
themselves and achieve their goals in a sustainable way.”
He is bestselling author of ‘how to books’ in Dutch (see here) and eBooks in English. He
worked 26 years in international Financial Services at Amro Bank and ABN Amro Bank as
problem solver with corporate & private clients, institutional & private investors, corporates,
startups, scaleups & SMEs worldwide. In corporate ICT & corporate business strategy
development; turnaround management; international business development; corporate
venturing; M&A; outsourcing, strategic partnering, negotiating & contracting and as
global change manager, program manager regulatory change after 9/11, splitting up ABN
Amro and as programme manager eLearning, online platforms, eMarketplaces, eBusiness,
eCommerce, eTrust & eKYC.
In 2001, he started to make money online working from home as a side hustle next to his
day job at the global ABN Amro Bank. With online consulting, training & coaching and
with digital products like eBooks, checklists, canvasses, planners and ‘pitch videos’.
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SURVIVAL STRATEGIES FOR CORPORATES About the author
He left the corporate business world in 2011 & now leads a happy personal and professional
life with his new wife. Helping managers, corporates, startups & scaleups to survive Covid-19
and grow a sustainable business online & offline staying small using ICT.
You can reach him:
- by phone or WhatsApp on 0031634387806,

- by e-mail here.
- on LinkedIn here and on Instagram here.
His websites:
www.tonydebree.on
&
www.survivalstrategyforcorporates.com
www.tonydebree.online/
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SURVIVAL STRATEGIES FOR CORPORATES Introduction
INTRODUCTION
“To Grow Bigger” Is Not Much Of A Business Strategy At All
– Ricardo Semler
Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, many C-level executives of corporates
(often men) have been struggling to go from growth into survival mode and define the
right corporate survival strategy to survive and do that fast. Some can deal with adversity
and some are not able to do that. Just like some of the characters in the well-known book
‘Who stole my cheese?’. Each person reacts differently when “his or her cheese”, read “his
of her income or revenues”, suddenly runs out. And that is exactly what is happening now.
Some executives hold on to “their cheese” and cannot let go, others are resilient and take
the right actions quickly and thus increase the chance of survival for their company.
If you are an executive of a corporate, your priority is to make sure that your corporate
survives if that is possible. To be able to achieve that goal, you need to be resilient yourself
and consequently define and implement the best corporate survival strategy for your
company… and fast.
Why? Because a large part of the income of corporates has dried up, unnecessary costs
are often much too high because they were focusing on implementing a growth strategy
and thirdly because many banks and investors, now often are in survival-mode themselves
8
SURVIVAL STRATEGIES FOR CORPORATES Introduction
and that means that it is much more difficult to extend existing credit lines or attract new
external financing. The good news however is that there are many opportunities, especially
in online business development, to survive Covid-19 if you take action fast.
Therefor, C-level executives need to quickly assess the impact of Covid-19 on their business,
they must look at their corporate burn rate and their corporate runway. They need to quickly
reduce their expenses that are not necessary to survive and adjust their financing strategy in
combination with the quick preparation and implementation of a new corporate business
model and a new corporate revenue model fast.
In this eBook you will learn:
1. What a business model is, what a revenue model is, what a survival strategy is,
what organisational economics are and what the Corporate Model Canvas© is.
Chapters 2-6 will cover the 5-step approach to choose and plan the right corporate
survival for your corporate company.
2. Step 1: how to stay positive and deal with adversity?

3. Step 2: how to carry out a quick problem analysis?
4. Step 3: how to describe your current corporate business model?
5. Step 4: how to describe your new corporate business model?
6. Stap 5: how to implement the new model fast?
7. What’s next?
p.s.
You can download the Corporate Model Canvasses, the checklists and additional material
here: here.
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SURVIVAL STRATEGIES FOR CORPORATES Definitions
1 DEFINITIONS
INTRODUCTION
Before the 5-step approach for defining and executing a corporate survival strategy for your
corporate company can be explained, several terms will be defined to set the scene. You will
learn what a business model is, what a revenue model is, what organisational economics are
and what the Corporate Model Canvas© is.
1.1 WHAT IS A BUSINESS MODEL AND A REVENUE MODEL?

A business model is actually a story; a story that you can shape and present in all kinds of
ways, depending on the medium and your target audience. But what exactly is a business
model and what is the difference with a revenue model? Because there is often confusion
about those two terms.
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A business model is:
The way in which your organisation creates value with and for your customers, your business
ecosystem, including your own organisation, your suppliers and your partners and the people
around you.
And a revenue model is:
How and when you earn monetary and non-monetary value for which customers and with
which solutions.
You can describe your business model in many different ways, but most of the traditional
tools used by corporates are not of much practical use during a crisis like Covid-19. There
are a number of reasons for that. Why? Because the organisational side is often missing. So,
you do not have any practical levers to make the right organisational changes to implement
your corporate survival strategy and your new corporate business model in an integrated way.
And there is another important problem with many corporate tools & methods: survival in
the online platform economy starts with paying customers and not with a brilliant idea
that you can brainstorm about at your leisure with colleagues internally or with other people
in a traditional corporate strategy environment. You just do not have the time for that!
While obtaining my Fintech Certificate at the M.I.T. in the United States in 2017, the
online action-learning program was divided into two different blended learning programs:
the students who worked for or wanted to work for a large corporate organisation used
different tools and models than myself in program 2.
In program 2, we had to set up a new profitable company in three months with my worldwide
virtual team as RegTech Capstone Project Leader. We did not have to worry at all about
how you could get it done internally as you do in many large corporate environments. And
that was great. We just had to “do it” and bring in paying customers as quickly as possible
with a small team using ICT and video conferencing.
We had 3 months then, but unfortunately many C-level executives of corporates do not
even have those 3 months now. So, you have to act fast.
And that is why in this premium e-book you get a number of new Corporate Model Canvasses
& checklists at your disposal to increase your chances of survival with your corporate. And
hopefully grow again after the crisis is over, staying small using ICT with your new virtual
organisation. Organisational economics play a major role in designing and implementing
that new virtual organisation, costs that most executives do not take into account
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1.2 WHAT ARE ORGANISATIONAL ECONOMICS?

Organisational economics analyses organisational actions as outcomes of strategic, tactical
and operational interplay among individuals inside and outside the company itself as they
respond to incentives or otherwise pursue their own interests. Organisational economics
thus looks inside the traditional “black box” of your corporate company, your corporate
organisation, by examining the task of organising and especially motivating and coordinating
human activity in a micro-economic context.
Three theories are important in organisational economics in the digital world we are living in:
the economics of Increasing Returns, the theory of transaction costs and the one regarding
interaction costs as you can read in the free eBook you can download here.
Organisational economics help you to answer questions like how can we create value as
quick as possible for which customers, what do we do ourselves & what do we outsource
to become and stay Lean & Mean in the eyes of our customers?
1.3 WHAT IS THE CORPORATE MODEL CANVAS©?

To determine your short-term and long-term corporate survival strategy, to adjust your
corporate business model and to change your current organisation, you need simple tools
because you have to do it fast. First, you need to be able to quickly assess the impact of
the current Covid-19 crisis on your bottom line with an emphasis on your corporate burn
rate and your corporate runway and then quickly describe your current corporate business
model and revenue model.
The new Corporate Model Canvas© gives you the opportunity to describe your current
‘AS-IS’ and your future ‘TO-BE’ corporate business model with an outside-in perspective.
Including your ‘AS-IS’ and ‘TO-BE’ Lean & Mean organisation and your key suppliers,
strategic partners and independent business owners in your business ecosystem. People and
companies with whom you will have to implement your corporate survival strategy fast.
Below you see the new Corporate Model Canvas©.
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CORPORATE MODEL CANVAS©
Company: Name: Date: Version:
Customers & Problem/ Unique Value

Touchpoints: Solution: Touchpoints: Ecosystem:
Prospects: need: Proposition:
Suppliers:
Strategic
partners:
Core Core
Organisation:
competencies: capabilities:
Independent
business
owners:
Revenue model: Cost structure:
Financing strategy:
Figure 1: The Corporate Model Canvas©i
Using an outside-in approach, everything starts on the left with your (hopefully fast) paying
customers and your prospects. In the “middle block” your current organisation is described
with your corporate profile (see Digital Strategy Mapping, Digital Leadership In The Platform
Economy) and at the front and back of your ‘own’ corporate, you communicate and interact
with customers and other people in the outside world on the one hand and with people in
companies in your network, in your corporate ecosystem, on the other hand. You do that
via offline and online “touch points” using ICT as much as possible.
The bottom line for your entire corporate business model becomes clear in 1) your revenue
model, 2) your cost structure, and 3) your financing strategy at the bottom of this canvas.
With this Corporate Model Canvas© you can quickly map your existing corporate
organisation as part of your ‘AS-IS’ corporate business model. So that you can then
quickly take your next steps.
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In the ‘good old days’ before the Covid-19 crisis broke out, you made decisions and assumptions
regarding your corporate growth strategy to make a difference with your solution for a
certain group of customers. Now you are forced by the circumstances to quickly investigate
whether all your assumptions are still correct, or whether you need to quickly adjust parts
or whether you need to overhaul everything. The most important question that you as
C-level executive must ask yourself now - alone or with other members of your team and
your best customers - before making all kinds of decisions about your survival strategy is:
“What concrete changes do we have to implement in the short term to survive and in which
parts of the current corporate business model, including our own organisation, in order to a)
keep our best paying customers in and b) survive and thrive?”
The Corporate Model Canvas© with its 13 different building blocks helps you to do just that.

Touchpoints: Solution: Touchpoints: X. Ecosystem:
Suppliers:
II. III. IV. Strategic

partners:
Core Core
Organisation:
Independent
Touchpoints: business
owners:
I. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX.
XI. XII.
Financing strategy:
XIII.
Figure 2: The Corporate Model Canvas©
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A brief overview of the different building blocks:
I. Customers & prospects: the customers / niche who pay or are expected to pay for your
relevant solution(s) and for whom you can make a difference.
II. Problem / need: the problem and / or need in which you, especially with your corporate,
make a difference for that specific group of customers in this situation.
III. Unique value proposition: a short, powerful message that clarifies why it is worth
purchasing your solution.
IV. Solution: the unique solution that you provide to your group of paying customers in
your target audience. Products and services are part of your solution.
V. Touchpoints: these are the moments when a customer or potential customer has contact
with your corporate. Online and offline channels and social networks are therefore part of this.
VI. Core competencies: are competitive advantages that your current corporate organisation
including you personally and the managers and employees in your company have in the
eyes of your customers that can not be copied and build quickly.
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VII. Organisation: the people in your corporate organisation. The structure, part of
the organisational design, the Corporate Profile (see ‘Digital Strategy Mapping. Digital
Leadership In The Platform Economy’) of many traditional hierarchal organisations looks
like figure 3 with a CEO, a large head office, supporting departments/units and a number
of business units, in this case 5.
Shareholders
Business
Customers
Ecosystem
Head Office
Business Units
Figure 3: A typical corporate hierarchical organisation
The operating model in these type of ‘portfolio’ corporates works along the lines of a business
portfolio model in which every business unit/business line has to be profitable. Profitable,
including all organisational costs of the CEO, the head office and other supporting
functions on the corporate level like corporate ICT, HR, Finance, Compliance, Risk &
Legal for instance.
VIII. Core capabilities: These are operational processes that you carry out yourself and that
are necessary for the proper functioning of your corporate. Examples are a good ICT platform
or one or more functional software packages. Also think of online and offline sales and
marketing processes, customer relationship management, customer experience management,
operational processes such as financial reporting, the provision of management information,
administrative processes and the processes to obtain sufficient financing and funding.
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IX. Touchpoints: these are the moments when a supplier, a strategic partner or an independent
entrepreneur at home or abroad has contact with your corporate organisation and you with
them. Flexible, scalable IT systems are also crucial for an optimal customer journey for your
customers and smooth business processes.
In your current corporate organisation, you do not do everything yourself I presume.

Different products and services that are part of ‘your solution(s)’ for your customers, are
produced by others. After all, you only want to incur costs in terms of time, energy and
money that are profitable and valuable for your paying customers. You let other companies
do things that you are not good at and that are not really very important to your business.
In order to work with them as well as possible, you need effective and efficient touchpoints.
X. Ecosystem: depending on the choices you have made under VII, VIII and IX when
setting up and further developing your AS-IS corporate business model, you currently
might work with certain suppliers, strategic partners and possibly freelancers and other
self-employed workers that can be hired flexibly locally and internationally to deliver your
solution to your existing customers.
Because of the Covid-19 crisis, you have to review that current corporate ecosystem fast.
Why? Companies in your existing corporate ecosystem might be in acute problems at the
moment, so you have to find out how they are doing and choose other partners, start
developing activities yourself again or automate certain activities. Companies in your new
business ecosystem must also be able to survive and able to help their customers to survive
this crisis including you.
The CEO The Corporate Company
The corporate ecosystem:

suppliers, partners &
freelancers with relevant
complementary knowl-
edge and experience
Figure 4: A corporate ecosystem (simplified)
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XI. Revenue model: online and offline income streams are the most important ways to
finance your corporate from the start, preferably from the income of paying customers. We
call that “revenue-based financing” or “customer-based financing” in English. A financing
strategy based on maximising your revenues from customers and limiting external financing
as much as possible.
XII. Cost structure: what things do you spend your money on and why? Broadly speaking,
you can distinguish the following types of costs:
- Fixed costs. Your fixed costs are usually related to personnel costs of managers
and employees in permanent employment and costs of buildings and other
facilities such as computers, networks, canteen, etc.
- Variable costs. These variable costs depend in part on the cost of the number of
products that you produce and sell. And also, the costs of temporary hiring of
people, including consultants & freelancers on the basis of odd jobs or projects.
- Other costs. There are other cost types that are not included by many corporates
and scale-ups, such as organisational costs, based on organisational economics
discussed earlier. In addition to wasting money, ‘organising’ can cost a huge
amount of time and energy.
Independent of the type of costs, it is important that they are all necessary costs, necessary
expenditures. What do I mean with that? That means that all costs should be relevant and
necessary to generate income from your customers. All the other costs are unnecessary.
XIII. Financing strategy: how do you currently finance the activities of your company?
It is best to do this with your own, internal financing on the basis of paying, profitable
customers. And to depend as little as possible on external financing.
XI, XXII and XIII are the three elements that together determine your burn rate and the
length of your runway and that indicate how big your acute financial problems are as a
result of the Covid-19 measures in your own country and abroad.
The 1st general rule of thumb for a healthy financial basis for any company in every phase
is actually very simple:
“What you don’t spend, you don’t have to finance”.
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1.4 WHAT IS A SURVIVAL STRATEGY?

Before the Covid-19 crisis, most corporates were focusing on a growth strategy:
A growth strategy is a plan of action that allows you to achieve a higher level of market share
than you currently have. ...
But since the lockdowns in different countries started from the beginning of 2020, all
corporates had to make a quick transition from their growth strategy to a survival strategy.
A survival strategy is an ICT- and a business strategy that will allow the company to survive
in the short term and grow and thrive in the future.
If you want to make the transition from ‘growth mode’ to ‘survival mode’ as a company as
a whole, you first have to do that yourself as C-level executive. And that is why step 1 in
the survival-approach is stay positive and deal with adversity.
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SURVIVAL STRATEGIES FOR CORPORATES Step 1: Stay positive and deal with adversity
2 STEP 1: STAY POSITIVE AND

DEAL WITH ADVERSITY
INTRODUCTION
One of the interesting observations one can make regarding how many executives of corporates
are coping with the impact of the global Covid-19 crisis is that many of them did not really
knew what to do and sometimes even panicked. In industries like in the airline industry,
many CEOs immediately started to ask for support by the respective Governments. others
showed more personal skills in terms of staying positive and dealing with adversity. They took
short term measures and changed their business model en revenue model as fast as possible.
That is why the first step of designing and implementing the right corporate survival strategy
for corporates is how to stay positive and deal with adversity. You need to be resilient if
you want to survive Covid-19.
2.1 STAY POSITIVE

If your company is hit hard by the Covid-19 crisis, it is absolutely essential as an executive
or manager to have the right mindset, have the right survival skills, and remain realistic
and positive. When the going gets tough, it is very easy for people to get into a downward
spiral, but you as an executive or manager cannot afford that attitude.
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You start e.g. to think about all the circumstances that have brought you to where you
are now. You then wonder what you could have done differently in the past and what you
“did all wrong”. You start to doubt your abilities and you wonder if you will succeed. The
more you are concerned with these thoughts, the worse you will feel and the less energy
you will have to take action: you take the ‘victim’ attitude of some of the mice in “Who
stole my cheese?” And then you do nothing more.
So, as you get started to keep your business alive and change course quickly, it is important
to maintain a positive attitude. To be clear, this does not mean pretending everything is
okay or putting your head in the sand. On the contrary. It just means that you remain
confident in your ability to achieve positive results. A lot depends on you personally, you will
have to get yourself, your family, the other team members and your customers through it.
A positive attitude also means that you are determined not to give up, to be resilient.
Continue to strive to change things quickly and keep your business afloat and building
a healthy foundation for possible continuation. If you sometimes struggle to keep up the
courage, remember that almost every major well-known entrepreneur has gone through
similar rough times and survived it all:
• Thomas Edison failed thousands of times before he could develop a fully

functioning light bulb.
• Apple nearly went bankrupt when Steve Jobs was president.
• Bill Gates’ first act was a total failure.
• Henry Ford’s first car company went bankrupt within a year.
So, stay positive and be resilient. And be a real leader for everybody around you, especially
in times of crisis.
2.2 SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE DEAL WITH ADVERSITY

Did you know that successful people know how to deal with adversity? It is true. If you
watch, listen to or read the stories or profiles of the most successful people, successful
survivors, you will be surprised at just how adverse their situations were. They often tell
the stories for others to learn and use to overcome adversity.
You should therefor read the profiles of successful people. They contain gems of information
and can act as a resource for everyone else. The story is one aspect of reading about them.
However, how they dealt with the situations is often a source of inspiration. When you
become inspired, you increase your chances of dealing with your problems.
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Inspiration does not last forever, unfortunately. You need to reinforce the message. If you
can, try to set aside time to read one story of a successful person every week. It will help
you with your inspiration, and it will feed ideas on how to use their stories to make your
life easier or better.
Reading the stories of successful people shows that they are just like the rest of us. There
is not anything superhuman about them that led them to their successes. You will find a
common theme among those facing adversity: they had persistence and kept a positive
attitude. Those two attributes will take you far when facing any situation.
You can choose to read stories online or find material in your local library. You can also
choose to find stories on the internet. But be careful of the resources you find online.
Anyone can publish whatever they like and sound convincing on their authority. Make sure
you check the source and keep a critical eye out for people who do not present qualified
information, but fake news.
When you get in the habit of reading material of successful people, you will shift to a
successful mindset yourself. You will have a memory bank of stories to draw inspiration.
However, you can read all about the stories of successful people and get inspired. But, if you
do not take action to survive this crisis and grasp the opportunities immediately, it will be of
little help to you. At that point, you become nothing more than a dreamer. Having dreams
is good, but you need to make sure you act on those dreams…. not tomorrow but now.
2.3 HOW TO LEARN FROM ADVERSITY?

You never want to face adverse situations. Unfortunately, they will happen. It is not a matter
of if, but when. If there is to be a silver lining, it is that you will learn from them. That
is if you are willing to learn.
The deeper the adversity you face in your personal and in your life as a C-level executive,
the more it tests your resolve. You will learn much about yourself in how you deal with
difficult situations. Of course, if you are not willing to admit you have s real crisis to deal
with in the first place, then you will not draw from those lessons learned.
You will learn to reassess your priorities. Suddenly, you will discover what is truly important
in your life. For instance, you may think your current job is the most important aspect of
your life. Then, you face your adverse situation like the Covid-19 crisis and realise that your
family and friends are much more important. You can always find a new job or different
ways to earn an income online with your knowledge and experience.
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You will learn that change is the one aspect of life you can depend on most. People have
a difficult time accepting change. The trouble is that change continually happens. When
you find yourself in a situation where you have no choice but to deal with something, you
will accept the change. If you do not, the problem may not correct itself. You will become
miserable by not allowing change to occur.
Seek the opportunities that may exist from your personal and professional adverse situation
like the Covid-19 crisis. You may find that you are good at something you hadn’t realized.
The situation forced you to use survival skills for instance that you did not know you had.
It is difficult to think in this capacity because you are dealing with your situation. But try
to recognize the opportunities.
You are going to meet people as part of the process offline, but especially online now
including on social networking sites like LinkedIn. These people may be key in helping you
through difficult times like this one. More importantly, a few of them may become close
friends. Adversity has a way of bringing the right people together.
Some adversity lies in dealing with others who do not agree with you or who do not really
want to help you. That allows you to learn about how others approach a situation. You
will see what kind of character those people really possess. Try to learn about their feelings
and their motivations. When you do, you can see their perspective on the issue. Although
you may see their point of view, it does not mean you have to agree with them, nor does
it mean you should back down. However, you will be in a better position when dealing
with them inside your own corporate organisation also.
2.4 HOW TO HELP OTHERS TO DEAL WITH ADVERSITY?

As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, you are already experience adverse situations and
you will encounter more, and you will need to handle them as a result. You learn from the
experience that you have the strength to overcome most anything that comes your way.
Sometimes, others you know may need help when dealing with their adverse situations.
Because you have helped yourself, you are in a good position to offer them help.
The people you are trying to help in your company, including managers and employees, may
need to open up about their situation. If they are denying that it is occurring, they do not
want to see the reality, it is going to be difficult to help them. They will not accept your
offers of help because they do not believe anything is wrong. Your offer may fall on deaf ears
with them, or worse, they will get angry with you for even suggesting something is wrong.
23
Sometimes, the best way to get them to realise your company and they themselves are
experiencing serious problems is by asking them how they would handle the same situation
if they needed to help someone else. By getting them to focus on an outside entity, even
if fictitious, they start the mental process of identifying the problem and take action for
themselves also. It is not a guarantee that they will come around when you do this, but
it certainly can get the process started.
Assuming you can get people to recognize the serious problem your company has and therefor
they as individual, you can help them take action to handle their situations both in their
personal and in their professional lives. You may want to search for specialised ‘survival’
advice, training, and coaching for yourself and for them online & offline. Research before
they do so that you can help them together with your HR-professionals when they get to
that point of doing the research themselves. It is not a bad idea to learn more about the
situation. You will be better able to help them.
If you have dealt with a personal and professional crisis before, that will speed up the
process. The person you are helping can ask questions about your experiences and what you
did to cope or get through it. You can share your personal stories and you will likely have
a list of resources prepared from your experiences. they get started; however, they probably
will not need you to continue going with them and you will not have the time to do that
anyway. You just can not do that with everybody in your company, but you should do it
with your most important colleagues and team members if they themselves have the right
attitude and mindset.
Helping others in your company deal with adversity and survive this crisis is not an easy
task. You should expect to get resistance, especially in the beginning. But, if you can get
them to see the problem, they may be ready to take action towards the recovery process. It
can be rewarding to know that you helped people start on their road to recovery. However,
helping others should never stand in the way of taking the right steps at the right time to
save the company.
If you have the right positive and resilient mindset to lead your company through this crisis,
you should immediately take the next step in the approach to try to save and turnaround
your company and that is: identify the real problem or problems your company is facing
and take short term actions. And do that with an open mind: cost cutting in a traditional
way is often not the right short-term action to take. That traditional survival strategy often
makes your problems even worse.
Therefor in the next chapter, you will learn how to identify the real problems your company
are facing. And if you want to read more articles on dealing with adversity, click here.
24
SURVIVAL STRATEGIES FOR CORPORATES Step 2: Identify the biggest problems
3 STEP 2: IDENTIFY THE

BIGGEST PROBLEMS
INTRODUCTION
Speed is the magic word if you want to survive the Covid-19 crisis. In step 2 of defining
your corporate survival strategy, you will learn how to quickly analyse the impact of the
Covid-19 crisis on your corporate business model using the Corporate Model Canvas©.
You will learn how to look at your current burn rate and your current runway and what
your biggest problems are at the moment in relation to the bottom line of your existing
corporate company.
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3.1 THE IMPACT OF COVID-19

It’s in the nature of many C-level executives to be optimistic, but just assume that your
assumptions about your customers, your revenues, your costs, and your financing that form
the foundation of your current corporate business model are now outdated and that you
have to review them and fast. You need to find out what your best customers will be doing
going forward and what they are currently doing. Are they closed or are they already closing?
Will they fire people, or will they go bankrupt so that they no longer pay your invoices, as
I have already experienced with a number of my own customers? If so, the expected revenue
forecasts and estimates that form the basis for your current corporate business model, your
corporate earnings model and your current spending pattern are no longer valid. And the
same can apply to suppliers, strategic partners and other companies you are currently working
with. How are those people and these companies in your corporate ecosystem really doing?
If you want your company to survive, you have to evaluate how things are really going.
You just cannot ignore problems. You cannot just hope that things get better and that the
Government will save you. You need to review your corporate business model quickly and
thoroughly and then make fundamental interventions based on what is happening objectively
now and what likely scenarios are going forward.
This gives you a quick idea of where yourself and where your corporate really stand and
how bad it is. But to really find out what you need to do to maximize your chances of
survival, you need to look deeper. At your personal strengths and weaknesses and that of
your core team as we did in the last chapter. And financially, at your current corporate
burnrate and your current corporate runway: your profitable customers, your profitable
solutions and your daily income, your daily expenses and your financing in the short term.
The “bottom line” of your current Corporate Model Canvas©.
And you will do that in the following paragraphs.
3.2 WHAT WAS YOUR BURN RATE &

RUNWAY PRIOR TO COVID-19?
Under normal circumstances, as a corporate, you make a growth plan based on internal
and external funding. Every month you review your current gross burn rate, i.e. how much
money you spend each month in order to grow. You look at your fixed costs and at your
variable costs. Then you review your actual earnings each month - not forecasts, but actual
earnings coming in each month.
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You then subtract your monthly gross burn rate from your monthly income to get your net
burn rate. If you make more money than you spend, you have a positive cash flow. If you
have less income than your expenses, then that figure is negative, and that figure represents
the amount of money your company loses in practice every month (‘burnt’ or ‘burns’).
If you look at your company’s bank accounts in this crisis, you can calculate how many
months you can last this way by “burning” that amount every month if you do not intervene.
That number of months, your “runway” is the amount of time your corporate has before
the money runs out if you do not take the right measures.
Your runway may have been extended in the past by means of external financing by corporate
financing by a bank or by borrowed capital from investors who you e.g. have given money
in exchange for shares or on the basis of contractually agreed dividend payments. They did
this on the basis of your estimated corporate growth and your corporate growth potential
in the “old normal.” That is the way all executives and managers learn how to grow under
normal circumstances.
Only that is of no use to you as C-level executive now and neither is it in the eyes of your
external financiers.
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3.3 WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST PROBLEM?

The situation is now completely different, isn’t it? You need to take a quick look at your
current corporate business model with the goal of surviving and generating revenues fast and
cutting unnecessary costs in the face of different scenarios surrounding the “new normal”.
Nobody knows exactly what will happen at what time, which measures help and which do
not help to isolate the virus, whether there will be a new outbreak because people do not
keep to the 1.5 meter distance or not and in which country.
The only thing you can control is what actions you take now. Are you able to deal with
this radically new situation or not? I assume that you answered this question with ‘yes’
because otherwise you would not have bought this eBook and you would be complaining
all day about the slowness of government assistance, right?
As explained earlier, the Corporate Model Canvas© has 13 different building blocks that are
related to each other and should be changed in an integrated way. In the normal situation
you would take the time to stick to the order of chapter 2, but now you have to act quickly:
what needs to be done immediately to survive, what do you have to stop doing NOW
and what might be useful but has to wait? You do that by focusing on your bottom line.

Suppliers:

partners:
Core Core
Organisation:
Independent
owners:
XI. XII.
Financing strategy:
XIII.
Figure 5: The bottom line in the Corporate Model Canvas©
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3.4 WHAT IS YOUR BURN RATE & RUNWAY SINCE COVID-19?

Many corporates are in serious financial trouble. And if you look at the news, most corporates
seem to apply the same survival strategy, which is cost-cutting. But is that the right short-
term measure to take? The answer is ‘no’. In practice it turns out that every company is
different. Some companies can last several months, others have a runway of 0 meters. In
fact, these have already crashed.
If you zoom in for a moment, there are 4 main causes for the financial problems of
corporates during Covid-19:
1. No or few (fast) paying customers.

2. No, too few or irrelevant solutions (products or services) for your customers.
3. Too high unnecessary costs.
4. Over-reliance on external financing: too high external financing costs
But the question what this survival phase is really about is: what financing & funding
do we really need to survive with our company? Because if you focus on doing the right
things for the right customers, your financing needs will also look very different than they
do now. To define your real financial needs, you need to answer the following questions.
3.4.1 WHAT ARE YOUR MOST PROFITABLE CUSTOMERS?
The inconvenience of using traditional corporate methods and models like the portfolio
model by the Boston Consulting Group, the 5-forces strategy model by Michael Porter
and “Business Model Canvas” is that they are all inside-out models and methods. They
tell you to start with “your own internal brilliant ideas” and with “your own passion”.
In that way, you will only start generating income after your brilliant idea has been turned
into a product or solution and has come onto the market or you notice that there is no
‘market’ with paying customers (at the moment) for it! A typical example of traditional
time-consuming ‘inside-out’ thinking.
Because of that traditional corporate attitude and that inside-out mindset, it automatically
means that your company needs financing from other sources in the meantime. Successful
entrepreneurs including C-level executives in a number of corporates, primarily focus on
customers whose Client Acquisition Costs are low. Moreover, they ensure during this
crisis that they 1) retain their most profitable customers and 2) bring in as many new
customers as possible who pay quickly.
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I have been using this approach with most of my customers and for my own business for
a long time: that entire ‘survival’ sales & marketing strategy is focused on customers who
have a real problem, who feel real pain, who make quick decisions and pay quickly. So, you
focus on fast, concrete “cash flows”. And that is the way to go if you want to survive this
Covid-19 crisis and hopefully thrive after it will be over. Because of the lockdowns in many
countries, the best way to do that is to serve customers online by developing relevant online
solutions and your online revenue model, and keep them happy. That is why online revenue
streams will play an important role in the next steps of this survival strategy-approach.
What about your company? Do you actually know who your best customers are and how
you try to retain them?
3.4.2 WHAT ARE YOUR MOST PROFITABLE SOLUTIONS?
Another disadvantage of those same popular inside-out models & methods mentioned above
is that people are trained to think in terms of “products” and “services”. And often
they choose to develop and market either just one product or a large number of different
products as the basis of their “shot gun marketing”.
As with retaining by helping your best customers, you must quickly investigate which
solutions you already offer offline or online yield the most return. You will often see that
the 80/20 rule applies: you get 80% of your income from 20% of your customers and or
20% of your ‘products’. Well, if that is the case, you can immediately stop with the rest!
A word of caution is needed here, however. Why? Well, remember what we said about
“organisational costs”. Profitability of a solution or product is a relative term. If a product-
line and/or business unit is losing money because of too high overhead costs, then you
have to do something about that immediately. What I do in a number of current survival
strategy assignments with clients is identifying and setting apart all internal overhead costs
that product-lines or business units are paying for ‘services’ provided by the corporate head
office. In a later stage we will look at necessary costs in terms of creating value for customers
and therefor revenue and other costs. In your survival strategy, target-costing is the way
to go, so you have to throw ‘full-costing’ methods out of the window. There are no costs
that are “given”, including your own salary…
How about your own company? Do you know which solutions are generating the most
income and are likely, given the changed problems and needs of your best customers, to
generate income in the short-term and mid-term?
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3.4.3 ON WHAT DO YOU SPEND YOUR MONEY NOW?
Once you have answered these first two questions, it is wise to go straight to the next point.
If you know which customers you earn money from the fastest and if you know with what
solutions, then you can then look at your existing expenses based on that information.
In principle, you should limit your expenses in any crisis based on the following classification:
• Rapid income-related expenses.
These are different types of costs that you have to incur to generate income by providing
the best solutions (products and services) to your best, fast paying customers.
• Necessary expenses.
One of the lessons from the first phase of the Covid-19 crisis and the lockdowns in different
countries is that you can actually provide a lot of solutions online. Just think of advisory
services, education, training and coaching. And you do not need to invest a lot of money
for that. In fact, your company often has the basic ICT-infrastructure in place. And as
many corporates have “discovered”, there are many online video tools like Zoom, Teams
and Meet, reducing potentially a lot of traditional corporate “organisational costs” like
expensive office space and much more.
If you really are a real ‘digital leader’ in the eyes of your best customers, you can cut a lot
of unnecessary costs immediately. Including high expenditures on traditional instructor-
led education, classroom training, expensive traditional corporate management programs,
expensive management consultants and expensive corporate marketing agencies. You just
have to look at what successful small virtual companies are doing.
Since 2001 while I was still working at ABN Amro bank, I have drawn up a whole list of
so-called “substitutes”, including continuous ‘online right skilling’ by following for instance
online courses for $47 per person by successful online entrepreneurs that teach you how you
can do that.. No theory, but just real practice. That really helps me now. Another example:
you can buy an expensive book with 220 pages about ‘corporate strategy’ with examples
from traditional management consultants on growth strategy or you can purchase practical
50-pager eBooks like this one that help you to start right away and to have a bigger to
survive as a company and hopefully you as a person. Working with people that want to
make a difference in your life really makes a difference, especially in a crisis.
Unnecessary expenses.
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There are many unnecessary expenses. We have already mentioned a number of them above:
expenditure for helping and serving ‘the wrong customers’, expenditures on incorrect and
/or unprofitable solutions and unnecessary expenditure due to bad partnering in your
business ecosystem.
In this category you can also add the following expenses:
- Over-allocation of salaries to yourself, your team and the wrong people in your
company.
- Too luxurious / expensive office spaces.
- Too many and too large cars.
- Own “unnecessary” permanent staff.
- Overpriced management consultants lacking the relevant survival skills and
knowledge to help you.
- Overpriced corporate marketers, lacking the relevant mindset and skills to really
help.
- Overpriced wining-and-dining management courses, offsites, education and
training and other unnecessary meetings / organisational costs.
In all those ways, the costs of being in business “AS-IS”, are way too high and that is one
of the reasons you now run into major financial problems.
If you add all this up together, you can often cut up to 50% of current unnecessary
expenses and thus reduce the actual financing requirements you have to generate cash
for with the best customers and the best solutions to survive.
3.4.4 WHAT IS YOUR CURRENT FINANCIAL STRATEGY?
If you look at it closely, the global and local economic Covid-19 crisis is in number of ways
a debt crisis. Why? Because in our current economic system, we mainly teach executives,
managers and entrepreneurs what different external forms of financing there are and how
to become investor ready. To attract external corporate or private investors instead of firstly
and above all focus on becoming customer ready (read here).
In addition, and again from my own experiences in the last 35 years, often little or no
attention is paid to self-financing and to revenue-based financing, customer-based
financing and bootstrapping.
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Two other crucial errors also play a role in the financial strategy of many corporates and
small and medium sized companies:
1. Steering on turnover (to make up for often unnecessary costs) and

2. Using internal cost price calculations as the basis for your market price.
What you need to do when you define your survival corporate strategy and as a basis for
your short-term survival plan is:
1. Focus on fast paying profitable customers.

2. Calculate your customer price based on target-costing from the perspective of
your best customers: what is it worth to that particular type of customer at a
particular moment in time like in a crisis for instance. If the relevance is high,
someone will be willing to pay more for it than if it is not. What your internal
costs are of no concern to your customers. That is your problem. a customer
has nothing to do with your own organisational costs and certainly not now.
In addition, if your financing strategy currently depends too much on these three types of
external financing, you probably already have a big problem:
- Innovation subsidies dry up unless you meet very strict criteria.

- Many banks are reluctant to give new credit lines or business loans.
- Many investors also see their investments drop in value quickly and often stop
committed financing or even sell their shares.
The good news is that ultimately it comes down to your necessary burn rate and your
necessary runway. What those are? Your necessary burn rate is the ratio between your
necessary expenses and your necessary income, and your necessary runway is the financial space
you have based on those necessary expenses in relation to that maximum necessary income.
If you focus on those two criteria together with your cash-flows, survival becomes more
realistic.
In the next chapter, you will learn how to quickly describe your current corporate business
model.
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STEP 3: DESCRIBE YOUR CURRENT
SURVIVAL STRATEGIES FOR CORPORATES CORPORATE BUSINESS MODEL
4 STEP 3: DESCRIBE YOUR

CURRENT CORPORATE
BUSINESS MODEL
INTRODUCTION
In this chapter you will answer the questions what is your current corporate business model
and what can you change to survive successfully? It explains how to quickly map your
existing corporate business model on the Corporate Model Canvas© and what options you
have to quickly adapt that business model to the new environment.
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4.1 YOUR CURRENT CORPORATE MODEL CANVAS ©

Based on the tips in the previous chapter, you have hopefully already been able to determine
which short-term actions you have to take to quickly adjust your burn rate and your existing
runway. Now you have to map your existing corporate business model onto the Corporate
Model Canvas© and to investigate how you can quickly change your organisation in order
to implement your survival strategy.
Below you see an empty Corporate Model Canvas© with the different elements. In this
example, the current simplified organisation consists of a CEO, supporting services and
5 business units. With a large number of permanent executives, managers and employees.
The corporate uses a traditional portfolio approach called the BCG-Matrix, the Boston
Consulting Group Matrix, as a strategy framework. That means that the company owns
a number of semi-autonomous business units in order to spread the risk of the corporate
company. Investments are made in different businesses including profits of one business
unit that are invested in another one.

Suppliers:

partners:
Core Core
Organisation:
Independent
owners:
XI. XII.
Financing strategy:
XIII.
Figure 6: Example of a Corporate Model Canvas© with a hierarchical structure
Download the Corporate Model Canvas© now here, print it and fill in the Corporate
Model Canvas© with your information, each section is provided with a number of Covid-19
related tips below.
35
I. Customers: your current customers / niche who pay or want to pay for your solution.
Make that target group as concrete as possible based on their online & offline revenue
streams from large to small.
II. Problem(s) / need(s): the problems and / or needs in which your corporate was making
a difference for those customers.
III. Unique value proposition: a short, powerful message that clarifies why it is worth
purchasing your solution and why your customers should. That message should be aligned
to your corporate mission.
IV. Solution(s): the unique solution or solutions that you currently provide to your
customers. Products and services are therefore part of your solution. From the beginning of
Covid-19, online solutions are likely to have become more important like online payments,
e-commerce and online consulting, training and coaching.
V. Touchpoints: these are the moments when a customer or potential customer has contact
with your company. Normally these would include offline events, workshops, masterclasses
and long-term training programs, while since the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis this will
mainly be online touchpoints and channels including video conferencing tools, websites,
social networks & WhatsApp.
A number of people in your organisation have crucial knowledge and experience. That crucial
knowledge and experience are the core of your distinctive core competencies according
to your customers. In addition, you have core capabilities, your core capabilities.
In an image it looks like this:
Your organisational core

The crucial knowledge competencies
& experience of you
and your employees
Your core capabilities:

operational skills/processes
(core capabilities)
Figure 7: The crucial knowledge and experience, core competencies & core capabilities of your company
VI. Core competencies: describe here the core competencies of your organisation according
to your customers. Alliance management, negotiating skills, and ICT-systems can also be
part of those core competencies like is the case with companies like Amazon.com, Alibaba
and the large social networks
36
VIII. Organisation: the people in your own corporate organisation with a permanent contract.
It also includes all the other elements of your organisational design and your Corporate
Profile mentioned earlier including the structure and your current business strategy.
VIII. Core capabilities: the current core capabilities of your company. These are operational
processes and / or functions that you currently perform yourself, such as sales & marketing,
finance, ICT, international payments or customer service. Also write down why you are
currently carrying out these activities and processes yourself and why you are outsourcing
which activities and processes.
It is important to note that your critical knowledge and experience, core competencies and
core capabilities enable you to truly make a difference to your current customers, even
during a crisis. But it also works the other way around. If you want to do or have to do
something completely different because of e.g., a crisis like the Covid-19 crisis, these also
limit your options.
Download the Corporate Ecosystem Canvas© here, print it and fill it in with your current
information on your current organisation (aggregate numbers and structured in line with
your current organisation).
CORPORATE ECOSYSTEM CANVAS©
Corporate (AS-IS): Corporate (TO-BE):
Your organisation: Your organisation:
Suppliers: Suppliers:
Strategic partners: Strategic partners:
Independent entrepreneurs: Independent entrepreneurs:
Figure 8: The Corporate Ecosystem Canvas© with your current organisation.
37
IX. Touchpoints: your current touchpoints with the various suppliers, strategic partners and
contract workers. Examples during Covid-19 are your website(s), social network accounts,
mobile phones, Slack, Zoom, Skype, email, SMS or Facebook Messenger for example and
all other media you use and through which they come into contact with your organisation
and your business and personal brand.
X. Ecosystem: your corporate business ecosystem contains your current most important
suppliers, your strategic partners and independent entrepreneurs at the beginning of the
Covid-19 pandemic.
You can also display those companies and independent business owners in the aforementioned
Corporate Ecosystem Canvas©:
Figure 9: The Corporate Ecosystem Canvas© with your current business ecosystem
XI. Revenue model: online and offline income streams are the most important way to
finance your corporate. Since the beginning of Covid-19, you hopefully have been able to
tap into more and larger online income streams. Online services and digital products are
good examples of this.
Now include the most important current online & offline income streams on the Corporate
Model Canvas©.
38
XII. Cost structure: what things do you spend your money on and why including different
types of costs. The “why” is especially important. Are these necessary expenses or not?
XIII. Financing strategy: how do you currently finance the activities of your company
(internal financing and/or external financing)?
4.2 WHAT IF YOUR COMPANY IS BIG?

Sometimes in the case of large, diversified companies, it might look difficult to describe
your large current corporate business model on the Corporate Model Canvas©. Well
actually, it should still not be a problem. Why? Because at the end of the day, it all comes
down to what you are making our money with, how you are relevant for our customers in
what we call ‘The Relevance Economy’ and your other stakeholders and why your company
actually exists.
In general, during the years, traditional companies have grown and grown in size, in
complexity and in management levels for instance. But especially in these difficult times,
you should be able to KISS: ‘Keep It Super Simple’ and if you are not able to do that
at this point in time, you will have to do it quick in step 4, or else you will not survive
with your company. Well, that was it for step 3 in defining the best survival strategy for
your company. In the next chapter we will cover how to define your survival strategy and
implement it with a new corporate business model and revenue model.
39
SURVIVAL STRATEGIES FOR CORPORATES Step 4: Design your new corporate business model
5 STEP 4: DESIGN YOUR NEW

CORPORATE BUSINESS MODEL
INTRODUCTION
To survive Covid-19, you have to design a completely new corporate business model with
different starting points and different, often short-term goals….and fast. In this chapter you
will put step 4 towards your new survival strategy including a corporate change strategy and
operational change management plan. In short, a number of design options for your new
corporate are discussed, from your current business and revenue model in a leaner form to
starting something completely different based on the online & offline needs of a certain
group of customers and your core competencies. Again, the Corporate Model Canvas©
and the Corporate Ecosystem Canvas© are used to be able to prepare that organisational
change & transition and fast.
40
5.1 CREATIVE IDEAS FOR YOUR NEW BUSINESS MODEL

The paradox of a crisis situation is that on the one hand it is full of threats, but on the
other hand you also get all new opportunities including online to start over partially or
completely under the condition that the results of the problem analysis in Chapter 3 offer
sufficient perspective. Meaning that you do not have to stop operating your business or
go broke because of the problems your company is facing.In that case, it means that you
actually have three options for quickly redesigning your new corporate business model and
implementing the changes in time:
1. You keep doing the same for roughly the same customers, but in a slimmed-
down form.
2. You start all over and you design everything from scratch, based on the
match between acute problems of certain customers on the one hand and your
knowledge, experience and core competencies on the other.
In both cases you are dealing with a change process with more or less drastic consequences
for yourself, your employees, your customers and the companies in your corporate ecosystem.
And you need a plan to implement those changes quickly. How fast depends on different
scenarios on how the Covid-19 crisis will evolve in your country and in other countries
And on the severity of the problems from chapter 3 of course. In both cases, you start
with an empty Corporate Model Canvas©. If you have one or more external financiers or
creditors, your options are of course limited.
By the way, under normal conditions you can start all over a) inside your existing large
corporate or b) build a new lean & mean organisation independent from that old organisation
from scratch using ICT.
Either way, why not take the opportunity to use your crucial knowledge and experience
and your core competencies to put together different creative solutions for fast paying
customers than you do now? Or at least add new solutions to generate more online income
whenever possible and offline income if that is also possible in different forms? Such a
‘hybrid strategy’, your own unique mix of a digital strategy and an offline strategy, is a
sensible step to take during a crisis and also when the crisis will be over. Basically, everything
is possible in every industry…..if you are bold enough.
Because there is much more online collaboration and money to be earned online, you
therefore see as an example an enormous increase in demand for higher quality webcams
and for fast and cheap online and blended learning courses in new video communication
software like Zoom, Teams and Meet. A development that in turn leads to increasing interest
in online course development, e-learning development and blended learning development
41
overall. Books like this eBook are a good example of a new urgent need for solutions to
urgent problems that executives of many corporates worldwide are facing. Executives and
senior managers that can read English. And the same thing applies to the Corporate Model
Canvas©. You need simple tools for quick decision making.
If you are able to offer new solutions to the right customers quickly and on time with an
empathic outside-in approach, then you can generate different income streams online and
offline fast. As a main activity or as one of your additional income streams.
At the moment I use for example a very simple tool for my own survival strategy and for
those of large and small clients, which will be briefly explained below under Revenue model.
Tip: look at the knowledge and experience and the core competencies that you possess in
your company, That you possess yourself or the people in your team and other tools and
assets that you already have at your disposal and what you can do with them. For which
problem for which group of customers can you quickly offer a unique value proposition
and a concrete solution?
If you want to run as little risk as possible that things will not work out, you just have
to ask the people involved, starting with your existing customers, and look at important
trends, among other things. Many people actually have the same problems, the same pains
all over the world. In all cases, speed and timing are important: if it takes your organisation
4 months to have something ready, the chances that you will be able to help your best
customers in time and the solution will be successful in this rapidly changing environment
are not that great.
5.2 DIFFERENT SURVIVAL STRATEGIES FOR CORPORATES

1. There are different survival strategies that have been proposed over the years
by two different schools of strategy and change experts, however some of them
a suitable in a crisis like Covid-19 as survival strategy and are less suitable or
not to be implemented at all. Here they are: Restructuring You do not change
anything except reorganising and restructuring. As it is only one element of the
Corporate Profile, restructuring does not solve any real problems. It just costs
precious time, energy and money.
2. Cost cutting This survival strategy includes cutting costs dramatically in
the highest cost categories. In many cases these cost categories are personal
costs. The problem with this approach is that most of the time the senior
management nor external consultants make a difference between necessary
and unnecessary costs. Another problem with this approach is that often
42
organisational costs are not taken into account either. And finally, often
companies in this way are ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’: they
destroy core competencies and/or core capabilities that are critical for survival
and do not solve the real problems the company basically has.
3. Selling 1 or more business units Another approach I have encountered many
times since I started to work in global banking since 1985 and that is still used
during the Covid-19 crisis, is the selling of of one or more business unites
‘because they do not make (enough) profit’. This is often done in companies
with a BCG-matrix portfolio strategy. Again, this approach does not look at
necessary or unnecessary costs nor at organisational costs charged out by a
large head office/staff organisation for instance. And on top of that selling and
spinning-off one or even more business units usually takes a lot of time. Time
you often in a crisis do not have.
4. Splitting up companies Splitting up a corporate company is sometimes
carried out as a survival strategy. It can be a very effective approach under the
condition that the corporate functions and possible debt is not split up either.
Basically, companies should be able to choose its own new organisational
design without the old burden of unnecessary ‘co-ordination’ and centralised
decision-making. Splitting up can be a viable survival strategy if business units
are loosely coupled and not highly integrated with ICT-systems for instance like
was in our case when ABN Amro had to be split-up after the hostile take-over
in 2008. That was a time-consuming exercise that took years and years.
5. Starting all over. Although it is not always easy to do, it is sometimes better to
stop what you’re doing and start all over with a new Lean & Mean company
all together as we proposed doing in the previous chapters. In practice, that is
a difficult thing to do as most senior executives andother senior and middle
management is likely to lose their jobs with that survival strategy and the
profound organisational consequences that implies this choice. However if you
look at the fact that many companies worldwide were actually forced to become
a Lean & Mean virtual company in one day during the different lockdowns
working from home using ICT, many things are indeed possible…..if you dare
to be bold as C-level executive and are able to act fast ‘out of the box’.
The best survival strategy for your corporate is to do a right-sizing exercise using new
ICT with a new corporate business model and a new Lean & Mean organisation. Focusing
on generating cash-flows from different sources and to limit external financing as much as
possible.
43
5.3 YOUR NEW CORPORATE MODEL CANVAS ©

Although in practice you might not be able to implement your ideal corporate business
model for 100%, it still makes sense to start from scratch anyway. So, download an empty
Corporate Model Canvas© here. and start from scratch. Below you see an empty Corporate
Model Canvas© with the different building blocks.

Suppliers:

partners:
Core Core
Organisation:
Independent
business
owners:
XI. XII.
Financing strategy:
XIII.
Figure 10: An empty Corporate Model Canvas©
Suppose you are a large software developer, and you specialize in building mobile apps.
Then of course you can start the development of Covid-19 related mobile apps just like
many other companies. But what is much smarter is to look at what you can do with your
core competences and existing software that you can build on.
Since many people are bored, including young people, you could develop Covid-19 games
for the smartphone where young people get points if they keep the required distance and
follow the rules in the game, and penalty points if they don’t. You can also have them play
against each other in online teams with friends.
44
What we learned in the last 35 years including during the Covid-19 crisis, is that you
can get really good ideas in every industry by listening carefully to customers and other
people online instead of focusing on your own ‘brilliant ideas’ and advice from external
management consultants. .
So, print out the Corporate Model Canvas© and try to come up with new solutions based on
your core competencies, ideas you have heard from existing customers and from potentially
new customers, from prospects online & offline.
Below we go through the questions you can ask customers or people internally.
I. Customers: which niche or customer group is most loyal to you and your brand and
how are they doing now? Which new groups of customers now also need your solutions or
your knowledge and experience and core competencies? For example, consider the impact
of Covid-19 on different types of entrepreneurs, on young people, on seniors.
II. Problem / need: what acute problems / what acute needs do your existing customers
have and how can you help them concretely and quickly? Covid-19 creates many practical
problems that require creative solutions in different formats.
III. Unique value proposition: how can you make a difference for your customers and
prospects?
IV. Solution: what is the solution you should focus on for existing fast paying clients and
to attract new ones with a similar profile? In any case, you should stop the production of
products and services that do not generate any cash in the current crisis and are not likely
to do so in the near future.
V. Touchpoints: the touchpoints that you choose for your survival strategy, for your customer
journeys and as channels depend of course on the type of customer, the solution, the type
of product and / or service. During the Covid-19 crisis, many are likely to be online. Like
your websites, your mobile phones, your laptops, your iPads, eBooks, canvasses and checklists
in various formats, online videos and video conferencing software. But also free webinars
and online masterclasses and the customer experience customers have when they call your
customer service department or use a chat on your website.
Important touchpoints can also be social media to help you to engage with your customers
and prospects with very likely an important role for mobile marketing and video marketing.
45
VI. Core competencies: what core competencies are still relevant to be able to offer existing
and/or new solutions to customers in your new right-sized Lean & Mean organisation using
ICT? Partnering and being able to build and maintain a unique business ecosystem are
relevant core competencies during a crisis.
VII. Organisation: which people including or excluding yourself are needed in the new
Lean & Mean virtual organisation to create and sell those new solutions and get paid fast?
And will you hire people on a permanent basis or not? This means that you also have to
decide who you want to keep from your ‘AS-IS’ corporate company because the persons
involved are indispensable for successful implementation of your survival strategy. And
which people from your existing core team(s) must leave, independent of the level they are
currently operating on?
Write down the names of the people you want to keep in the new corporate organisation,
in the core team(s) on the right side of the Corporate Ecosystem Canvas©.
Figure 11: The Corporate Ecosystem Canvas© with your new organisation.
VIII. Core capabilities: which tasks, activities and processes are you going to carry out
yourself, given the results of your problem analysis and the opportunities you see in order
to generate cash and save necessary costs, for example, and which ones are you going to
outsource and / or automate?
46
For example, there are many SaaS-solutions to automate your social media marketing activities
and your sales funnels and the same applies to e-commerce platforms and software to get
online platforms off the ground quickly. Having your own ICT knowledge and skills to
set up e-commerce sites for instance and to right-size your existing organisation to your
own version of a virtual organisation can however also be a tremendous advantage. In
that way, you can quickly do things yourself within your new Lean & Mean organisation
instead of hiring people externally.
IX. Touchpoints: what will be the most important touchpoints with the various existing and
/ or new suppliers, strategic partners and temporary employees within your new corporate
business ecosystem?
X. Ecosystem: which existing and / or new suppliers, strategic partners and independent
entrepreneurs do you need at least to make your survival plan successful and hopefully grow
and scale online and offline afterwards and thrive after the crisis is over?
Write the names and the companies of the suppliers, strategic partners and independent
entrepreneurs that are going to help you to implement your survival strategy and fast to
the right in the Corporate Ecosystem Canvas©.
Figure 12: The Corporate Ecosystem Canvas© with your new TO-BE business ecosystem.
47
XI. Revenue model: what are the most important new & existing online and offline income
streams you are able to tap into? And how big do you think they will be and when will
they generate that income?
I use this simple table to make basic decisions about existing and new solutions with an
outside-in approach that you can also download for free:
Startup costs Development Operational Revenues

Revenues
Idea: (money & costs (money & costs (money & (money &
(other):
time): time): time): time);
Book
eBook
Online service x
Digital product y
Table 1: Comparing different outside-in driven cashflow-ideas for new solutions.
Online services and digital products are easy to develop and deliver if take decisions fast.
Examples are online consulting/advising, online training and online coaching.
These new services however will only be successful if your staff has relevant knowledge and
experience that can really help your customers.
The four questions that you should ask yourself are:
1. What is the niche you are going to help?

2. What is problem is your solution going to solve?
3. How do you help them with it now?
4. How and when will they pay?
Again, you see that time plays a crucial role in addition to money, namely in two ways:
a) how much time does it take to have the relevant solution available for the fast paying
customers concerned and b) when will those customers actually pay?
If you know that customers/prospects take a long time to decide or they have brought their
payment term to 60 days, then do not focus on those people now.
XII. Cost structure: which existing and/or new profitable, necessary expenses do you need
to make and why? And how big are they?
48
XIII. Financing strategy: what will be your new financing strategy in your new corporate
business model? Before implementing your new corporate business model, it is important
to consider refinancing certain debts or other obligations in consultation with the relevant
banks, investors or suppliers and whether you can restructure or convert certain external
forms of financing.
So much for the design of your new corporate business model. For new and existing (online)
services and digital products it is easy to fill in this Corporate Model Canvas© and start
earning money online with a Lean & Mean virtual organisation. When you design, produce
and sell physical products, things are a lot more complicated of course.
But even then, there are opportunities in that category of solutions. There is a huge shortage
of some physical products, such as everything that has to do with the healthcare around the
Covid-19 virus and there are many opportunities in the e-commerce space. While everything
that has to do with mobility and transport, tourism and events has practically come to a
standstill. But even then, online business development with a virtual organisation can
sometimes offer your company partial relief if you focus for instance on serving local customers.
In the next chapter, we will take a look at the 5th and last step.
49
SURVIVAL STRATEGIES FOR CORPORATES Step 5: Implement the new business model fast
6 STEP 5: IMPLEMENT THE NEW

BUSINESS MODEL FAST
INTRODUCTION
This is the last step in your 5-step plan to implement the right survival strategy for your
company. First, I will explain what a survival plan is, then it is briefly explained what
the goals of such a survival plan are compared to a traditional step-by-step change plan
and then we describe what your survival plan is supposed to do in organisational terms:
changing your old organisation as part of your old corporate business model into your new
Lean & Mean organisation, your new corporate business model, based on what you have
done in chapters 3 to 6 .
6.1 WHAT IS A SURVIVAL PLAN?

If you want to survive in the short term & mid term, you need to make quick organisational
changes in your corporate business model. And that is why you need to draw up a short
survival plan. Depending on the problems your company are facing, you do not look at
the next 6 months, the next year or the next 3 years. Survival is a short-term activity that
should give you are bigger chance to cope with whatever will come at you next. Being a
next wave of Covid-19 in your own country or in other countries that you do business with.
50
A survival plan is thus a completely different plan than a traditional large digital
transformation or change management plan in combination with a large traditional
business plan. In circumstances like the Covid-19 these large transformation plans and
business plans are of no value to you nor to your customers if you have to survive with
your company. That all takes far too long.
Then what? You must have a plan that will allow you to quickly fill “the holes in the bottom
of your ship” and then continue to steer and avoid “monster waves” with your ship if
that is still possible. Even if you do that, you still run the risk of running into a monster
wave that will keep you from making it, but at least the most important holes in your
bottom (line) are filled and you have made the best preparations possible to have a Lean
& Mean organisation and survive. And that is what your survival plan will help you to do.
6.2 WHAT ARE THE SHORT-TERM GOALS OF A SURVIVAL PLAN?

The short-term goals for your survival plan are:
1. It helps you focus.

2. It provides you with the Lean & Mean organisation with the greatest chance of
survival.
3. It creates the conditions for survival.
4. It provides enough positive cash flow to survive.
5. It implements clear choices and clear adjustments to your business model &
revenue model.
Instead of a detailed implementation plan, you now produce a high-level plan, using a
high-level planning, with a Lean & Mean core team, using simple checklists, planners and
‘to-do’ lists in combination with new ICT-tools and ICT-infrastructures to ensure that you
make the necessary changes quickly and that your new company responds quickly to rapid
changes in your environment.
Empathy, resilience and determination are the most important skills if you want to survive.
Whether everything you do is right or not and if everybody is agreeing with you or not
is not really important now. As C-level executive, you have to act and fast. Together with
the right people in your team, with complementary competencies of people with the same
mindset and mentality in your business ecosystem.
In order to have maximum freedom to be at the helm yourself, you must exclude as many
irrelevant external stakeholders as possible from the decision-making and taking action
processes including external financing companies. You do not need multiple captains steering
your ship in a storm like Covid-19, do you?
51
6.3 IMPLEMENTING YOUR SURVIVAL PLAN AND FAST

In chapter 4 you mapped out your current corporate business model and in chapter 5, you
described your new corporate business model. Now you can draw up and implement your
integrated survival plan to quickly change your existing corporate business model into your
new corporate business model, having thrown all unnecessary weight overboard. You will
be able to navigate with a higher survival rate because you will have gained tremendous
speed and agility.
In the figures below you see the transition from the old corporate business model to the
new corporate business model if you can still call it ‘corporate’ by the way as it will be
with a Lean & Mean organisation.
OLD CORPORATE MODEL CANVAS© NEW CORPORATE MODEL CANVAS©

CORPORATE MODEL CANVAS© CORPORATE MODEL CANVAS©
Company: Name: Date: Version: Company: Name: Date: Version:
Customers & Problem/ Unique Value Customers & Problem/ Unique Value
Touchpoints: Solution: Touchpoints: X. Ecosystem: Touchpoints: Solution: Touchpoints: X. Ecosystem:
Prospects: need: Proposition: Prospects: need: Proposition:
II. III. IV. Strategic II. III. IV. Strategic

partners: partners:
Core Core Core Core
Organisation: Organisation:
competencies: capabilities: competencies: capabilities:
Independent Independent
business business
owners: owners:
I. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. I. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX.
Revenue model: Cost structure: Revenue model: Cost structure:
XI. XII. XI. XII.
Financing strategy: Financing strategy:
XIII. XIII.
Figure 13: The transition from the old Corporate Model Canvas© to your new business model including the
change from your old corporate organisation to your new organisation
Based on chapters 2-5, you can now also implement the human aspects of the rapid
organisational change at an individual and busines ecosystem level in your virtual organisation,
as you can see in the figure below:
52
Figure 14: The change from the old to the new business ecosystem
This completes the last step of the 5-step approach to define and implement your survival
strategy.
53
SURVIVAL STRATEGIES FOR CORPORATES What’s next?
7 WHAT’S NEXT?
In this eBook you learned how to develop and implement a corporate survival strategy
as part of your new ‘survival’ business model in 5 steps and how to use the innovative
& easy to use canvasses to do just that. In order to succeed and survive a crisis, you need
the right tools and the right people to design and to implement your corporate survival
strategy in an integrated way….and fast. At the end of the day, you can not survive in the
old ways, with the old ‘growth’ methods and tools and the old ‘growth’ mindset.
Success implies staying positive and working with the right people including your customers
and the people in your business ecosystem to make that transition to the new virtual Lean
& Mean organisation in time and to keep your company afloat in the future. And that
also means cutting the right people loose in your own organisation and in your business
ecosystem. That can be a painful solution, but if you do not do it, everybody will drown.
Especially if that includes leaving the company yourself or taking up a different role inside
the company if that is necessary for the company to survive.
In any case, changing and developing your company and yourself as a person, ‘pivoting
yourself ’ as I call it, will be a continuous process to be able to grasp the opportunities
around you and to survive different crises as a person and as a company.
Because whatever happens after the Covid-19 crisis, the ‘old normal’ will never come back
and that is also good news. Successful intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs have grasped the
opportunities of the online economy and of online business models with a virtual organisation
in many different ways. It is now up to you to do the same!
54
SURVIVAL STRATEGIES FOR CORPORATES What’s next?
If you need any help with making that change yourself or have any questions about how
to use these KISS-tools in your company, do not hesitate to contact me by phone on
0031634387806, on Skype at tony.de.bree, by email here and lets connect on LinkedIn here.
You can see a list of recommended further reading on this and related topics on the same
protected download page where you can also download digital copies of the different canvasses,
the free eBook(s) and other relevant content here. Password = SURVIVALSTRATEGY2021.
55
SURVIVAL STRATEGIES FOR CORPORATES Endnotes
ENDNOTES
i Bree T. de, (2001), ‘Transformation of Financial Services companies’, page 104.
56

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Survival Strategies for

2 Step 1: Stay positive and deal with adversity 20

3 Step 2: Identify the biggest problems 25

4 Step 3: Describe your current corporate business model 34

5 Step 4: Design your new corporate business model 40

6 Step 5: Implement the new business model fast 50

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Tony de Bree EEP MBA

His personal mission is:

You can reach him:

- by phone or WhatsApp on 0031634387806,

“To Grow Bigger” Is Not Much Of A Business Strategy At All

In this eBook you will learn:

2. Step 1: how to stay positive and deal with adversity?

1.1 WHAT IS A BUSINESS MODEL AND A REVENUE MODEL?

A business model is:

And a revenue model is:

1.2 WHAT ARE ORGANISATIONAL ECONOMICS?

1.3 WHAT IS THE CORPORATE MODEL CANVAS©?

Below you see the new Corporate Model Canvas©.

CORPORATE MODEL CANVAS©

Company: Name: Date: Version:

Customers & Problem/ Unique Value

Revenue model: Cost structure:

Figure 1: The Corporate Model Canvas©i

CORPORATE MODEL CANVAS©

Company: Name: Date: Version:

Customers & Problem/ Unique Value

II. III. IV. Strategic

I. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX.

Revenue model: Cost structure:

Figure 2: The Corporate Model Canvas©

A brief overview of the different building blocks:

Discover our eBooks on

Figure 3: A typical corporate hierarchical organisation

In your current corporate organisation, you do not do everything yourself I presume.

The CEO The Corporate Company

The corporate ecosystem:

Figure 4: A corporate ecosystem (simplified)

“What you don’t spend, you don’t have to finance”.

1.4 WHAT IS A SURVIVAL STRATEGY?

2 STEP 1: STAY POSITIVE AND

2.1 STAY POSITIVE

• Thomas Edison failed thousands of times before he could develop a fully

2.2 SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE DEAL WITH ADVERSITY

2.3 HOW TO LEARN FROM ADVERSITY?

2.4 HOW TO HELP OTHERS TO DEAL WITH ADVERSITY?

3 STEP 2: IDENTIFY THE

3.1 THE IMPACT OF COVID-19

And you will do that in the following paragraphs.

3.2 WHAT WAS YOUR BURN RATE &

Discover our eBooks on

3.3 WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST PROBLEM?

CORPORATE MODEL CANVAS©

Company: Name: Date: Version:

Customers & Problem/ Unique Value

II. III. IV. Strategic

I. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX.

2 Step 1: Stay positive and deal with adversity 20

3 Step 2: Identify the biggest problems 25

4 Step 3: Describe your current corporate business model 34

5 Step 4: Design your new corporate business model 40

6 Step 5: Implement the new business model fast 50

2 STEP 1: STAY POSITIVE AND

3 STEP 2: IDENTIFY THE

3.2 WHAT WAS YOUR BURN RATE &

4 STEP 3: DESCRIBE YOUR

5 STEP 4: DESIGN YOUR NEW

6 STEP 5: IMPLEMENT THE NEW