Back in mid-March 2020, Chris Hurley, the co-owner and CEO of Russell & Abbott Heating and Cooling in Maryville, TN, was in a dark place. The COVID-19 pandemic had begun its rampage and the country was beginning to shut down in response.

My GGOB Story The year was 2011, and I was living it up as a young single 20-something in Springfield, MO. I was a proud community college graduate holding an associates degree in ‘electronic media production’ with a slight obsession with attending large-scale music festivals. You know the ones, Coachella, Bonnaroo, The HangOut Music Fest. I lived for them and I was always planning out which one I would attend next, always keeping in mind what my small hourly call center wage would support.

Recessions are painful. They cause businesses to close—and billions of dollars in capital to melt away. Recessions are also about more than just a dip in economic activity. They get personal. People lose their jobs and a way to support their family. Recessions strain our social safety net and put lives at risk. The only good thing about a recession is when it ends. But there’s another ugly truth about recessions—there’s always another one right around the corner. Historically, recessions hit the U.S. economy about every 10 years or so. That means even as we struggle to get through the current recession triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, we can also start the clock on when the next recession will hit. Recognizing that 2020 has been a heckuva year, the question becomes: What are you doing today to plan for the next recession?

The pandemic has forced all of us—coaches, teachers, pastors, business leaders, and even parents—to walk a very narrow line. On one hand, we all need to take every action we possibly can to keep our friends, neighbors, kids, and co-workers healthy and safe even as the virus continues to surge. On the other hand, we have to find creative ways to keep society functioning—without jeopardizing the health of each other.

If your company practices any level of transparency, you know it’s often difficult to help your employees understand all of the financial jargon they will hear on a daily basis. What better time than now to teach your employees basic business financial terms and help them understand what they mean? Use the terms and definitions below to complete this classic training bite to help your team learn 11 basic financial terms in 15-minutes or less.

I recently wrote a blog about how, when our company conducted our second High-Involvement Planning (HIP) meeting in October, only 74% of our associates told us they were confident in the sales plan for the company—which was down from an 80% confidence rating when we conducted the same survey in June. Historically, we’ve seen confidence ratings consistently in the high 80s—sometimes into the 90s. Maybe it’s easy to write off the 74% number due to the ongoing uncertainty of the pandemic as well as the election and other factors. But it did get me wondering about what truly inspires confidence in people. That led me to conduct an informal survey where I asked our associates to send me their responses to a simple question: “How do you build confidence?” I was blown away by the diverse range of answers we received. I found it interesting to see all the different approaches people recommended, so I grouped them into a couple of categories:

“Maybe that meeting was my missed opportunity,” Ron told me, beating himself up a bit. “The fact that the president hadn’t even reported the actual results from the quarter should have alarmed every one of us board members into taking action.” That never would have happened at SRC. We work with our financials in real-time and through our constant huddling, not to mention our bi-annual High-Involvement Planning (HIP) meetings where all of our divisions get together to compare our progress on achieving our plans and forecasts. Paranoia can be good for you—unless you don’t do something about what scares you. You can’t hide from the solution and be successful.

Every October, we conduct our second sales-and-marketing meeting of the year (the first is held in June)—a ritual we’ve continued every year since 1983. The sales teams from each of our divisions make presentations to everyone inside the company—including our board of directors—and we ask our people to vote on their confidence in those plans. For us, this process—what we call High-Involvement Planning—is the lynchpin of how we build a true culture of engagement inside our business.

When practicing The Great Game of Business® (GGOB), the breakthrough comes when companies shift from focusing on an event (bonus plan, financial literacy program, etc.) to using GGOB as an operating system to run their organization. GGOB is a system. It’s a pattern. It’s a strategy. It’s a way of thinking. If you want to fully leverage the power of Great Game™, you must treat it as a system and persistently work it.