Scaling forward: how coaches are guiding businesses through COVID-19

Executive overview

When COVID-19 hit, most businesses faced a version of the same problem: demand collapsed, cash tightened, and teams scattered. The question was not whether to adapt but how fast and how well.

Three experienced Scaling Up coaches — Bill Gallagher, Bruce Eckfeldt, and Anita Cabell — discuss what is working across their client portfolios. They organise the conversation around Vern Harnish's four P's of scaling forward: People, Pricing, Process, and (implicitly) Purpose.

The leader's mindset determines the outcome before strategy does. Companies that treat this as a problem to solve rather than a crisis to survive are already seeing growth.

Leaders who stay mentally grounded and move into experimentation mode are outperforming those who wait for normality to return.

People: wellbeing, hiring, and virtual work

• Remote work has erased commutes and created new time — leaders who build structured routines around it are more effective.
• Idling and rest generate neural connections; blocking recovery time correlates with better decision-making.
• Virtual whiteboards (Mural, Jamboard, Stormboard) have expanded participation far down the org chart.
• Onboarding teams to virtual tools before a session — short tutorial videos, pre-session warm-ups — removes friction from the actual work.
• Companies with strong cash reserves and low debt had breathing room; they avoided panic layoffs.
• Gravity Payments model: share the situation openly, invite the team to share the burden, avoid unilateral cuts.
• Bird Scooter counter-example: laying off 320 people via a two-minute recorded Zoom call destroyed trust and reputation.
• Talent availability has improved — a downturn is a hiring opportunity if you have cash and a strategy.

Pricing: adapt terms, bundle, and tier

• Cash trumps margin in a crisis — focus first on payment timing, not price levels.
• Billing every two weeks instead of monthly shortens the cash cycle; smaller invoices often bypass slow approval processes.
• Good-better-best pricing resets customer buy-in and lifts average transaction value.
• Flexible and bundled pricing (unbundling, tiering, tailored packages) can be more effective than a rigid three-tier menu.
• Defer revenue if necessary — a service business earns nothing by sitting idle, so working now and collecting later still beats not working.
• A 5% blended price increase, spread across multiple levers, can be worth more annually than most cost-cutting initiatives.

Process: constraints, value streams, and segmentation

• Theory of constraints: identify the single bottleneck before trying to fix everything.
• Value stream analysis asks whether each step adds value for the customer in their current situation — not pre-COVID assumptions.
• Customer segmentation parameters have shifted; geography (is your customer's region open or closed?), industry, and financial health are now more relevant than legacy criteria.
• Get granular: identify which customer segments are most profitable and communicate with them in personal, direct channels.
• Incremental process tweaks outperform full re-engineering in a live operating business under high demand.
• Dashboards are now non-negotiable for distributed teams; physical whiteboards have been replaced by digital equivalents.
• Start dashboards in a simple spreadsheet, refine for a quarter or two, then migrate to a platform — avoids tool overwhelm.

Pivoting and opportunity

• Some pandemic adaptations are temporary lifelines; others are permanent business model upgrades — distinguish between them early.
• Juice bar example: moved from $7 drinks to $12–$125 kits; added fresh produce delivery; now building a franchising model.
• Wolfgang Puck Restaurants: treated each brand independently, launched takeout, added $175 online cooking classes within weeks.
• Hybrid events — delivered food kits plus live Zoom with music and breakout rooms — are a viable new format for event businesses.
• M&A opportunities are emerging as distressed competitors exit; asset quality and transferability vary by industry.
• Cannabis sector nuance: federally illegal status blocks standard bankruptcy protection and restricts license transfers, which complicates distressed M&A.

Mindset and leadership

• CEO mindset at the outset of crisis is the strongest predictor of outcome — before industry or business model.
• Leaders who have navigated prior crises (9/11, 2008) defaulted to action faster; those who waited for "normal" to return fell behind.
• Empathy — genuinely understanding what customers and partners are dealing with — unlocks better sales, better product, and better relationships.
• Experimentation culture: try things quickly, change fast when they don't work, build that into the company's operating rhythm.
• Living values and being on purpose is not a soft benefit — it is where profit and resilience come from in a crisis.
• Collective thinking and live conversation integrate ideas in ways that solo reading and video cannot.