Mazars Luxembourg managing partner Muhammad Hossen served as the CFO of a bank during the 2008 financial crisis Mike Zenari

Mazars Luxembourg managing partner Muhammad Hossen served as the CFO of a bank during the 2008 financial crisis Mike Zenari

If Muhammad Hossen had to narrow down how companies can pivot their strategy in hard times, it would boil down to people, communications, planning and investing, and finance. 

The Mazars Luxembourg managing partner states that people are “the major asset we have…we really need to take measures to support them.” The pandemic caused many to shift to remote working--whether companies were digitally ready or not. 

This requires companies to listen to individual employee needs. “For certain people, it suits them to work from home. But for a lot of people, it does not suit them [and] they can have emotional issues that arise as a result.” It’s critical then to communicate transparently not just about safety, but also via “regular updates on the health of the business because, of course, it’s a primary concern for a lot of them.”

When it comes to planning and investing, IT acceleration will undoubtedly continue into 2021. But in addition, Hossen advises “regular contact with your customers and suppliers… be aware of how the covid-19 pandemic is impacting them in terms of their key activities.” Disturbances amongst suppliers will, of course, impact whether organisations can deliver to their own clients, but anticipation and preparation can help a company’s resilience.

Take a hard look at profitability and ambitions, he adds. “Scenario planning is definitely something that has to be implemented. Instead of doing, for example, yearly budgets, consider moving to rolling financial forecasts, where you have a regular update on your revenues and expenses,” he says. “Consider also the impact on liquidity and cash flow risk to the organisation, which has to be monitored on a daily basis for certain organisations.” CFOs can assess cost structures, find the “low-hanging fruit”. 

Hossen, himself a bank CFO during the 2008 financial crisis, encourages organisations to set up a covid-19 crisis committee, if they haven’t yet, meeting as often as necessary. 

And what about for SMEs? On one hand, fewer people may be simpler to manage. But Hossen advises “perform[ing] a business impact assessment: you need to talk to your clients, find out how it’s affecting them, and how it eventually will effect you…one key measures is managing liquidity risk [and] cash flows, manage and renegotiatie credit lines, accelerate collection of receivables…all of that is applicable to every single company operating within the Luxembourg economy.”

This article originally appeared in the 2021 Forecast edition of Delano released on 16 December.