Black Friday 2020. I ordered some online deals late in the evening; they were delivered to my door less than 12 hours later. Was I impressed by the speedy service? To be honest, I expected nothing less. The NOW generation is calling the shots and immediate fulfillment is the order of the day.
Over the past decade, social media has accelerated the pace of just about everything. News hits your screen as it happens. Posts go viral within minutes. Online shopping deliveries take hours, not days.
What consultants are noticing is that this need for speed has spilled over into the workplace. People want everything now. Strategy, action plans and results – NOW. As communications consultants, we’re expected to prove that we’re immediately invested in our clients’ businesses, and to back our commitment up with instant results. And while we at ByDesign have always based our service offering on a 100-day plan, we’re finding it more critical than ever to go back to our plans and see where we can realign them to deliver results even faster.
We interrogate our plans not only from our point of view as consultants, but also from the point of view of our clients’ CEOs. We poke holes, we find gaps. We question whether plans are critical to the sustainability of our clients’ businesses. Do they necessarily involve exco? Are they implementable? Are they measurable? And, most importantly, why haven’t we started already?
While servicing the NOW generation, haste shouldn’t make waste. Having a solid 100-day plan enables us to interpret a client’s business strategy, turn it into a communication strategy that makes sense, map the campaign in daily or weekly chunks, hit the ground running – and most importantly, get results from the get-go. Then we reflect and review, rinse and repeat.
NOW is here to stay. The challenge for consultants lies in taking the time to craft a plan that can be implemented, and will return on deliverables, at lightning speed.
Kevin Welman
Director of ByDesign Communications
