Ep. 200: Marsha Huber - IMA’s Guide to Small Business Resilience

Connect with Dr. Marsha Huber
Read the report Thriving Amidst Challenges: A Guide to Small
Business Resilience


Full Episode Transcript:
Neha:



Welcome back to Count Me In, the podcast where management
accounted stays center stage. I'm your host, Neha Lagoo Ratnakar.
Today, I'm joined by Dr. Marsha Huber, who is IMA's director of
research to discuss a recently published report, Thriving Amidst
Challenges: A Guide to Small Business Resilience. I have to say,
this report is such a great example of the timely and rigorous
research IMA specializes in with the goal of providing practical
insights and actions that truly help businesses learn and grow.
We cover a lot of ground in this conversation, but make sure to
download the full report using the link in the shownotes, because
it's literally brimming with insights that can be put to use
immediately. Now let's get started with Marsha.


Neha:



Hi Marsha, welcome to Count Me In. It's such a pleasure to have
you on the show.


Marsha:



Oh, thank you so much Neha. I feel privileged to have been
invited to talk about this IMA publication.


Neha:



Oh, it's all my pleasure, Marsha. And first of all,
congratulations on your new report. Thriving Amidst Challenges: A
Guide to Small Business Resilience and that's quite mouthful, but
a very much needed topic. Can you tell us, our listeners, what
this report is all about?


Marsha:



Yes. It's a report that was developed from interviews with
business people, the small business development center, and
various members of the small business committee at the IMA. And I
spoke with people, read interviews and developed models with
people and experts, and here's the report of our findings.


Neha:



Cool. And I'm glad you were able to do all that. And how did you
come up with this topic? What's the story behind this report?


Marsha:



Yeah, it's really interesting. I was not the originator of this
report. During the pandemic, the small business committee at the
IMA had a heart for small business and they actually had another
publication. And then this was the second of the two about
resilience, small business resilience. And I was invited as a new
researcher at the IMA to help the small business committee write
this report. And that's what I did. And it was a excellent
experience.


Neha:



Thank you for sharing that journey with us Marsha. So, let's talk
about the resilience model. I found it very interesting. Where
does that come from and how can it help businesses bounce back?


Marsha:



Yeah. This came from actually a lot of interviews with the small
business development center, Youngstown State University, because
they worked with small businesses and they worked with small
business during COVID. And at that time, when this was happening,
I was also a faculty member at Youngstown State. So I worked with
them as well to work small businesses. And so we decided to think
about companies that thrived, you know, this is a report about
thriving during hardship and resilience, the very definition of
it is bouncing back. So how can you bounce back when certain
challenges come your way? And what happened was we found three
elements among the businesses that thrive as well as the
experiences of our small business committee members. These
different three, there were three concepts that stood out. And
would you like me to describe those concepts?


Neha:



Sure. Go ahead, that would really help our understanding of the
model.


Marsha:



Okay. So just imagine three circles, and you can also look at the
report as I talk about these things, because these are
illustrated, but you know, I'm just gonna lay it out three
circles and one circle is business focus. And of course, during
COVID, and now, we still have a continuing pandemic. You know,
business focus is important for everyone, but it's not
everything. Okay. So what else we saw as a visionary leadership
and the companies to thrive, they could see beyond they didn't
lose sight of their goals. They kept their eyes on the goals, but
they also had to be flexible and agile and they had to change for
the circumstances and they could see things that they never saw
before. So, and I might give some examples if you want some in a
moment. And then the other element that was so important was a
people-centric culture. That the companies that thrived thought
about their people, they thought about them as family, you know,
not worrying about, you know, we have to lay people off or we
have to do this and that they're thinking about how can we keep
our people here?


Marsha:



They're our family. And I think you see now even a heightened
awareness of wellbeing, but before the pandemic, yeah, wellbeing
is around. But right now it's very important. And I think it
actually began at that time where everybody was in the same boat,
we were all working from home, having kids at home, you know,
things happening, dogs coming in our Zoom meetings, our animals
and everything else going on, that we had to change. And some of
those things brought humor into what we did. And when you bring
these things together, the business focus with the visionary
leadership and the people-centric culture, those items mixed
together, came to what I called a zone of thriving.


Neha:



Wow. That was very insightful. And thank you for bringing the
human bit in it. It is true that the pandemic did bring out that
human side of us. We were more real on those Zoom calls than we
are in the actual office setup.


Marsha:



Yes. Like I'll just give you example of one company, they were in
the concession food truck business. Now during COVID, there was
no food truck business to go to, people were not going out to
eat. All their orders were canceled. And they were the top food
truck company basically in United States and everything came to
standstill. So they thought, how can we keep our people working
when we don't have a business anymore for a while? And so they
developed and they saw, looked at everything they had, they
basically reenvisioned what they could do. And they started a
hand washing station business. And they cuz they had the
products, they had the manufacturing process, they had the people
and that's what they launched. And then they started selling
these hand washing stations. And the University I worked at, they
put them in, people put 'em in venues and they're really cool.
You don't need to touch anything. There's three stations, you're
six feet from each other. And then you wash your hands and your,
the soap is there. You wash your hands, you dry your hands. It
takes like 20 seconds. And then the next person could go. So
that's the very ingenious idea that came just because they cared
about their people.


Neha:



Wow. That was pure genius, I agree, Marsha and thank you for also
volunteering a bit ago to talk about some examples. And let's
talk about the six Rs of resilience. That's something that also
stayed with me. Can you give us some examples of what that means
for a management accountant?


Marsha:



Yeah. And when we talk about the six Rs, let me mention them,
under visionary leadership, there's reflect and reimagine. Under
business focus, there's reevaluate and reinvent. Under
people-centric culture is reconnect and recharge. And again, you
know, it's the six RS, resilience, you know, was a way to model
these things, these different ideas. So the first example already
talked about was visionary leadership, you know, reflecting and
reimagining, you know, w...