Your Real PPP: Post-Pandemic Plan

Please take the following statement with the encouraging mindset and great admiration for our industry with which it is framed:

How your credit union handles strategic planning in the next few months will determine whether or not you’re in business in the fall of 2021.

Whether held traditionally or remotely/virtually, your credit union must develop its real PPP (Post-Pandemic Plan). Why? Because investment income is dropping. Fee income is dropping. Loan losses are going up and net worth is becoming diluted. While we all hope this thing passes, what if it hangs around for another six months? Not doing a strategic planning session as quickly as possible – one that reflects the current economic downturn and specific challenges felt by your credit union and its members – makes less than zero sense. Sticking your head in the sand may work for an ostrich but it will not work for your credit union. A PPP bravely looks at all the pandemic-related challenges your credit union faces directly in the eye and, with contribution from everyone on your executive leadership team and board, crafts a plan addressing them.

2020 is a roaring dumpster fire of a year. Credit unions have been through the ringer so far this year and the only real guarantee is that it will definitely get harder if your credit union abandons strategic planning and chooses to delay it or do nothing.

A few words about hope: You probably hope loan volume increases. You probably hope net membership gain increases. You probably hope the virus comes to an end.

But guess what? Hope is not a strategy. Now, more than ever, your credit union must adjust its strategies, pivot its tactics and create a vibrant strategic plan that acknowledges and overcomes the tidal wave of financial “new normals” we all face.

You also can’t copy and paste last year’s plan into 2021. Unless you had major psychic abilities, the strategic plan you put together a year ago is woefully inadequate and unprepared for the rapid economic downturn wrought by the pandemic.

Postponing your planning session now, for any reason, is equally problematic. Again, the way your credit union approaches its strategic planning process between now and the end of the year will, in large part, determine whether or not your doors are open a year from now.

Of course, you must also look at the positive side of the equation, which indicates that a solid strategic plan places your credit union in a much better position to emerge from the current economic downturn. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be a strategic planning session done in the traditional way, with board, your executive leadership team and a facilitator all packed into one room. The realities of the pandemic and social distancing may require your credit union to consider a remote/virtual planning session. Here’s some further good news: Remote/virtual planning sessions absolutely work. Consider the following from Stefanie Rupert, CEO of Collins Community Credit Union in Cedar Rapids, Iowa:

“At first, doing a virtual strategic planning session seemed daunting. Would we be able to accomplish what we needed to during a Zoom session? Heck, yes! It was just as effective as the traditional way.”

Founding father Benjamin Franklin once said, “You may delay, but time will not and lost time is never found again.” There has never, perhaps, been a truer time for such a statement to ring in the minds and hearts of credit union leaders. You can choose to put off strategic planning, but time will leave your credit union in the dust and there’s nothing in the world you can do to regain that lost opportunity. Doing nothing is a recipe for greater struggle, mergers, insolvency and a host of other words no one in the credit union industry relishes.

Now is the time. Strategic planning is the tool by which your credit union will succeed and actually develop a growth plan through the pandemic. The choice is yours. Make it wisely.

Mark Arnold is Founder and CEO for On the Mark Strategies in Carrollton, Texas.