Calculated Risks and Training Can Help Contracting Businesses

Truth or dare? Chad Storlie had a bit of both for contracting business owners on Contract Magazine’s website. Storlie believes there is virtue in applying military tactics for calculating risks to small businesses.

Storlie gave three tactics Special Operators Forces use to help them win on risky endeavors:

1. Train well beyond your comfort zone.  SOF training is incredibly physically and mentally demanding. The goal of all SOF combat training is to make it as indistinguishable from combat as possible so people are as well prepared as possible to succeed when they enter combat.  The SOF training starts with identifying and recruiting great people and then testing them under a rigorous selection process to ensure they succeed. Once the best have been recruited and selected, a series of training events bring them to the level of a honed and skilled SOF operator.  Finally, personnel retention practices go hand-in-hand with training to ensure highly-trained SOF personnel do not leave.
2. Identify, anticipate, and react early to events critical to your competitors’ success.  In both business and the military, the classic question of "what will my competitor do?" confronts organizations at all times.  In the military, Intelligence and Operational leaders create a "most likely" enemy operational plan of what they believe the enemy will do and then identify several critical and identifiable junctures in the estimated enemy plan.  The identification of these critical "action" points in a competitor's plan then creates your own "action" points.  When you see your competitor acting or about to act, you can implement a strategy to counter or mitigate the success of your competitors.
3. Create contingency plans to solidify and exploit your success. Few businesses create plans and operational extensions to fully exploit their success. One of the worst failures for a business is to have a very successful product launch or a new service and not be able to effectively expand or maintain the high levels of service that brought the initial success. SOF teams have multiple, highly-elaborate contingency plans for all parts of a special operations mission, from infiltration to completing the mission objective to exfiltration from the mission area back to base.  It is entirely possible to have a successful mission without exercising a contingency plan.

Visit Contractor Magazine’s website to read more from Storlie in advance of Veterans Day or visit Storlie’s website.