Maryland Business: Rebooted

How to test your plan forward in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world. Whether or not you have a formal strategy or you are “muddling through” a crisis, it is essential to review your plan forward. The session will give you a simple framework on what makes a “good” and a “bad” strategy – given the current business environment there are plenty of examples available.

• Webinar 1: Strategy Health Check

Discussion questions for the Webinar:

• How much could you rely on your strategy when the pandemic hit?
• Why do you need a strategy – for your business or for your career?
• When was the last time you led, acted or thought strategically?
• How to detect a good and a bad strategy?

Why planning is so much more important than the plan. Building on Webinar 1, we will discuss the process of building a better strategy. In essence, your value proposition serves as the baseline of “what to do”. The strategic planning process takes the “what” and tries to find the best ways “how to do it”. While there is eventually a plan emerging, the webinar will stress the importance of planning over plan.

• Webinar 2: Rethinking Your Strategy

Discussion questions for the Webinar:

• What are the critical skills for a strategic planner?
• What is the real benefit of having a formal strategy?
• Are formal strategies as important for small and medium-sized business as they are for large organizations?

How to create a strategy that maximizes flexibility and captures opportunities no matter what the future brings? Strategic plans are always about the future. Therefore, you can’t build a great strategy without a better understanding of the immediate and distant future of your industry, your competitors, your customers and the world at large. This webinar shows you how to find opportunities locally and globally by discovering early warning signals and capitalizing on trends before your competitors do.

• Webinar 3: Future Robust Planning

Discussion questions for the webinar:

• How to discover the important trends that change my strategy before it is too late?
• Can you predict the future enough to include in your strategy?
• What kind of strategies could have helped during the COVID 19 pandemic?
• What is the impact of the post-COVID world on business strategies?

We will review the conceptual framework that defines financial accounting and explore the four fundamental statements accountants use to present financial information to investors and creditors. In addition, we will examine accrual accounting, the core method accountants use to determine a company’s income, and compare it to cash basis accounting, which is used by many smaller companies.

• Webinar 1: The Nature of Accounting and its Relevance to Business (April 18, 2020)

We will expand the discussion of accrual accounting to specific areas of a company’s business and explore the key differences between a company’s income statement and its cash flow statement. We also will review concepts of financial analysis and use analytical tools that use accounting information to assess the financial health of a company.

• Webinar 2: Income and Cash Flow Statements (Sept. 1, 2020)

We will broaden our studies to include concepts of managerial accounting. This type of accounting involves the application of business management tools, including budgeting, cost accounting, performance management, breakeven computations and incremental analysis.

• Webinar 3: Managerial Accounting (Sept. 22, 2020)

Once you’ve decided on your site’s target audience(s), it’s time to design the site with their needs in mind. We’ll explore infusing your company’s site with your unique company brand personality through content and design to guarantee a positive user experience. We’ll also look at the nuances of a mobile site/app design to assure a frictionless interaction.

• Webinar 1: Creating Your Company's Website for the Best Customer Experience (Sept. 30, 2020)

As the general population has gravitated towards e-commerce, industrial buyers have come to expect more from B2B sites. We’ll look at how you can make your B2B site more engaging and informative for procurement officers. With millennials entering the supply chain field, we’ll also explore what content and platforms they are seeking to guarantee a smart B2B purchase.

• Webinar 2: B2B Websites - How Amazon has Elevated Industrial Buyers’ Expectations and How a Business should Respond (Oct. 14, 2020)

In this webinar, we’ll discuss selecting the social media outlets that resonate with your target audience(s). As the number of social media platforms expands, it becomes more confusing for the business owner to decide where to invest their time and resources in the social arena. We will look at established and emerging social media platforms to better understand who is using them and how businesses can make the most of their social media efforts on each SM platform.

• Webinar 3: Social Media - Maximizing your Social Media Efforts (Oct. 28, 2020)

This session will focus on the "big picture" and major trends of the retail industry, more or less organized by different retail sectors, as well as the implications for SMR's. We'll also define the strategies to address these challenges, from the perspective of SMR's.

• Webinar 1: Retail Industry Trends and Implications for Small and Mid-sized Retailers (Jan. 27, 2021)

This session will cover retail performance metrics and how to utilize them to diagnose problems and improve retail decisions. It will focus on those performance metrics that can be implemented using a retailer's existing inventory management and bookkeeping infrastructure (so that they can be easily adopted by SMR's).  We will also discuss more advanced metrics and frameworks that have been utilized by sophisticated retail operations and the additional data/resources required.

• Webinar 2: Utilizing Data Analytics to Build a Winning Retail Business (Feb. 10, 2021)

Professor Jie Zhang will moderate a panel discussion by three retail experts: James Thomson of Buy Box Experts, and Katherine Cullen and Adam Lukoskie of the National Retail Federation. The discussions will cover the following topics: 1) how to move a retail business online and how to compete successfully in e-commerce marketplaces; 2) consumer spending and emerging retail trends during the Covid pandemic; 3) strategies for enhancing store operations and de-escalation; 4) the RISE Up initiative by the National Retail Federation.

• Webinar 3: Forum on Strategic Retail Management (Feb. 24, 2021)

Speaker Bios

James Thomson is the chief strategy officer and partner at Buy Box Experts. Previously, he served as the business head of Amazon Services and the first Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) account manager. He co-founded the PROSPER Show and co-authored two books about Amazon Marketplace. Prior to Amazon, Thomson was a management consultant and banker. He holds a Bachelor of Science from University of Alberta, an MBA from Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management, and a PhD in marketing from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

Katherine Cullen is senior director of industry and consumer insights for the National Retail Federation’s research team. In this capacity, she leads research on consumer spending and emerging retail trends and develops new research initiatives and partnerships. Prior to joining NRF, Cullen worked in customer strategy and intelligence at Macy’s Inc. She has a master's degree in business administration from New York University’s Stern School of Business with specializations in marketing and business analytics.

Adam Lukoskie is vice president of the National Retail Federation Foundation, where he oversees major workforce programs including the RISE Up training and credentialing program. Lukoskie has 15+ years of successful system transformation and teambuilding. At Teach for America, he oversaw $100M in purchasing, streamlined TFA’s procurement process, and led an award-winning team. He holds a BA from University of St. Thomas and an MBA from Georgetown University.