STRATEGY
CFOs’
ESSENTIAL LESSONS FROM LOCKDOWN
Both essential and non-essential services had to quickly adapt to an uncertain operating environment during the Covid-19 pandemic. Through it all, leading CFOs across a range of industries learnt new ways of working, some of which they will continue to practise, writes Ronda Naidu.
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Covid lockdown” entered the South African vocabulary in early March 2020, with alert level 5, better known as the hard lockdown, coming into effect on 26 March 2020 for a period of 35 days.
Food, medicine, healthcare, energy, fuel, municipal services, internet and banking services were deemed essential and for any other type of business, it was mandatory for employees to stay at home. Businesses both in the essential and non-essential categories had to quickly adapt to government requirements. Douglasdale Dairy CFO Bradley Wentzel recalls the period well. “We were deemed an essential service very early but the rules were changing on an almost daily basis,” he says. “We had to make quick, smart calls. In the first month, if there was once an incident of Covid-19, then operations had to shut down for two weeks. Everybody was living in fear of what it was and where it was,” Bradley explains.
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People focus In order to manage this, the company, which services 6,000 customers daily across five provinces, focused on communication. “We made sure we were talking to our guys, positive messages around the same thread. We emphasised the longevity of the company, ways to be safe and how to manage finances through the period. We tried to give people as many tools as possible to help them work through it, even offering finance courses,” Bradley says. From a customer perspective, Douglasdale Dairy also made the counterintuitive decision to discount a key mass market product, Amasi, which is often eaten with bread as a meal. “We provide basic food products and people are losing jobs and taking salary decreases. Even though a basic finance metric is to increase EBITDA margin, we took a conscious view on discounting Amasi so people could afford to have a meal,” Bradley adds. “We kept conversations going all the time, from farmers to big businesses,” he says.
