Your Plan Won’t Save You in a Merger—But This Will
Your plan won’t save you. A strategic planning system designed for high-stakes execution will. Here’s how top community banks avoid merger collapse.
You have to do some cost-cutting. Fine. It’s part of the responsible stewardship of your business. But if you think across-the-board cuts are best simply because it distributes the pain and keeps interdepartmental whining to a minimum—you’d better think again.
Jan Carlzon took over the reins of Scandinavian Air and turned an $8 million loss into a $71 million profit in one year. He did so NOT by slashing costs across the board, but by identifying every moment, a customer had the opportunity to form an impression of the business. He called these Moments of Truth and knew that at each of those Moments, a customer would either feel better or worse about Scandinavian Airlines. He knew that if he managed every one of those Moments meticulously, he could create consistent positive impressions and earn customer loyalty.
His Moments of Truth included the cleanliness of the waiting area, the announcements of the pilot, the check-in process, and even the cleanliness of the plane. If a customer saw a coffee stain on a tray when it was pulled down from the seat back, Carlzon knew that the person’s first thought would be, “Uh oh, I wonder if they remembered to service the engines.”
But that’s unreasonable, you say. Darn right, it is. But customers WILL make unreasonable assumptions about whether small things are predictors of something more serious. So it’s essential to manage the perceptions.
Not all cuts are the same. The companies that fare best in tough times are those who figure out how to cut costs in ways that register least with the people who matter most—the customers.
Your plan won’t save you. A strategic planning system designed for high-stakes execution will. Here’s how top community banks avoid merger collapse.
Most banks pretend that culture can be delegated. Wrong. Elite banks weaponize culture as their profit engine. Here’s the system CEOs can’t ignore.
Roxanne Emmerich exposes the toxic lie behind most strategic plans—and the second-order thinking top banks use to pull away from the pack.
Your boardroom may be your biggest blind spot. Discover how elite banks fix strategy at the Breakthrough Banking Blueprint™ Bootcamp.
Most boards are left out of execution—and it’s destroying performance. Here’s how top 5% banks fix it.
Forget templates. Roxanne Emmerich reveals how top banks burn the rulebook and build execution systems that deliver relentless results.
Hope doesn’t scale. Systems do. Find out how elite banks drive results with engineered behaviors and real-time accountability.
Roxanne Emmerich reveals how top 5% banks grow $100M+ in core deposits and triple cross-sales—without matching rates or chasing gimmicks.
Cross-selling isn’t a script—it’s a system. Discover how top-performing banks engineer daily discipline that triples products per customer and locks in loyalty.
One bank ditched fake smiles and vague reviews—and doubled profits in 12 months. Here’s how they built a culture that actually works.