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The money is out there.

That's the general consensus of almost every veteran founder, CEO, investor, and board member I've talked to over the last six months.

The problem we're all feeling right now is that these folks are being overruled, shouted down, or otherwise ignored by the people with more control over the purse strings.

Yeah. That's what's going on. Somewhere up the chain, someone has decided that you can toss out everything you know about business and cut your way to future growth. Then it becomes a mandate to amputate all the limbs to save the patient.

In this article, I'm going to attempt to give you a few "second opinions" to think about before you commit to that kind of ill-advised major surgery. I'll go over some of the best ideas my contemporaries and I have for surviving as a business without gutting the workforce.

Because you can't cut your way to growth, but you can't just cross your fingers and hope for the best either.

You need a plan.

First, one more time for the back of the room. One of the most inarguable tenets of business is that you can't cut your way to growth.

I know what that sounds like. A platitude. I said it in an article I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the recent massive and misguided technical job cuts. And while almost everyone agreed with that statement, the pushback I did receive revolved around the obvious. So let me split hairs and pick nits here.

Yes, you can always trim fat. Yes, you must eliminate redundancies in your workforce. Yes, some employees, especially technical employees, just aren't trying that hard.

But look, if an organization, especially a technical organization, was operating under a level of waste, redundancy, and malaise that........

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