Hitting The Ground Running After Covid – A Business Survival Guide
When it comes to getting back on your feet, or adjusting to a post-Covid society, your business is surely going to experience its fair share of challenges. Of course, it’s too early to say that a ‘post-covid society’ is even possible at this point, but business life will resume, in one way or another. For that, it’s worth taking the time to plan your best approach.
But what does this mean in practice? After all, a one-size-fits-all solution is simply impossible to consider, and leads to impractical, often insensitive advice. Thankfully, hitting the ground running after Covid doesn’t mean you have to thrive or die, it just means getting your bearings and figuring out where your weak spots may be.
So – how can we avoid a difficult fate, and more easily move forward with wisdom? Is there anything we can learn from this pandemic and the associated struggles we’ve been through? What matters is taking the time to consider that, and moreover, to try and prevent such a problem from hitting us so hard again. Let’s consider:
Finding Staff & Outsourcing
It’s a good idea to consider how you may replenish your staff if you’ve had to let some go, or if you have certain skillsets that are now no longer present at your firm. Finding a healthy outsourcing option can get you out of a pinch, or it can help you ensure your standards remain even as a business. Of course, for a process as delicate as this, it’s best to stay in safe hands. That’s why using a labour hire agency can be so important, and so worthwhile in the long run. It gives you a quality means of being able to source these staff, of onboarding effectively, and of keeping the effects of your workplace ‘brain drain’ limited, especially if you were impacted by this during 2020.
Upgrading Your Office
It can be a great idea to upgrade your office from time to time, but especially when you’re expecting a return of your staff and a resumption of your normal processes. It might be that moving the desks around to make decorative sense can be important. You might invest in some ergonomic furniture that helps your staff feel comfortable and supported after working from home all this time. Furthermore, it will likely be helpful if you ensure further measures are in place to protect against the spread of the virus once more – just in case.
Plexiglass shielding, face mask supplies, hand gel, regular cleaning of your stations, these investments and protocols can help your staff feel safe. They can also protect the health of those who work for you. No matter your personal opinions about the last year, the last thing you need is to be worried about having many of your staff off sick, and more importantly, failing to keep them safe – which is your duty as the business owner.
Using Software To Your Advantage
Using software to your advantage can be a great idea when returning to the office. Inventory stock forms, for instance, can help you keep better control over the inventory you have and have had to store over this time. Performing a regular cybersecurity check using managed IT services will also be important, because it could be that your IT network has many months of cybersecurity updates to apply, especially if you’ve failed to use many of the devices you had there.
Software, such as digital assistants or payroll assistants, can help you keep on top of the more technical aspects of your business, especially if it’s been a while since you approached these tasks, and the variables of a strange year have thrown out normal protocol from top to bottom. It can also be worth ensuring you are still subscribed to all of the essential software suites and packages you use to begin with. Annual subscriptions to Grammarly, Office 365, the cloud and more may need to be reuploaded, or restructured. Keeping on top of all this can be one of the most important things you do – and can prevent a working issue from taking place. Don’t discount it.
Renewed Marketing Push
A renewed marketing push is important after such a strange and hazy year, because consumer confidence is at an all time low. This means that not only do you have to prove your own business is worth it, but you have to make sure that consumers are encouraged to spend in the first place. Finding renewed methods of value, then, can be one of the most important measures you take here.
It’s not easy to tell already struggling or 2020-concious businesses to invest in marketing, but that is often the best way to get yourself out there, reminding people that you exist. It might also be that certain concessions such as promo deals, combined bundles, free delivery, trial packages and more can help you revivify and motivate a prior and renewed audience. This can help you add fuel to the generator, as it were, encouraging customers to repeat their spending cycle with you once more.
Caring For Your Clients
In some cases, it can be worth using the personal touch to reconnect with your clients. Sending them a Christmas card over the winter break, or loyalty-customer-specific discounts, or simply renewing your social media presence with more posted content can help you connect and reconnect with those you wish to keep around.
Caring for your clients also means checking in on them in some instances, particularly if they’re high-quality products or services you’re selling. Simply checking in to see how everything is going may end up giving you another order, or it might just keep them around, or, it might actually help you see how your client is actually doing with no ulterior motive. These little efforts really do make a difference in the long run.
With this advice, we hope you can more easily hit the ground running as a business, even after Covid.
