Are you finding it hard to know how you can proactively manage your small business during the coronavirus?
With the coronavirus still spreading across the world, small business owners are worried about their survival. Restaurants, Retail stores, malls, theatres, and other small businesses are ordered to shut down and employees are asked to work from home. Many business owners are concerned about their small business survival in this situation because no one knows how long this economic situation will last.
Below are 9 survival plans with detail that can make a difference in being able to keep your doors open and calm your employees and customers:-
1. Immediate financial triage
The most important concern of the small business survival is how they will be going to pay the bill. This is the most difficult question to answer because they are facing the most critical time of business reduction. Here are the important points to keep in mind on the financial front:-
- Create a cash flow budget with fixed variable costs for small business survival.
- Create a list of a fixed amount that needs to be paid. Prioritize the most important payments based on the timing of when they are due.
- Contact all your debtors to try and get any overdue payments in.
- Also, try to convince your creditor to see what payment they can defer in this critical time.
- For small business survival eliminates unnecessary costs that are not producing revenue or securing the key business functions.
- Always remember that your key employees can be your greatest assets if you cut them deep, you might not get them back.
- Be creative and innovative in how your sales and marketing function. Find an additional financial source of earning to make small business survival.
2. Tax payment
- Speak to your tax professionals to discuss the options to pay the tax.
- Deferring tax payments can impact your eligibility for other stimulus packages.
3. Special COVID-19 policies
- Create special Covid-19 policies for your employees and be clear with the safety protocols and business work from home culture to make small business survival.
- Be flexible with the sick leave policy that employees want to take at work from home.
- Do a webinar twice a week to stay connected with your employees.
- Appoint a dedicated person (From the best performers of your company) for every team to maintain the workflow and decorum.
4. Employees and the talent
- Make sure that you assured your employees about being protected. You have to retain the key employees who drive your business.
- Stop hiring the new candidates instead try to diversify your employees. You can shuffle the key roles among your employees to understand their potential to handle the crises.
- To make small business survival, make plans for next week, month and year and communicate the plan with your key people.
- Unfortunately, you have to make hard decisions. Create a talent assessment in your company on who is a valuable asserted and how that person will help you in revenues.
5. Sales and marketing
- Do regular communication with your customers and make sure that they know how to reach you.
- Make it simple for the customer to purchase your product and services.
- Start sending a regular newsletter or a series of emails and use it to communicate your willingness to help the customers. Tell them about the new feature, function, update and offer on your services and product.
- Use social media to keep your customers up to date. If you don’t use social media, this is the time to build one.
- Focus on your existing customer; provide them great service to maintain a relationship with your customers.
- Find out new ways to deliver your product or services to your customers.
6. Research & development, operations, product or service improvements:
- Invest your time to tackle projects you have been putting off.
- Use this time to improving products and services and find efficiencies.
- Use past customer feedback to improve your customer service and process.
- Conduct online training or webinar for your company to create a world best product. You should also get training as a leader in problem areas to improve your company.
- Invest time on media marketing, Accounting, IT or anything in your business category that can drive your business, only if you are weak on it. Involve your key team members into this.
7. Work from home for your employee
- Many employees are having first experience working remotely; make sure you set the clear expectation.
- Empower your employees with technology, if you want your small business to survive.
- Implement a work from the home agreement with your employees.
- Set an expectation and procedure for a daily productivity report and analyze it weekly so that you can track the workload and productivity of each employee.
8. Business strategy plan for 2020
- This is an excellent time to make modifications to your business plan and you have not a plan for the year, it is the time to make one.
- Start with the project that has been on your wish list and revaluate your objectives.
- Use this time wisely and adjust your plan for this year.
9. Show humanity and be charitable
- Reserve some money that could help in this time of disaster.
- Try to serve and help those in your community.
- Learn about how you can prepare yourself better for this disaster. Use this time as a wakeup call and learn from this experience.
- Build small food storage that can help those people who cannot by food for themselves or for their family.
- The more you help others in this difficult situation, the better you will feel.
As the future is uncertain, it is likely to be prepared for worse for small business survival. Recessions are cyclical by nature and entrepreneurs can make up for lost value at successive rounds once the economy improves.