How To Make Your Business CovidProof?
Well, As we all know the impact of Covid-19 (known as the Chinese Virus) all over the world, adversely affected our personal life, families, govt administration and business houses as well.
Currently, we are going through the second wave in India badly and experts are already started talking about the third wave may hit us any time. So, I was thinking if this goes on like this, then what would be the possibilities to cover up or take care of our businesses in future. Please remember as an owner of a business house your responsibilities are more than a normal citizen. You do not only need to take care of your family, your health, your colleagues, and of course your business operations too. It’s time to make difficult decisions for the difficult period, especially in the pandemic.
1. Ready to Work From Home Concept:
I think most of us have already understood what is work from home concept and experienced it suddenly without a proper plan. Now it’s time we should plan ahead and ready to go for the WFH concept with a short notice along with these small but important long-term planning during the pandemic period.
– Start digitalising data from books
– People need to learn MS Office more, especially excel, word and PowerPoint
– Start acquiring laptops, notepads instead of a fixed desktop system for easy mobility
– All Software including Taxation, CRMS etc. should also have a provision to work on a remote basis
– Start using a Cloud-based server to store data centrally and access it from anywhere by multiple team members
2. Use Automation Process:
As we all know work from home concept is not workable for manufacturing industries, but they also do have a different solution to work on. Many production plants are still running with the manual and lengthy process. So now I think the time has come to optimise and switched to standardise automation process, which will not only help you to lowering the heads, but it will also help you to lowering the cost of production in long run. This should immensely helpful to maintain the quality and increase the production quantity. The automation process will become much easier to supervise the production even from a remote base during this difficult period without cutting down the production or shutting down the plant fully.
3. Organise Multi-Vertical Training:
If you want better productivity from your team during the work from home or remote work period, then start proving them a multi-vertical training like HR should know how to handle customer, service should understand how to close a sales deal, sales should know how to create process, the admin needs to learn how to run promotion etc. In this way an organisation may keep their employees busy, engaging and train for better result by justifying their cost to the company during the difficult period especially.
4. Control Your Cost But Increase Your Base:
During the WFH period, when most of your office expenses, travelling, goes down, then I think this is the best time to go out and take the market and increase your share by acquiring more customers, business, volume now so that it may deliver the recurring income in the long run.
5. Go Digital:
This is the biggest and most important requirement for all our business houses, corporates. Instead of pausing the brand promotion, communication, marketing through traditional media or suspending, for the time being, it’s time to continue through a digital network all around the year with minimum budget and continuous mind recall. In fact, during the WFH, digital media can give you the best results as online surfing and activities go all-time high. Most importantly the time has come where your business needs to adapt to the current situation and start converting most of your business operations smartly through the internet. Its time we should move to internet banking/mobile banking/UPI from the regular banking or branch banking concept, start moving towards digital workbook from a physical copybook, Website is must for all brands, emails are the most essential communication instead of physical letters, start sending E-brochures rather than spending and sending print collaterals, Google my business listing is also more important like a physical signage of your business.
6. Keep Some Liquid Investments:
You should already ready with the liquid money during the difficult period. If you want to invest in this period, I suggest must go to liquid funds or any other short time investment with a high liquidity option to keep insuring regular fund flow in the business.
7. Plan Your New Product Launch:
It’s an ideal time to do research, study, competitor analysis, budgeting and plan your business ahead. I advise this is the best time to make your new product prototype and work on the launch.
8. Make Daily Mandatory Reporting:
Make daily reporting such as morning meeting, evening chats or con-calls, as these are really important activity to keep the momentum goes on and continue to supervise the work and track result.
9. Keep Everyone Insured:
Before or after Covid, you should keep all your assets safe and secure including your employees, system, office premises, stocks and raw materials to avoid any accidents, emergencies during these difficult problems.
10. Launch Contest:
If you want an extraordinary return, you need to put something more than ordinary. This is the time organisation should launch some formal contest for the team and let the team members perform and get to earn more. The contest should be related to these points
– Providing innovative ideas to control costs, easy process
– Crack a new business deal
– Get better customer reviews
– New products development idea
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Regards, Subhajit Ghosh
Business Director l Brand Consultant
