How Is Coronavirus Affecting Us. Really.

We did an update to our staff on COVID-19 and how it is affecting us. This was some of the messaging, that I think should be shared so that the impact of what is going on in the business world is understood.

There have been 3 hugely trying events in our business history. The 1st was the global banking and financial crisis hitting us 1 month into launching Velocity. The 2nd was when we ourselves hit financial trouble 8 years ago due to bad partnership decisions and holding on too long to underperforming businesses. This is the 3rd and certainly most challenging our business has faced and likely ever will.

This is a “Black Swan” event. For those of you who don’t know the reference, for many years, the only swans anyone ever saw were white. The concept of a different colour swan was not conceivable. Until one day, a black swan appeared and the view on the swan world was changed in an instant. 

We have been living in a business world where the concept of planning for a full month and beyond in business interruption was not something that was logically planned for. This is our Black Swan and in fact the world’s black swan.

Many large businesses and household names that have locked down in this period will not re-open again. The ones that do will likely be under significant profit pressure and debt burdens. Post COVID-19, we will have a different world. We are under no illusion that many people in our own industry will not survive this period and we believe there will be casualties both big and small.

Our competitors today will likely not be our competitors in the same form in 6 month’s time. 

Initial indications show that our business is running at 40% capacity of normal circumstances in our infrastructure supply business and somewhere around 60% in our services business. 

Having been around for 12 years and with prudent financial controls and an internal investment strategy, we luckily have reserves and debt facilities to help us through the situation. Many don't.

The company will always protect its staff to the best of its ability. We have not planned to affect anyone’s job from a redundancy or salary perspective and this month’s salaries will be paid in full, as normal. We also have no strategy to short pay our suppliers and service providers, like many businesses out there have publicly stated that they will. To us, that will not be a morally acceptable thing to do and will merely perpetuate the issues faced by the country. 

When dealing with a crisis, we can only deal with the things that are in our control. A lot of what is happening right now is not in our control, but there is a lot that is.

Our strategy to ensure longevity in this process and to deal with what we know that we can have an influence on is as follows:

• We will continue to invest in sales and marketing activities to ensure we are building a pipeline for the short-term future and a better pipeline for the medium and long term.
• We are aggressively shifting the type of products and services that we are engaging customers with, in order to generate immediate revenue outside of hardware and shift their previous perceptions of us. 
• We will pursue deeper relationships with suppliers and vendors in order to gain their support and show ours. 
• We will look for system and process efficiencies to take advantage of. As an example, we very quickly dumped our on-premises switchboard and got a Teams integrated service running so that we have phones wherever we are. 
• We will focus on getting our data cleaned and our customers profiled to better serve the business needs of our customers and our own. 
• We will focus on debtors efficiency and ensure cash is brought into the business. 

For now, we are sticking to the identified plan. We do however hope our initiatives will be able to get us through this tough period and set us up to be a better business on the other side.

If we can steal a phrase from the TV series ‘Survivor” and adopt it as our Coronavirus motto: Outwit, Outlast, OUTPLAY. That is how we all need to approach this time.