POSITIONING YOUR BUSINESS FOR THE FUTURE POST-COVID

In a previous article, I wrote about the things business owners should be doing to survive the first six months of restrictions. Teaser - it involved 5 P’s!

I have also posted a webinar on what Board’s can do to help business owners navigate through a crisis.

An important message in both those communications is a recommendation that each business owner devotes some of their time to position their businesses for the post-COVID world.

So, what does that look like? 

Here’s a few things I think business owners should consider when thinking about #positioningforthefuture.

1.    Your Finances (A Fool and His Money)

Given where you are now, how has the financial “dust” settled? You should have a better understanding of and have a more intimate awareness of the various levers that have a direct influence on your financial position.

Where is your business in terms of its cash flow, liquidity, debt and revenue positions? What are your real-time projections based on your current circumstances? What are the factors that will need to change to affect these projections? What are the possibilities of these factors changing? Do you need to borrow more money? Have you taken advantage of the government’s financial assistance? What happens when that ends? 

Understanding your financial position and being comfortable with your debt capability, your short-term liquidity position and your real-time revenue projections will be important to help you understand how to meet the challenges and to seize the opportunities of the post-COVID world.

2.    Your Operation (A Stich in Time)

A critical part of the success of your business’ recovery positioning will be to review and update your current strategies and maybe even your operational policies. The aim of this exercise is to:

• see what was done well and why
• see what was poorly managed
• to learn from the mistakes being made

This will include things like your business continuity plans, your crisis management procedures, process workflows, revenue growth plans, debt recovery policies, social media and advertising strategy, customer engagement practices, people engagement policies – all of it!

It will be important to ensure that the foundation of your business is solid so that you are in the best position to accommodate the inevitable resulting changes to your business and to take advantage of the opportunities post-COVID. 

3.    Your Opportunities (Strike while the Iron is Hot)

Once you have worked out your financial tolerance and firmed up your operational foundations, it is time to look at the opportunities the COVID-19 world may have presented to you.

The current restrictions have affected all of us in similar but sometimes different ways. But all of them will provide you with opportunities, which could take the following form:

• the potential for new products or services to be developed
• the justification to scale-up existing products or services
• the opportunity for strategic acquisitions

The similarities are the shared experiences that can produce opportunities for your business to evolve products and services to meet demands that weren’t there before. For example, HR professionals may now see an opportunity to specialise in consulting on the safety of home offices, to help employers discharge their workplace health and safety obligations. Another example may be the development of a range of interface products that could work with Zoom, Skype, Google Hangouts and other video conferencing platforms to augment or customise the user experience.

The current circumstances may also provide you with a robust business case to scale-up your existing offerings, which now have a high demand or its delivery model successfully challenged by the current restrictions. For example, we have seen some ride-share companies evolve into de facto home-to-home couriers. Another possibility are tutors being more available to students via online learning rather just face-to-face sessions.

Another potential opportunity for business owners to consider, is strategic business acquisitions. Are your competitors struggling? Maybe they will make good targets for an acquisition. What about businesses who make in-demand complementary products and services, but who lack the ability to scale up for the post-COVID world? Know who they are? Are you keeping a close eye of them?

Being alive to these opportunities early and laying the groundwork now to capitalise on these opportunities will be critical to help you to thrive post-COVID.

4.    Your Challenges (Lemons into Lemonade)

With these opportunities, there will also be challenges. These may come from:

• the way you interact with your customers
• the way you run your business
• the profitability of certain parts of your business
• the ongoing need for particular operational costs

The challenges faced by your business may be industry specific. For most businesses, the way we do business or the way in which we engage with our customers will likely change from an industry level. For example, the events management industry is yet to understand how to deliver events and conferences in the virtual world, and whether some form of hybrid delivery model will be the way of the future. The opportunity here is to take advantage with blue-sky thinking. By being the first to rise to the challenge and to lead the way, you could set the groundwork for your business to be an industry leader!

There will also be challenges revealed which are specific to the way in which you have run your business. For example, weaknesses in your supply chain due to reliance on off-shore suppliers. Or the inability to quickly find qualified staff to fill temporarily vacant roles. Have your bad debts profile changed? Maybe you need to incentivise early customer payments with discounts to reduce your invoice payment exposure? By facing these challenges, you will be putting your business onto a path that is more sustainable and more resilient!

Not that you have looked at the potential opportunities that your business could take advantage of post-COVID, are there any businesses or business units you should divest? The COVID related restrictions may have unearthed unprofitable parts of your business or may have made certain parts of your business less profitable. Now is the time to divest or scale-down those parts of your business and to make way (and to re-deploy both resources and capital) to those opportunities you have identified!

There are also other cost-saving opportunities that may have arisen. For example, with the realisation that flexible work-from-home arrangements are a real option for your business comes future cost savings for office space, office furniture and infrastructure – even tea and biscuits in the office break-out room! That being said, it might actually just be a re-deployment of that cost to support the post-COVID world reality. For example, greater investment might be needed to shore up the technology platform and cybersecurity measures where you have identified a greater move towards virtual engagement with your customers and your staff.

Make Hay While Sun Shines!

COVID-19 has affected us all in profound ways. As a business owner, you have been responsible for keeping your business afloat, to make sure your customers are looked after and to support your staff as best you can. It has been a difficult time and while you may be bruised and battered, you’re still hanging on. That is no mean feat!

Now that we are looking at some relaxation of the restrictions, ensuring that your business is ready to be #positioningforthefuture is critical to guarantee your efforts over the last few months have not been in vain. 

I hope that this article will give you the foundation to make the decisions you need to position your business to rebound as we slowly move towards a totally unrestricted post-COVID world.