They're turning chaos into opportunities. Here is how you can do it, too!

Reading the news lately is tiresome. Everything is COVID-19, death toll, crisis and downturn. And if you're listening to Venture Capitalists, 9 out of 10 only talks about reducing costs and extending your runway (= a startup jargon referring to the time you can hope to survive with the cash you have in the bank). But that will only keep you alive, and you'll get out of the crisis so weak you might never recover from it. On the other hand, cutting through the clutter are a number of organizations that didn't wait for the world to go "back to normal" - if it ever will - to actually turn this crisis into an opportunity. Here are a few pathways that have worked for others and could inspire you to make the best of this strange times.

Please share in the comments other innovative examples you've seen out there!

• Turn experiences into as DIY-from-home

You used to organize physical events, provide service to your clients personally or gather a crowd to provide an experience? How about turning that same experience into a self-serving kit for people to keep enjoying it in a new way? That's how Club Vino is now providing wine tasting experiences from the comfort of your home. U-Fit, a physical gym brand, prepares custom personal trainings and sends them through an app with YouTube videos showing how to execute each t?o?r?t?u?r?e? exercise, while dance studios livestream or record their classes so that you can learn to dance and practice on your own schedule.

• Keep the essence, pivot the service

In some cases, there is simply no way to maintain the business as is. The New Luncher, for instance, offers premium healthy lunches for school kids. But the current absence of school obviously defeats its purpose. Yet, kids still need to eat, preferably healthy, and the products used for the menus are now left to waste. So in a few days, Founder Catherine Lesselin and her team put together the website supermarche.sg where you can get the same healthy products delivered to your place and cook a healthy lunch for your lucky kids.

Another one that looked at it with children's eyes, literally is an online platform for discovering and booking family events and experiences. Only if no one can leave home, you might as well close shop. Kidadl thought otherwise and became the experience destination it was once listing, offering ideas and inspiration for stay-at-home fun and learning. So if people needed to come see you to enjoy your service, and thus currently can't, maybe you can reach out to them and reinvent the experience online with a twist.

This last one is slightly different and particularly inventive, while also - or hence, a fantastic PR stunt! Mediamatic ETEN, a restaurant in Amsterdam, reopened to offer their menu on quarantined tables! You still go to the restaurant, but now your dinner is served in a Serre Séparée - a private greenhouse - with a breathtaking view of the pier. They kept the very essence, but turned the challenges into an even more unique experience. And now they're in every news outlets looking for a cool story to tell without having to spend a cent on media.

What I particularly like about all these examples is that, once the situation gets back to normal, these new ways of doing business don't have to disappear. They can just become part of the business or even take over the original concept. So all these efforts and investments don't go to waste.

• Lead the resistance by supporting your ecosystem (aka pay-it-forward!): 

If you're doing well, or you have enough runway to live through the crisis, you can work on your reputation by using your expertise, tech or infrastructure to support an entire ecosystem.

An example dear to my heart as one of the leaders of La French Tech Singapore is a creative movement we launched called #codeed-20 (pun intended): a collaborative condition mostly characterized by Severe Acute Networking Syndromes and a Pay-It-Forward attitude. In layman terms, we the leaders randomly picked out to several members of the community, offered them expertise and a listening ear for free then invited them, in turn, to pay-it-forward to someone else. It kept the community alive in times not allowing physical meetups, provided a fantastic ice-breaker to everyone to reach out to anyone, and quickly spread way beyond the community, reaching entrepreneurs from France, Bangladesh, Vietnam..., lifting their mood, offering new perspectives and consolidating our reputation and trust in the network.

Singapore Restaurant Rescue is another collaborative platform launched to help food & beverage businesses to dodge the expensive commissions often collected by food delivery companies in times where revenues have shrunk dangerously. Food can be collected at the restaurant, whereas deliveries can be run by their own staff (waiters, dishwashers), allowing them to maintain a salary. Relief initiatives to support small businesses like the one offered by Google Pay also contribute to help cutting transaction fees. By creating a hub, the initiators of the movement showed their leadership and commitment to the ecosystem.

Retail is another industry that got striked badly by the COVID thunder. So UNIQGIFT decided to play its part and launched "support our stores", a platform to enable retailers to generate immediate cash-flow by selling e-vouchers. The funds are immediately transferred to the merchants upon issuance of the vouchers and all transactions fees are absorbed by UNIQGIFT. And merchants that could or did not offer e-vouchers before can now leverage on the company's technology for free to issue and accept e-vouchers. Nice move, one that requires to care!

• The door is open. Put your foot in!

Surfing on the previous examples, tech companies like Google and Klaxoon understood quickly that paying-it-forward by putting a great product in the hands of your clients for free is a good way to put a foot in the door. They give free samples, extended trials or enable collaborative tools to get inside and add immediate value in a time where their clients are most needing it, while not necessarily able to invest. But if you think about it, that's growth marketing done well, essentially. Once inside, you just have to transform that new pipeline after the crisis, with usage numbers and internal cases to back your sales pitch. And even if people don’t use it, that’s still good PR: nobody can’t blame you for offering your services for free. Talking about which, if you haven't claim you free design thinking business clinic with Co-Creation Lab, you can still book it here ;)

• Leverage low resistance-to-change to focus on inside sales and upselling.

Change has already happened. The situation has already been disrupted. So for once, you can come as a messie instead of the Devil, offering a new solution that would normally get your clients out of their comfort zone. With less ongoing meetings and travels, it’s also a great time to learn how to practice international sales remotely as you don’t really have the advantage of being “on the ground” in a specific geography. One company doing that well is Agorize: many open innovation challenges have been launched during the crisis, several of them by governments looking for solution to solve the current issues. And as as APAC CEO Aurélie Wen puts it, the fact that these challenges - including the final demos - are fully online, they open to a much wider audience, with participants coming from all corners of the globe. Let's hope they bring these creative solutions home quickly!

https://covid.openinnovation.sg/en/challenges/beyond-covid-19

You want to try new stuff and new approaches while you can: anything you test now that fails can be blamed on COVID-19 and will be fast forgotten, whereas anything that works will be marked as entrepreneur genius.

• Get people while they're home and b?o?r?e?d? more available.

It's never been a better time to run webinars, online workshops, virtual demos, or remote Tupperware meetups… It's also a great time to get the top leaders usually too busy to travel on stage. Xoogler.co, the Google Alumni entrepreneur network I’m part of just recently got Geoff Ralston, President of Y Combinator - the best startup incubator in the world - on a global call, to share about startup funding, acceleration and entrepreneurship in general. Not a chance to get a hold of that guy in normal times! How cool? (And since you probably weren't on that call, see what I took away here, if you’re interested in the startup life).

• Train your employees

Embrace liminal times to take a step back, upskill yourself or your employees, possibly by launching new or procrastinated projects, or talking to people doing stuff you admire or desire. You’re missing tech skilled workers? Give them that training they’ve always wanted and leverage their new skills in a few weeks, along with their renewed loyalty. That's what Try & Review is doing at the moment for instance. Co-Founder Alexia Sichère finally got to train her employees on SEO & content writing, something she's been putting off forever for lack of time, that will pay off once they're back to operating full speed. The uplift on social media might actually be worth the break, only there was no way to fit it in a few weeks ago!

To walk the talk myself, I've actually just signed up last week with Le Wagon - the #1 coding bootcamp in the world, after taking a UX course on LinkedIn Learning. So much to learn, it'd be silly to spend all your new found time on Netflix when you could be investing in yourself! I'm hoping learning the language of the future will offer ways to develop Co-Creation Lab I'm not able to even conceptualize as of now. But even if it doesn't, that will still be worth 10x staying idle waiting for business to knock at the door.

• Hire great people!

If you can't afford the time to learn the skills your organization requires, lots of companies big & small are currently laying off top tier talents, some of whom used to be very fulfilled in their job, hence inaccessible or too expensive for you. So if your finances and/or pipeline look good, it’s the perfect time to hunt, hire and onboard them. They’ll be ripe for a wild ride once the rodeo starts again - very soon! - and having them will definitely put your business ahead of the curve.

Airbnb for instance has created a section for their alumni to find new opportunities, and VC funds all over the world have allied to help relocate startup talents from companies eating the dirt to companies surfing the wave. You can check out the SEAriously Awesome People list originated from Singapore here for instance. La French Tech Singapore has also launched a talent exchange last year that is finding more meaning now than ever.

• Repurpose idled resources in a new way.

You have a bunch of workers who can’t work? Instead of firing them, lend or swap them with other organisations, or put them to work on a different task inside the company.

I've already mentioned how some companies are using their staff to post on social media or deliver orders since their regular job is undoable. Here some creative and inspiring initiatives run at an even larger scale:

1. In Pakistan, virus-idled workers were hired to plant trees: more than 60,000 jobs were filled as part of the country's 10 Billion Tree Tsunami programme.
2. 800 Singapore Airlines cabin crew went to serve in new roles in Covid-19 fight: helping out in hospitals or guiding commuters at public transport hubs.
3. Japanese workers left jobless by virus were repurposed to balance the labor shortage in farming: the government subsidized the costs of training and accommodation of foreign workers to back-up re-employment workers from industries like hotels and restaurants, while tackling a labor shortage in agriculture.
4. Aldi employs redundant McDonald’s staff: the discounter took over staff from restaurants the fast-food chain had to close while Aldi was facing extremely busy times in stores where more customers came to buy significantly more products.

So in confinement or out in the wild, stay safe and innovate! To read further on the subject, here is a cherry-bonus on the virus-free-cake, with other insightful articles on the topics. And please share your own in the comments!

• Startup Offense and Defense in the Recession by Elad Gil
• Playing offense during a downturn by Gokul Rajaram
• 4 startups that pivoted their way out of the COVID-19 crisis by Forbes
• Reinventing your career in the time of Coronavirus by HBR

I'm the Founder & Managing Director at Co-creation Lab, where we help our clients envision what their operations could look like in the future, through human-centered creative problem-solving. But the real value of creativity doesn’t emerge until you are brave enough to act on those ideas. So we work with your own teams, focusing on individuals to create the right environment and provide an efficient set of tools to drive change and impact in your organization. Get in touch: [email protected]