The semi-lockdown may have only lasted a few months, but the impact of COVID-19 on the business sector is just getting ramped up. If you’re scrambling to figure out your strategy now that we’re starting to come out of all this, you’re in good company: CEOs, owners, and company presidents are all in that boat, too. So how do you find your way through it, and what does your business’s strategy look like going forward?
Tip #1: Understand What Started the Crisis
Easy answer: the coronavirus.
Real answer: risk. Because of a risk to individuals’ health, the risk extended to everyone’s health, which extended to our healthcare infrastructure and business systems. This kind of risk is hard to see coming, but not impossible to predict if you understand it’s not a linear progression, and that lots of small events can add up to have a major impact.
Tip #2: Understand the Scale of This Change
Every business’s digital systems are vulnerable to risk, but most companies don’t know the full extent of that vulnerability. And so, just as the world didn’t see COVID-19 coming and the economy didn’t see 2008 coming, your business may be primed for a disaster it never sees coming—unless you take a look at the small things that may be adding up to something big.
If your business is like most others, you’re always making changes to things. You’re optimizing systems, reacting to threats and opportunities (SWOT analysis, anyone?), and evaluating your finances. But you’re probably not making a huge change all at once.
COVID-19 has forced us to make a huge change, all at once.
This pandemic has drastically transformed economies, consumer behavior, social systems, and more. The motivations and values of your workforce have changed. Your competitors’ tactics have changed. And all of these shifts have happened at the same time.
Tip #3: Adapt
As we said before, small changes add up to large transformations. As a business owner or CEO, you need to be on the forefront of understanding this truth. You must see opportunities and threats in the market that go beyond the obvious. You need to understand the bigger issues and changes, of course—but even more than that, you must understand the impact of the tiny events that fly under the radar.
Every business that survives this crisis will need to adapt. The future of business isn’t about getting back to normal. It’s about finding the new normal. It’s about embracing an entire paradigm shift that changes the way business—specifically, your business—is done, forever.