How to keep your business going at this critical Period (COVID-19)

At Accounteer, we are deliberating following the evolving Coronavirus (COVID-19) public health outbreak that is having a significant impact on the world’s economy.

The world is currently adapting to the changes brought about by the pandemic, hence the need for every business owner to think of how to keep the business running and not sink.

We at Accounteer were able to transition easily into remote working without hitches on our operations and processes and we are sharing these tips with our fellow business owners/managers and to every stakeholder.

Here are a few tips on transitioning your employees into remote working.

Identifying the possible challenges

Remote working is not new in this part of the world as most developers and other freelancers work remotely. Unfortunately, it’s difficult for the operating arm of most businesses to work and control operations remotely. But if you run an online business where you engage your customers and deliver your services online then remote working suites you perfectly. The common challenges of remote working are the availability of power, good internet connectivity and measurement of productivity.

Hence to effectively transition to remote working ensure to get a good Internet Service Provider (ISP) that is good at different locations where your employees reside. Get some budget to provide the best internet.

Next is to get good collaboration and communication tools that allow you to have virtual meetings with team members and clients. Tools such as Slack, Teams, Skype, Zoom, and WhatsApp are good ones you could choose from. Also, get a project tracking tool to measure and track the deliverables of each team. Tools such as Pivotal Tracker, Trello, Asana, Airtable, and others.

There’s a little to do with power in this part of the world as power is currently expensive, hence I will recommend employees to optimize the best of out the available resources.

Cancel all physical meetings with clients and make all meetings virtual. Suspend all travel arrangements to ensure everyone is safe.

Acquisition Vs Retention

Every business is unique, hence different seasons for sales need to happen. For some businesses this is time to deploy more resources on acquiring new customers/users as customers would be using such the product more than ever before while trying to retain the existing customers by upselling and through support.

On the other hand, some businesses will find it hard to acquire new customers this period but rather work hard to retain the current customers by cross-selling and up-selling your service and by doubling up on the support and response time.

When new sales drop, retaining existing customers is essential for the survival of your business.

Customer success managers at this period must be resilient to provide top-notch customer experience and best support.

Review your Budget and other Financials

Budget and forecast of every business should be reviewed and reworked as things suddenly changed and it’s still changing. Budgets need to be reduced in some areas and hence be padded in the other area, for example, the travel budget needs to be reduced while employee welfare should be increased. This depends on individual businesses.

Revenue and expense forecasts should be carefully examined. In general, a business should focus on optimizing the revenue channel and working to reduce the expenses.

Communicate

With customers, with stakeholders, with employees. Many companies put so much focus on building the business/products that they forget to give “business updates” to their stakeholders. That’s okay when the updates are great and everything is praiseworthy. But when the world is shaky, regardless of whether your business is or not all your stakeholders will be nervous. Communicate with them what’s happening, give them confidence that you’re in control and have a plan to address every area of concern and risk.
Do this early and often, not when you’re already in the sinking and your community will realize you’re one of the few solid companies with your heads firmly fixed to your shoulders.

Conclusively, business owners must prepare for the worst that could happen. No one could predict if a recession would be the next after the COVID-19 is gone. Plan and have a strategy of retaining your customers and ensuring your recurring revenue isn’t reducing while churn increases.