Ten ideas to Re-Orient our Post-Pandemic Businesses and Leadership Style

You are perhaps back to Work from Anywhere by now.

The causes, the short and long term geoeconomic effects of the pandemic are being debated over mainstream and social media. It appears that the pandemic will significantly impact the context as well as the transaction environment of our businesses.

We already see significant short term impact in areas that provide the context in which our businesses and organizations operate. The effect is visible in areas like international mobility, global trade & logistics, health care, migration, oil price, currency exchange, and investment climate.

The context, in turn, impacts how all our businesses transact with clients/users, suppliers, employees, i.e. our transaction environment.

We are in uncharted territory, and this is creating twin tragedies-loss of life and the negative impact on global trade as well as local economies.

The demand side, the supply side, finance, and most importantly health aspects- are impacted simultaneously, so this is unprecedented. Perhaps we cant get out of this situation, by just printing money like after a financial crisis.

We are perhaps somewhere in the middle of the crisis. It is difficult to predict how long will demand in sectors like tourism, HoReCa, consumer-durable, and other discretionary spending related ones remain subdued.

However, it would be safe to assume delay and reduced demand, in emerging businesses and startups, connected with the more impacted sectors for the next quarters.

The same goes for investible fund allocation. Some surveys have already validated this.

Yet, every crisis brings opportunities. It is a good idea to start by asking the customer. How can we help?

Here are some thoughts and ideas around re-orienting emerging businesses and startups, that came up during our conversations to help trigger more ideas.

#1

Among established businesses, we already see more remote working, diversification, and low-interest rates. We see these triggering acquisitions of some existing infrastructure, strengthening business continuity planning and greater use of pickup points in retail businesses.

With work from home increasing significantly, there are more opportunities for remote work tools, online education, and enabling technologies across several sectors, besides the healthcare-related opportunities for prevention, assessment, testing, and cure for COVID-19.

#2

In our interactions with clients and partners, we found businesses and NGOs are already re-orienting themselves, to serve their clients, suppliers, society, and government i.e. their transaction environment in several areas.

For example, several organizations in the knowledge sector are providing complimentary access to their materials and courses to existing and potential clients. Large manufacturing companies are transforming their capacities to produce masks, personal protection equipment (PPE), safety kits, etc.

Many businesses and establishments have remained open to serve clients as essential services during the crisis. To contribute to saving lives, some engine manufacturers have pivoted to manufacture ventilators and masks; alcoholic beverage manufacturers have pivoted to manufacture sanitizers

Hats off to these heroes.

As economies reopen, governments would need to balance the needs of the central or federal and state or provincial governments, the banks as well as the industry.

Besides direct subsidies, deferring taxes, paying contractors. It would perhaps need to spend more to increase liquidity and make projects bankable beyond only their economic viability.

Several government agencies and leading startup incubators have announced hackathons and funding support for innovative startups to support prevention, diagnosis, and cure for COVID-19. For example, India has only about 30 Unicorns and 230 semi-unicorns among its ecosystem of about 50,000 startups. There is headroom for startups in every sector, as there are innumerable problems to be solved.

At Apex Group, we are having mentoring & investment related conversations with members of our network, to brainstorm and help them re-orient themselves to support the fight-back and explore new business models in the changed scenario.

Here are some more ideas around re-orienting emerging businesses and startups, that came up during our conversations to help trigger more ideas:

#3

Startups in the health-tech, ed-tech, and gaming sectors will clock more revenues during this time. Whereas startups in the consumer-tech and sharing economy space are relatively more impacted, the ones in deep-tech are better off. There are opportunities in transforming existing startups to deep-tech and pivoting to new businesses in the less affected sectors.

#4

Expect a drop in the valuation of 20–25% for startups that are looking to raise capital at this time. Can you postpone your fund raise?

Prudent investors would most likely give a three to six months leeway in revenue buildup during the COVID-19 impacted period. So businesses need to work out their growth projections removing the impact of this period. There are opportunities in helping businesses replan growth and secure patient capital.

Some of the ideas that came up for startups looking to pivot:

#5

Look at new ways to engage the customer. Earlier, consumers reached out to enterprises to buy or transact, and now these consumers are at home. So enterprises and startups will need to find a way to get to them. So new marketing approaches and businesses will be in demand.

#6

Develop or modify facial recognition algorithms to identify people wearing protective equipment.

Leverage Geo-fencing algorithms to help implement quarantine requirements for people, cargo, and equipment.

We expect a new model for planning and execution in most businesses after the pandemic.

Technology would perhaps decide what the future will look like. We need to choose how we will use technology, to help our customers plan and execute the movement and storage of goods and services, keeping in mind the quarantine requirements.

#7

Help review and plan resilience in the supply chain. The pandemic has accelerated the transformation of supply chains. Now citizens and consumers are demanding more sustainability and a renewed focus on ESG.

Resilience and the ‘just-in-case” scenario planning have become even more critical. An HBR study mentions that globally 1000 large businesses, have about 12,000 facilities in the quarantined locations in China, Korea, Italy. The downstream impact on the supply side, will become visible as the safety stocks are exhausted.

#8

Help develop and manage the infrastructure to support remote working. This is going to be a long term requirement. It would include developing and managing soft infrastructure like training the leaders for remote working.

For example, leaders will need to learn how to respect the time of their remote working employees and yet get the job done across time zone differences, identify which processes and hence which employees need to be available on-site, and when. The rest of the team can be moved to telecommuting.

#9

Take this time to develop new products, train employees, and build a robust continuity plan for the next disruption.

Think of information security-related businesses.

During the pandemic, the people have worked from home, but the data center continues to remain fortified. From that perspective, there may not be any additional risk from access. However, home users and other device users need more awareness. We need to help manage the trust. While the central systems remain the same, the endpoints will also move to the cloud.

There are opportunities for creating awareness and delivering training more frequently and deeply.

#10

The organized sector will continue to get bigger. Agile businesses have already started working on winning in this new normal. Lawyers are already focusing on Force Majeure advisory, and investors are working on better deals. Connect with them.

Since the business context will keep shifting during and post the pandemic, we will need to anchor on something to pivot.

To arrive at whether we need to pivot and if yes, what do we do now to contribute and co-exist, we are using an updated version of our VRSPRIC Framework also covered in our Mastermind sessions. The Framework also applies to established and larger businesses.

A pandemic like this one requires a significant contribution by the leadership team.

From the Leadership perspective- Every crisis would have its share of victims, heroes, villains, and spectators.

Let’s look at things we can do to play the part of heroes in our transaction environment when we can’t change the broader context.

At country, enterprise, or small business levels, people are looking for robust leaders, who are in the front-line yet compassionate. They can project the image of control and containment without minimizing the uncertainty. As someone who can also deliver during these challenging times.

We need to be realistic as leaders, and I have found that re-framing the situation often helps make it look less scary.

For young adults moving into the job market at this time, expect the following three skills to be in continued demand:

#1 Passion & Purpose, leading to building horizontal domain expertise in marketing, sales, human resources, computer science etc.

#2 Imaginative communication so that the message and contribution by the enterprise/startup can be packaged differently to stakeholders

#3 Stamina & availability, i.e. as low downtime as possible

Some doomsday thinkers speak of worst-case scenarios as the best case, which then adds to the negativity.

We need to be watchful, as the choices we make and the information we forward will make a difference.

For those of us who are fortunate to have been physically unaffected by the crisis, what could be a better time to be a better neighbor, to show more care for our employees, colleagues, and clients, to be more helpful to our extended families.

Here’s to continue sharing our insights with the hope it helps trigger more conversations.

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