Small Business Guide during the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak

We at The Launch Buddy, are practicing best measures to avoid the spread of COVID-19 and hope that you all keeping safe and healthy at your home with your loved ones and families..

As a Business owner, we all know that carrying out a venture do comes with certain challenges, it might be financial or probably with inventory or some employee related issues but we always a Plan-B for situations like this and we know how to handle them.

But we’ve never seen anything like the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving us quite uncertain about how to cope in these strange times.

Thus with this article we hope that it might help you all to plan the business challenges against the pandemic. Here are a few things to focus on and plan for the crisis management for your business:-

• Take Care and Stay Calm & Positive.

The basic necessity during the difficult times is to stay calm and staying positive. Taking care of yourself and your employees, your family would encourage a healthy mindset everyone to come up with innovative ideas to move forward. As the vision seems to be blurred at the moment, it would be beneficial if you start asking for trusted opinions which will give you a perspective to move ahead and fill you with hopes and positivity.

• Plan your Finances- (A Three Month Plan)

As part of the precautionary step, an increasing number of countries are practicing social and commercial lockdown, except for healthcare and other necessary business. The lockdown is definitely affecting the productivity as well as the performance of various businesses resulting a toll on your regular financial management.

Every small business usually has the same key expenses, which include employee salaries, office rent, and utility bills. Further expenses range from industry to industry.

Chalk out the Creditors (whom you have to pay the Bills) and sort them according to your tentative Due Dates. Speak to who you need to pay in the next three months (landlord and suppliers), and find out what options you have to spread out the costs and you must also look at ways you can cut costs. The heavy capital investments can be postponed for some time. You need to be very attentive while you prepare a Payment Plan.

Now define your funds, also calculate the personal finances and you would need to invest in your business to keep it perpetual. It is a time to keep the show on without having the fear to dry out.

• Plan Ahead- Find Opportunity

Future planning is a prerequisite for every venture be it big or small. You need to keep evolving each day to stay upbeat. The pandemic has forced people to stay indoors and spent some time pondering over the things that you might have never realized.

You need to focus more on strengthening your business model making it capable of enduring such unprecedented changes, You should consider the marketing strategy as majority of people are online therefore you can leverage the social media as a booster to your venture. Write your vision and your future goals.

• Inculcate new skills in your staff- Provide Online Trainings

If you have a supporting team, it is probably an asset for your business. However possible, you should always try your keep you staff motivated. You could train your existing staff on additional skills, which could make them more productive and efficient, rather than hiring more staff.  There are plenty of online courses that are very affordable, and these will allow them to enhance their skills. Some on the good sites you and your team can explore are Coursera, Udemy, Intershala etc.

• Stay in touch with your customers.

Proactively share important information with your customers using email, your website, Facebook Page, Instagram business profile or however you typically connect. You can also  provide information about the various preventive measures you are taking to make your premises safe, your product safe as well as your employees safe along with this you can also tell them how you will handle customer enquiries if there are expected delivery delays.

You can also update your Page hours to show your customers how and when you’re available for business. Notify customers of any changes or modifications to your availability or services by updating your Page info and selecting Open with service changes or Temporarily closed, depending on your situation.