When business is booming, business owners feel like they don’t have time to do the housekeeping and operational maintenance that they’d like to do. They say, “If I only had more time,” or, “I’ll do it when things ease up.” Yet, as soon as business slows down, they jump to the other extreme and begin frantically trying to increase sales and revenue.
Rather than signaling an overfull schedule, the avoidance of these critical tasks more often evidences absence of foresight and strategic prioritization. In such instances, one focuses exclusively on the 30 minutes being “wasted” right now to, let’s say, restructure a common workflow system, rather than the 5 minutes that will be saved every time that system is used in the future.
This is often the state of affairs in a non-crisis situation. As we all know, we are currently in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, which has caused widespread disruption to the economy. Businesses are struggling and revenues are down.
Companies tend to become myopic and insular when they are under threat. However, a necessary focus on surviving the present crisis should not preclude consideration of the future. The key question becomes: What can you do right now to position your business to thrive during the economic recovery?
As many businesses either navigate remote work or staggered in-office shifts, leaders can choose to find ways to maximize this forced downtime or sit on their hands and do nothing. Below are three strategies to effectively utilize your company time and improve your operation so that when we final come out the other side of this crisis, you will be able to outpace your competitors.
Employee Training and Development
Your employees are your most valuable asset, but due to the economic slowdown caused by the coronavirus, there have been massive layoffs across the country. Although layoffs will be necessary for some organizations, always keep in mind that when we come out of the current crisis you will need to replenish your workforce. Hiring and training brand new employees is slower and more expensive than redeploying your current workforce.
Pro Tip
A recent article in the Harvard Business Review noted that this crisis doesn’t have to lead to layoffs. The authors argue that company leaders can showcase their leadership by considering all the options for cost reductions that don’t involve layoffs, such as a 4-day work week or staggered pay decreases.
More fundamentally, though, employers may still object to keeping their employees on the payroll because they don’t think there’s enough work for them to do; in effect, they don’t want to pay employees to do nothing. However, there are other valuable tasks employees can perform besides their usual jobs.
Chiefly, you should consider additional employee training. You could have employees in certain areas of the business, such as sales personnel or marketing staff, devote a certain number of hours per day to improving sales techniques and learning new marketing practices. You might ask all employees to get better acquainted with company-wide software systems. Alternatively, other employees could receive actual training in new areas of the business to improve synergy across departments.
Either way, dedicating time to professional development and employee training would be a worthwhile investment. Additionally, they are sure to boost morale and build a positive culture in the workplace (even if you’re working from home) more so than mass layoffs.
Internal Systems Audits
Internal systems are critical to a profitable company. They allow for efficiency and consistency in your product or service cycle. Unfortunately, they are also one of the biggest areas of any business that could be improved.
There is not a single “system” that runs everything. In ever business there are many interworking systems that span across the organization, including:
- Marketing and advertising
- Intake and sales
- Workflow and production
- Product and services development
- Website design and user experience
- Customer follow up
- Referral source contacts
How valuable would it be if you could get a 5% improvement to your website’s conversion ratio plus a 5% improvement to your production system plus a 10% improvement to overall sales because you revamped your pricing structures on your services and products? What if you also threw in a 5% increase in returning clients because you found a flaw in your customer follow up system?
The need to update one of these internal systems isn’t always obvious. For example, a business is unlikely to second guess a client intake system that’s running at 70% efficiency because they won’t be able to tell it’s only running at 70%. The downtime afforded you by the coronavirus is the perfect opportunity to interrogate these systems, identify holes or weak spots, and improve their efficiency and functionality.
Pro Tip
If there are any critical components of your business that don’t already have written systems in place, now is the perfect time to create those systems. Documentation of basic operational systems should be a core part of your crisis response plan.
Personal Improvement
It’s not just about improving your operations, workflows, employees, or pricing structures. At the end of the day, improving yourself as a manager and a leader is one of the most important things you can do for yourself and your company right now.
Take, for example, DTX founder and CEO Tim Armstrong, who recently shared on the Prof G Podcast that one of his primary goals for the shutdown is to better himself 10–15%. He expects his employees to bring a sense of curiosity and a desire for professional and personal development to their jobs, so why would he not demand the same from himself? Armstrong understands that being a boss doesn’t just mean you run the business; it means you are a leader—and leadership is a skill you have to develop whereas “boss” is just a title and rank.
Whether the coronavirus pandemic has forced your business to slow down or close, use the time wisely to introspect and improve yourself as a person, a manager, and a leader.
More Paths to Improvement
I have presented only three paths to improving your business during the coronavirus pandemic. There are many other methods you could implement as well. The important point is that you should not waste this opportunity for personal and professional development. Now is a perfect time to take steps to enhance your company so that you can outpace your competitors when we reach the other side of this crisis.
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