How is your small business fairing during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic? Like many businesses, these are tough times, and you’re likely affected in one way or another. There have been radical changes in demand patterns for products and services across all business sectors worldwide. Some of these disruptive changes will affect how you operate and are here to stay.
Take, for instance, how global supply chains and business service networks are affected. Think of how small businesses are adapting fast and creating radical new levels of agility, visibility, productivity, end-user connectivity, and even adopting remote work. How do you sustain performance as a business during challenging times?
You need to reinvent the way you work and position yourself in a way that you can rebuild operations to sustain performance during hard times. Here’s what you should do:
Build Operations Resilience
During challenging times, whether it’s a pandemic like COVID-19 or a recession, small businesses need to redesign their operations to protect against a wider and more acute range of potentially fragile supply chains and shocks. As noted in this article about writing a business plan, you need to write a solid plan that realigns to your goals and needs and execute it.
Businesses that act quickly during times of change are able to rebalance their operations. By building operations resilience, you can easily adopt new technologies to solve new problems. A closer look at consumer demand patterns can also help you reorganize your operations by encouraging worker cross-training and improving internal operations.
Accelerate End-to-End Value Chain Digitization
Achieving operations resilience is a resource-intensive venture. But you can overcome this by embracing digitization across your small business operations. Take advantage of digital and analytical tools and strategies to reduce operational costs and ensure flexibility. By accelerating end-to-end value chain digitization, you can enjoy highly-flexible and low-cost operations.
Over the last few years, many small businesses have been digitizing their operations. If you’ve not yet done that, it’s time to accelerate these efforts to see significant benefits in the quality of service, productivity, operational flexibility, and end-user connectivity. You should rebuild your business operations around digital solutions to ensure survival.
Increase Transparency in Spending
If you want to survive now, during, and after hard times, you have to revamp your approach to spending. No more blind spending and unwarranted operational expenditures. There is a full suite of technologies available to help you increase transparency in spending. What could take you months to compile is now possible within weeks or even days.
Embracing digital approaches when doing procurement and spending analysis for your small business will save you a lot of money, time, and man-hours. Leveraging SaaS solutions or models is also a smart way to help you save valuable capital costs for your business. Balance transparent spending with opportunities that also bring in new income for your business.
Embrace the Future of Work
The future of work is here – remote working. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us that it’s possible for businesses of all sizes to quickly adapt to disruptive workplace changes. Small business owners and workers across all functions are now completing tasks remotely, relying on collaboration tools to work on projects, and using digital communication.
In small business operations, these changes are bound to become the norm as we see an accelerated decrease in repetitive and manual tasks and the rising need for technical and analytical support. This radical shift calls for significant investment in worker training and engagement to ensure they have the right skills to keep your business running and performing.
Conclusion
Small businesses need to create a dramatic shift in their operations strategies to gain a competitive advantage and meet customer expectations. Speed will be of the essence as more businesses wake up to the new reality. Those who set new business operations standards will thrive and perform better than their competitors.
