How Successful Businesses Pivot During COVID19?
4 Powerful strategies businesses can adopt to grow during COVID19
COVID 19 is an unprecedented global pandemic. We are scared for our lives and the lives of our loved ones. While we are battling with physical and emotional instability, the world is also being taken over by a looming economic crisis. Economists are predicting this crisis to be more severe in its impact compared to recent global recessions. As a result, organizations are looking for opportunities to reduce spending. This is resulting in many organizations ramping down their teams by cutting workforce.
Warren Buffet has famously quoted
Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.
It is time that we adopt this principle not just for investing, but also to run companies during a situation like COVID 19. Not many executives are formally trained to handle a global crisis like this. Most of us haven’t lived through an epidemic of this nature. There are no best practices for us to rely on. But innovation finds no death and during times like this, being innovative becomes more essential.
Here are 3 innovative strategies that organizations can deploy to sustain and grow during COVID19.
1. Identify Blue Ocean Strategy
If you haven’t read the book Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, now is the time to grab a copy of the book. The book explains how dying businesses can capitalize on the market by opening up a completely new market space to address a new demand. A Blue ocean is an analogy to describe the wider, deeper potential to be found in unexplored and new market spaces.
The strategy of Blue Ocean is very relevant during times like these, when traditional business offerings are losing value. The demands and needs of COVID19 is the new blue ocean that businesses should explore. Look for ways you can pivot your current business to meet the new demand for products and services for COVID19.
There are many organizations who are already frontrunners in adopting Blue Ocean Strategy during COVID19. One example, Astound Group (https://www.astoundgroup.com), a company that manufactures booths for events has pivoted to build temporary assessment centers for COVID 19. Restaurants that have been hugely hit by COVID19 are pivoting their business from on premise dining to offering curb-side pick-up and using other creative ways of bringing their service to clients.
You might say that not every business model has a direct ability to meet the demands of COVID 19. But it is not impossible to pivot your existing business model to support the needs of COVID 19. Encourage your teams to think out of the box. Connect with social and government networks to look for ways to build and capitalize a market that is created by COVID19.
2. Prepare your customers for post-recession recovery and success
If you are a company building products for other businesses, then you are in the B2B business. The success of B2B Companies is directly proportional to the success of their customers. The more successful your customers are, better the revenue for your company.
B2B companies should use this opportunity to prepare their customers for post COVID 19. There is always a storm before the calm during an unknown and unprecedented situation like COVID19.
Instead of being fearful of the situation, be wise and help your customers prepare for business growth and expansion after COVID19. Identify patterns in your industry during the past economic recessions. This does not require complex AI models. It needs leveraging simple business logic to look for factors that influenced growth in your business area during and after recessions in previous years. The outcome of your analysis can be effectively used to determine if you should use the time and resources during recession to build a new feature in your product or deploy a new service in your business that can help yours and your customers’ business post COVID19.
3. Now is the time to grow your customer base
Most companies will look for ways to retain their existing customers during times of recession. But the smart ones, look for opportunities to add more customers during times of recession.
Most of your potential customers are navigating through an unknown land. They are threatened by the gloomy economy. They are unsure about how to care for their business and their employees. In essence, COVID19 has led to a lot of uncertainty and as a result, businesses are quite fragile. Now is not the time to sell your products or services to your potential customers. Now is the time to lend your support, in any shape or form that can support your potential customers.
There are many ways to reach out to your potential customers during times like this. Share your market analysis and your post recession recommendations with your potential customers. Offer to connect your potential customers to your business network so that they can brainstorm ideas of survival during these times. This is not the time to cold call your potential customers. This is the time to be genuinely interested in your customers’ challenges and looking for ways to address them. Efforts you put in to provide services to your potential customers during times like this will convert them into your permanent and long term supporters.
4. Leverage your skills in high demand industries
If you are in a services based industry and your only capital is people, there are more ways you can leverage your peoples’ skill during COVID19.
Look for ways to pivot your current service offerings. If your business offers software services, train your teams to write software to build 3D Models to produce Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for the medical industry. Build a technology platform that can help people run online tests for COVID 19. Create a platform that can digitally connect people infected by COVID19 with healthcare professionals. Look for ways to build a crowd sourcing platform for products and services that are essential to fight COVID19.
In doing this, you not only help your businesses survive during these tough times, but also helping your people remain employed.
Depending on the type of business you run, you can leverage one or more of the above strategies to sustain and scale your business during COVID 19. The decision to pivot or persevere is in your hands. Whether you are being proactive or reactive in the current scenario will determine the growth and scale of business after the pandemic finds its way out of the universe.
