My mantra from the beginning of all of this has been “Beat The Pandemic”. And now with storms and wildfires and all that 2020 has thrown at us, how are we doing with that? There are different measures of “success”, depending on your perspective. Wearing or not wearing masks; schools opening or not; the race to the vaccine or better treatments.
But how are we doing from a business perspective? {If you haven’t seen it yet, we put together this Pandemic Pivot Tool to help you rethink your approach in this new normal.}
Beating the pandemic in this context means responding to societal changes and finding sustainable ways forward. That happens in a few ways.
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Maintaining a Healthy Course
Before thinking profits, focus on people first. Staying healthy is critical. Implement practices that support physical, mental, even spiritual health for yourself and your team. Practice what you preach. If you don’t take time for yourself and rest, your team won’t make it a priority for themselves or their families.
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Short Term Pivots
Short term pivots involve reacting to the changes as they come in, while caring for your employees and team mates and watching that bottomline. Sometimes it means stepping back from certain campaigns or promotions and focusing on caring for the community. Other times, it means major shifts in how you do business.
Either way, those pivots take courage and creativity. Let’s acknowledge the sleepless nights you may have endured to get over those bumps in the road.
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Long Term Perspective
Sustainable success means looking past the everyday challenges and thinking thoughtfully about what the future will look like. How is this pandemic fundamentally shaping your industry? With challenge comes change and with change comes opportunity. Where can you be the leader, as things operate differently moving forward?
It may mean taking some risks, and leaving some other ideas behind to pursue new ones, but that’s always the case in business. We all get into this game knowing the risks, but we stay focused on the rewards, while we overcome the obstacles.
We just put together this case study of a client of ours, World Class Displays, who crushed it with both short term and long term thinking, keeping their staff employed and setting themselves up for future success.
So how will we know when we have #BeatThePandemic? It’s hard to know if there will be a V-Day with this national, and global, challenge. But one thing I do know: to rise above these challenges as business owners and economy drivers, we’ve got to be willing to make the courageous changes to meet market demand. It’s up to us to rise to the challenge and lead us all forward into our new normal. So are you with me? Let’s beat this thing.