Resources to run a better business.

In an ideal world, all of you have had an amazing Q2 despite COVID-19, and this post is completely irrelevant. In an actual world, I know some of you are struggling with a decline in sales and/or profitability. One bad quarter is exactly that: one bad quarter. If you're smart about your planning and recovery, the past 90 days can be a blip on the radar and not the start of a downward trend.

In the midst of a pandemic, our clients continue to thrive. With so many businesses struggling, our smart, brave, dedicated group of entrepreneurs has acted quickly to ensure their companies outlast COVID-19.

The economy may be open for business, but business sales haven’t bounced back. In fact, up to 60% of consumers plan to maintain at least some of the spending habits they’ve developed during the pandemic. With a few exceptions, there’s less business to go around than before. Who is that business going to--you or your competitors?

Conference recap!

With the COVID-19 pandemic, predicting the future seems particularly challenging: are you better off shaking a magic 8 ball or flipping a coin? But in fact, the process of predicting COVID-19, or more specifically, its effects on your company, is identical to the process you would use to predict anything else in your business. And the ability to predict is a skill that will benefit you long after the pandemic is behind us. You need just two ingredients: information and insight.

Now that you're able to reopen your business, it’s important to keep moving the ball forward. The positive changes you’ve made in your company have kept you alive this long, but you’ll need to keep evolving. We recommend you reopen your business in three phases: recover, restore, and revitalize:

Identifying company values, along with a mission and vision of the future, is considered table stakes if you want to run a successful company. But integrating and living by those values is more difficult than it seems. And when crisis strikes (i.e. COVID-19), that’s when core values are really put to the test.

Finding amazing talent has been absurdly difficult the last 5-6 years. Extremely low unemployment meant that the best employees were already working somewhere else (and, in some cases, being constantly solicited by recruiters with better offers). How quickly things can change. The talent that was impossible to find and hire just weeks ago could be job hunting right now. Your business may have the opportunity to start building your "A" team.

If you want to keep doing business (which, right now, might look like networking and maintaining relationships if your operations are shut down), you’ve got to embrace the virtual meeting. And even once you’re able to go back to the office or meet up for lunch again, here’s why you should consider keeping some of your business meetings online.