“Developed countries celebrate the return to the normal by re-opening the museums, some, on the other hand, are preparing to resume the football season” That’s what I said in a seminar I attended this weekend. Unfortunately, this is the level of development we achieved over the few decades: only a little. We are re-opening the stadiums to celebrate our return to our normal routine.
Anyway, one way or another, we are slowly taking back our normal lives. We will soon return to the hustle bustle of routine life. We’ll open the shop shutters every morning and pick up where we left off while trying to maintain our social distance day and night.
That’s why, in every webinar I attend, I suggest business people to keep morale high and start planning their return to work. Obviously, they don’t feel very happy right now because of the ongoing rise in exchange rate USD to TRY. But I keep telling them this: “The World we live in wasn’t a bed of roses before the coronavirus. That’s why you should try to face your past mistakes.”
Indeed, there’s only a little time left before we can back to our normal routine. A lot of businesses will resume as of June 2020. But how? That’s the real issue here. So, I’m trying to help these businesses as much as I can by offering them the road map they need, which consists of the 5 following stages.
- Set common goals with shareholders: This stage is designed to help the business solve its unresolved problems and find “the right business action” In other words; this is the first step towards good governance. In this stage, business owners should try to enhance their ties and contact with customers, suppliers, partners and employees in order to access the correct information and reveal others’ perception of their businesses.
- Build immunity: In this stage, you should focus on cash flow issues, supply problems, and other deficiencies involving sales, collection and marketing, and eventually, on ways to restore the business and keep it alive if another wave of coronavirus comes.
- Plan for returning to work: This stage will act as a guiding light to help the businesses achieve their pre-coronavirus performance. As loss assessment was done and all restorative measures have been taken in previous stages, you should take it slow to help your business gain its strength back, and this time, you should take the right actions, if you think that the past ones were a mistake.
- Discover the new normal: Use your observations to predict how your competitors will handle business in this era of the new normal. Always try to adopt “properly working reflexes” developed against business interruption.
- Reform: Always keep yourself updated with new rules and regulations issued by regulatory authorities, be proactive and try to guess how their actions before they take a new one. Have a clear idea about the direction into which your line of business is expected to evolve. Shape your business accordingly.
Well, I know that it’s not easy to achieve all those tasks I mentioned above. But, one way or another, you will have to take your first step. Believe me; putting at least a single item in this road map into practice would help your business gain momentum. But if you manage to turn each of them into reality, you will be surprised to see how useful they actually are for the future of your business.
