31 Jul How to Stabilize a Small Business
With so much uncertainty looming, many are looking for ways to stabilize a small business against crisis. We found a few articles online on the subject and came up with a bunch of tips that will hopefully inspire. The main takeaways we found on how two stabilize a small business are reduce overhead, manage cash tightly, find new revenue streams and improve customer communications. To these, businesses will have to get creative, be flexible and go digital.
Let’s start by taking a look at two recent articles with two very different approaches to stabilize a small business. An article at Entrepeneur.com offers 4 Simple Things You Can Do to Stabilize Your Small Business Right Now
“Small businesses all over the world are seeking stability right now, and fortunately, there are a number of proven methods for making it happen,” said the article. Read more
1. Communicate with customers
This is mostly for brick and mortar operations and they are basically saying to reach out to your customer lists anyway you can–social, email and window postings. Things to keep them up to date about are how you are working to protect their health and what new services are available, like delivery for example. With so much uncertainty, your customers will be wondering what changes you are making in your day-to-day operations.
2. Consider new products to replace unavailable services
This seems a bit obvious, but it’s important to get creative when you’re thinking about this. Some of the ideas for new services or products which the article suggests include, offering online coaching, courses and tutorials, video series and ebooks.
3. Shift as much of your focus online as possible
Now is the time to up your virtualization game. Start selling more online, including the items we mentioned in number two above. “Small brick-and-mortar retailers that rely on foot traffic to shift products must consider digital workarounds — especially in areas where state mandates have closed their doors,” Entreprener.com said. Workarounds may include curbside pickup etc.
Collaboration tools like Zoom, Slack and Teams are more critical than ever. In addition to these, some tech tools you can leverage to digitally transform your business from front to back office include, Desktop-as-a-Service, Software-as-a-Service, hosting for ERP and CRM. Learn More about VDI, ERP, CRM
4. Be mindful of how you manage expenses.
Many SMBs are facing revenue declines which means that managing cash flow is more of a concern than ever. As we said in number two and three, going cloud has never been more important to allow you or your financial team to access critical apps to manage cash flow from anywhere. Learn why Virtual Desktop Hosting is critical to remote work.
An older article at Successnet.org offers the following eight tips to maintain business stability during times of crisis:
- Stay positive
- Create an emergency fund
- Collect any overdue revenues
- Stock up on products and supplies
- Take time to do some cost cutting
- This is a good time to liquidate all non-profitable assets
- When times change, people’s attitudes change
- Keep an amount of cash on hand
Learn more
How Adaptive Business Strategy Can Help Stabilize a Small Business
We wanted to offer one tip that wasn’t included in the either article we referenced: An adaptive business strategy enables a business to work proactively on a continual basis to achieve long-term goals and quickly adjust those goals when necessary. This is done by identifying and quickly implementing short-term strategies and actions to achieve bigger picture goals. Learn more about what is adaptive business strategy and how to adapt in a rapidly changing world.
At CyberlinkASP, we manage your hardware and infrastructure so you never have to worry about setting up or maintaining your servers. Instead of dealing with each component on an ad hoc basis, we see the big picture—that web of physical assets and complex interrelationships that make up the modern information system. That means we can plan for contingencies and strategize for optimal performance.