7 Tips for Small Businesses During Times of Crisis. Podcast by Dr Prem Jagyasi.

Are you struggling to run your small business or professional services because of lockdown? Here is my podcast with 7 simple yet incredible suggestions to help you get going.

1. BE OPEN AND SUPPORTIVE TO EMPLOYEES – Remember your employees are your biggest asset, not your buildings, equipment, office space. Take care of them, make sure they are comfortable. If they could work, motivate them and support them to work from comfortable environment with easy reporting. Give them freedom and keep them stress free.

2. STAY CONNECTED WITH CUSTOMERS – Lockdown only means you can’t go out, it never means you can’t reach out to your customer, remain connected with your customers/clients, or ask them what they might need during this time. You can always carry out more analytical tasks like research, learning, strategy development, relationship building.

3. ADAPT YOUR BUSINESS – GO VIRTUAL – Which is the biggest smart collaborative application being downloaded right now? It’s actually a webinar app, because companies, schools and authorities all are going virtual. It’s right time for you to adopt these new technologies.

4. WORK WITH YOUR COMPETITION – This is perfect time to forget about competition and embrace coopetition? Coopetition is the act of cooperation between competing companies; businesses that engage in both competition and cooperation are said to be in coopetition. How about jointly dong some activity to keep market active, keep industry motivated. This is not a time for competition.

5. BUSINESSES ARE LONG TERM, CRISES SHORT TERM – Remember we have gone through this, crises have been here previously as well. I have personally witnessed the 2008 recession, we weathered it, and we will weather this one as well. Important for you is to understand that business are built on long term sustainable strategy. Use tactics to achieve short term objectives but don’t change your long term strategy

6. CONNECT WITH EXPERTS, JOIN TRAINING, LIST YOUR SERVICES – This is perfect time to connect with experts. For instance, with all my travels being on halt, I am now more available to share my views/opinion with industry colleagues, and reach out to industry experts. Also it’s perfect time to engage yourself and team in training program. Many companies like us are offering free courses. We have 100+ courses available for you absolutely free – check our training website in comments. Also this is perfect time to list your business in online directories.

7. BE ACTIVE – This is the time where you surely slowdown and look at things from short term perspective; but don’t sleep whole time, don’t go in bunker, as you need to remain active. Be active professionally, think about activities that you were not able to do for your businesses. Let’s do it together. Working together always works.