The COVID-19 pandemic has hit small businesses especially hard. It’s been a rough year for many locally-owned businesses, but with vaccination efforts quickly ramping up, many entrepreneurs are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. And while the short-term outlook remains uncertain, many businesses can safely begin a post-COVID rebuilding plan. In this article, we will be providing a few tips and must-do steps to rebuild your business in a post-pandemic world.
Assess Your Situation to Rebuild your Business
The first — and perhaps most critical — step for determining how to rebuild is figuring out where your business stands. It’s important to determine exactly how your business was impacted by the pandemic before rebuilding. This can help provide some amount of direction for where to begin the rest of the rebuilding process.
When you are assessing how COVID affected your business, it’s best to start with financials. Cash flow, profit, and loss numbers can all give you some indications as to how your year went. It can be especially helpful to compare these figures to previous years to determine how much ground you have (or haven’t) lost.
Aside from these basic metrics, there will likely be other ways that COVID has affected your business. Many small businesses have been forced to make layoffs throughout the year. Re-hiring staff is going to be both cash and time-intensive. It’s even possible that some of your customer base has migrated towards other competitors.
Take Care of Your Financials
Cash flow is likely the number one hurdle your business has to climb during a post-pandemic world. There’s a good chance you will need financing to really begin rebuilding. There are many different options that can inject a new influx of cash into your business. The most obvious is, of course, the SBA. This, alongside the Paycheck Protection Program, can provide guaranteed relief for employees and business owners during the pandemic.
Unfortunately, funding is limited for these programs. By the time your application is processed, there may not be any money left. There are many other options for small businesses in need of financial assistance. These include:
- Traditional bank loans and microloans
- Business lines of credit
- Business credit cards
- Accounts receivable financing
- Inventory Financing
- Purchase order financing
- Equipment Financing
Pivot to the New Landscape with Lowkel
The truth is, that many of the changes brought on by COVID-19 are likely to be permanent. One of those is an increased shift towards e-commerce. By adapting to the newly changed marketplace, your business will rebuild and thrive like never before. Unfortunately, big companies have all but monopolized the e-commerce landscape.
Lowkel will give your company a way to compete, by offering an online platform to connect you to your customers. We even handle logistics and shipping. With Lowkel, locally-owned and small businesses can enter into the increasingly digitized, post-COVID marketplace.
Re-Examine Your Budget
Although building back after COVID is certainly a do-able task, it may require some amount of reconfiguring. Chances are, you will need to balance your budget a little differently moving forward. When rebuilding after the pandemic, you will need to account for different expenditures, and use any incoming revenue very wisely. Try to reduce overall expenditures and operate on as lean of a budget as possible.
For example, consider delaying any major remodels or renovations. Instead, move more money into marketing and promotional material. As the economy reopens, it’s a great time to attract more eyes (and customers) to your business.
Think Outside the Box
In difficult times, the resourceful always thrive. Be creative, and don’t be afraid to try new ideas during these post-pandemic times. From entering the online economy with Lowkel to re-examining the foundation of your business, there are many effective ways to make sure your business thrives in 2021.
If you want to register your business on Lowkel, visit these links:
Read more about what Lowkel is doing for merchants: https://lowkel.com/for-merchants
Register on Lowkel Merchant Portal: https://merchant.lowkel.com/signup
Read more on How to Grow Your Local Business
February 12th, 2021 By