Many small businesses and startups have had to seriously toe the line between barely covering costs and making a profit during the pandemic. For some businesses, it was the city mandates forcing non-essential stores to close the shops. For some e-commerce businesses, citywide and even nationwide restrictions disrupted supply chains and forced owners to increase their prices which were marginally passed on to customers, much to their detriment.
The pandemic is far from over, yet business is slowly coming back to life. Owners are forced to rethink strategies and implement new ideas to see them move ahead of the competition. For some businesses, these strategies worked, while for others, the proverbial glass ceiling has been hit, and they were either forced to opt-out or start from scratch. So what are the lessons that we can learn from small businesses that have managed to weather the storm of the pandemic and bounced back more resiliently?
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Table of Contents
1. Buy When Others Are Selling
We all know sense can easily fly out the window when the markets panic and everyone is trying to make a quick return on their investment, or at least not lose it. So when folks start selling, this is the best time to jump on some pretty sweet deals for items that will be resold later at a profit.
2. Be Agile
Agility for small businesses implies innovation and adapting or finding new business models by creating new products or adapting existing ones to suit the market. Find different ways to appeal to or reach your customers or your competition will.
3. Make Your Business “Essential”
This is one way of ensuring that your business always makes money, whether in a downturn or a bull market. Not every product or service can be categorized as “essential,” and your business might be among these unlucky ones. Still, you can make some elements of your business-essential, for example, by sending out weekly newsletters that address your customers’ needs.
4. Stay Ahead of the Competition by Solving Customer Pain Points
Zoom wasn’t the first company to offer video conferencing and virtual meeting services. Cisco webinar and Skype were already in this market. However, Zoom’s conquering the video conferencing market wasn’t a stroke of easy luck. Zoom’s product focused on customer pain points that included high fidelity audio and video, besides an array of enhanced features such as breakout rooms.
Besides these, Zoom could also stay ahead of the curve by anticipating problems that would affect their customers later due to rising demand. These included reducing downtime on Zoom’s servers through expansion of cloud storage and introducing products to different market segments, for example, schools and corporate customers. Zoom also improved features such as screen sharing, whiteboarding, annotation, and usage reports. However, while Zoom rolled out these and many more features, its competition struggled to keep up.
5. Rethink Costs and Business Strategies
Many businesses had enough cash to burn pre-pandemic on expenses that might not have been all that necessary. Survival in this new space requires that businesses eliminate every unnecessary expense. For some businesses, this might mean pulling out of some markets, while for other businesses, it might mean an expansion into others. In many instances, businesses were forced to offer alternative products. No single strategy has all the answers to the numerous questions that business owners might have. Instead, entrepreneurs have to understand their niches to see what they can do differently.
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6. Adopt AI for business
Artificial intelligence not only has the means to process large quantities of data and draw conclusions at break-neck speeds. In addition, AI can discern trends, make communication with customers seamless, improve customer insights, and deliver better customer experiences. AI technology is especially useful for transforming e-commerce and customer supply chains. In the age of lockdowns and reduced movement, the most efficient businesses utilize AI to streamline communication and identification processes and forecast demand and supply. Besides these, AI also has important ramifications for research.
Can These Strategies Be Adopted for Every Kind of Business?
Small businesses and startups are unique in the kinds of problems that they face. A lack of expertise and finances mostly compounds these limitations. Aside from AI adoption, the former 5 strategies can easily be adopted by any kind of business. On the other hand, AI rollout requires specialized in-house help, tailored turn-key solutions, or collaboration between businesses and research institutions. Topessaybrands.com is a great place to start if you’re looking for tailored writing solutions in business, finance, tech, or any other kind of academic assignment.