Sink or Swim: Entrepreneurs Highlight Their COVID-19 Business Survival Tips

‘Change before you have to’ is the celebrated business adage by General Electric’s famous CEO, Jack Welch, much quoted across consulting circles.

Large conglomerates with the benefit of management consultants will likely have contingency plans in place to ride out economic downturns. But for smaller business owners running on tight margins and at greater risk, few could have anticipated a global pandemic would turn their livelihoods upside down in a matter of weeks.

Small and medium-sized enterprises are the real drivers of our economy. Some have been able to ride the wave better than others; some are being driven to the brink of destruction, others are adapting and flourishing. What exactly distinguishes them?

Like many aspects of life in the time of COVID-19, the pandemic also presents a business opportunity. A key benefit of running a smaller enterprise is its agility and ability to quickly adapt. Amidst the chaos, some stealthy business owners are doing just that - adapting their strategies, their sales channels and their entire ethos to reevaluate, remodel and realign.

How are they running their companies under the constraints of Coronavirus? What are the realities they’re facing in this new world order? Is working in isolation more or less productive?

And is it possible to pandemic-proof a business?

Some industries it appears have fared better than others. For an entrepreneur David Patrick from Shark Wheel who literally reinvented the wheel (for skateboards), business is booming. ‘People with time on their hands have been buying more recreational items like skateboards… and our sales are off the chart,’ he says.

But booming business doesn’t guarantee an easy ride for growing startups when cash flow is at its tightest. “When you’re growing and you’re scaling you’re not stockpiling profits because you have to spend constantly in order to sustain your growth,” says entrepreneur Dana Donofree whose business - AnaOno in women’s lingerie has withstood the crushing impact of COVID-19 on the retail industry. So how should growing startups manage their cash flow, and is it prudent to scale a business under the looming threat of recession?

These are just some of the questions being asked in the ‘Making it Work’ podcast series which addresses the day-to-day challenges of small business owners; such as making difficult decisions on keeping employees and how to keep up the momentum, to the bigger picture top-down questions.

Most great ideas are, after all, preceded by chaos!

Contact Information

Iain Patton

Director

Ethical Team Ltd

Contact via E-mail