3 Ways Small Businesses Can Navigate The Post-COVID-19 Landscape

The pandemic isn’t yet behind us, but South African business owners are now looking beyond the severe lockdown months to determine what’s next for their businesses. These months have been devastating for most small businesses with 75% of respondents in a global GoDaddy study reporting that their revenues have fallen and 36% indicating that they had to close temporarily.

Yet 71% of businesses in our global study are confident that they will be able to recover within the next 12 months. With lockdown restrictions easing and infection rates starting to decrease, this is a time for rebuilding. Here are a few ideas about how small business owners and side hustlers in South Africa can revive their operations and get growth back on track in the months to come.

Assess the financial toll

Like many small businesses in South Africa, GoDaddy customer Konfetti Love is kickstarting its recovery strategy by assessing the financial damage of the lockdown months. This includes taking a sober look at cash balances in all bank accounts, reviewing the income statements, and looking at what spending is necessary to revive operations.

“During the lockdown, our turnover dropped as we had to dramatically downscale our operations,” says Marissa Vogel, Owner and Director of Konfetti Love. “We decided to use this time to investigate our cost base and identify potential savings. The focus for us is cash flow – as we recover we need to ensure that we are generating enough cash to cover our expenses.”

Relook at your business plan

Wise small business owners understand the value of a written business plan and the best way forward at the moment is to revise it by going back to each section and review it knowing what you know now. The current COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically impacted many companies’ business plans – from their revenue projections, to their sales and marketing strategy, to their target audience.

For some, especially in the tech space, COVID-19 has created new opportunities, such as adding ecommerce, and developing and offering virtual services like remote training or consulting. For others, the need to shut down and social distance has required a complete pivot – think liquor delivery companies that had to switch to delivering groceries instead or hotels using their staff to provide outsourced cleaning services.

Whatever the case, it’s time now to dust off your business plan and rework the business model and the numbers. It might be worth looking at how the following have changed and what that means for your business going forward:

The market and demand for your products and services:
Whether your traditional revenue base has grown or declined;
Whether you have added new revenue streams and can they continue in the future;
How your cost base may have changed;
How your sales and marketing strategy can evolve; and
Your success in using new channels like ecommerce is showing opportunity for your business.

Consider how customer behaviour has changed

It has been a difficult year for your customers too, and many of them have needed to rethink their own behaviour and spending patterns. If you operate in the business to business (B2B) space – where you create products and services geared toward other businesses, your customers are probably optimising their spending. And if you serve consumers directly, their behaviour shifted radically under lockdown, and may be different now and into the future, with no plans to go back to the old normal. If more of your customers are going online to conduct their business, you may want to consider creating an online presence for your business, to be more visible for your current customers and for future customers too.

A study of South African consumers by GfK found that 26% said they would definitely increase their usage of home delivery even after the pandemic, while 44% of consumers reported that they will decrease spending. To keep ahead of these changes, small businesses need to keep close to their customers and their evolving needs in a volatile market.

With many consumers embracing digital, this is an ideal time for small businesses to ensure that their websites, social presence and search engine optimisation strategies are up to scratch. Having experienced the convenience of researching and buying goods and services online, many novice and experienced digital shoppers will keep doing so, even when COVID is just a bad memory.

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