As the Coronavirus disease is rapidly making its way across the nation, many businesses are
inevitably being impacted. As entrepreneurs, what should you do in this hour of crisis, and position
yourself better to respond and recover. Here, I am going to share the 7C’s that every Entrepreneur
must embrace today to overcome the challenges faced due to the ‘C’ that has been wreaking havoc
in our lives – the Coronavirus.
- Cleanliness : This may sound a little obvious to you but I couldn’t have started off with anything more important. Do whatever it takes to keep your office or factory environment clean so that you do not encourage the spread of the virus amongst your staff members. Stock up your workplace with disinfectants and make sure all high-touch areas like desks and door knobs are frequently sanitized.
- Communication Technology: Understand how communication technology can work for your organisation. Explore alternative work arrangements and figure out how technology can be used better for remote conversations, to avoid travel and for allowing employees to work from home. Various platforms like Skype, Google Hangouts and Zoom can allow teams to collaborate and communicate efficiently.
- Customers: Your customers are finding it very difficult to make payments right now. So, sit with them, offer them discounts, offer them payment plans and understand their challenges. Otherwise, you would be in for a rude shock when the time for payment comes and they don’t show up with the money.
- Creativity: This is the time to be creative and find alternate methods of sourcing for your company. The outbreak will have a disruptive effect on supply chains because there will be temporary production delays and the vendors may not be able to supply businesses on time. Try and find new suppliers, new customers and new markets. Explore fresh marketing techniques so that you can reach out to new audience.
- Conservation: The Coronavirus outbreak is posing a potentially significant threat to our economy. This is not the time for entrepreneurs to be ambitious and announce any new projects. So please conserve your cash and use it carefully. We don’t know till how long the impact of this virus will be. So, this is the time to be conservative and save your resources.
- Co-opetition: A lot of industries are facing many challenges. It is not only you who is under crisis, even your competitors are facing the heat. This is not the time to go after your competitors and be in a competition mode. Rather, it is time to be in a co-opetition mode and cooperate with your competing companies. So, sit down with your competitors, engage with them and together decide on how you as a sector are going to overcome these challenges. Consider what things can each one of you bring to the table to survive this deadly onslaught of the Coronavirus.
- Community : With governments overloaded and under so much pressure, who is going to help us emerge victorious from this challenge? – only we together as a community can make this possible. Businesses, big or small, have some resources which they can contribute to the community by giving back in some way to help fight the Coronavirus. This is an unprecedented situation, something we, as a nation, have never seen before. We all need to be one with the community at this point of time.<br>All these 7 C’s need to be packaged with another C – Compassion. This is a difficult time for everybody – your customers, your vendors, your employees. Each one of us is going through a tough time with COVID-19 sweeping the world. So, do all these C’s but do it with compassion, do it with a heart. And I am sure you will come out stronger after this challenge and be ready to take on the world.