A guide to surviving COVID-19 for SMEs

General Resources

1. Maximise your access to government benefits. Talk to your accountant.
2. Apply the 80/20 rule to your customers and canvas the top 20% to understand how they are being affected and how you can help them
3. Identify businesses/organisations whose overseas supply chains have been disrupted  and look for opportunities to meet their needs
4. Leverage your resources . How do you do that?
   • More effectively concentrate resources on key strategic goals
   • More effectively accumulate resources
   • Complement resources of one type with those of another type to create higher-order value
   • Conserve resources wherever possible
   • Rapidly recover resources by minimizing the time between expenditure and pay back
5. Factor the Coronovirus impact into all your planning
6. Make a concerted effort to consult your staff and draw upon their intellectual resources for meeting the new challenge
7. Conduct some ‘working from home’ experiments to understand what will be required if ‘isolation’ is required—for you and your human resources
8. Review your customer list for opportunities for your business
9. Review your customer list for ‘hotspots’ for your customers
10. If you already have a regular newsletter then build the next issue around the coronavirus OR if you don’t have a newsletter use the telephone to talk to your customers
11. Monitor your cash-flow harder than ever
12. Look for more opportunities to conduct business and meetings online
13. Review your office cleaning procedures and your office hygiene facilities
14. Develop talking points for engaging clients about their concerns
15. Take the opportunity to review your business model and identify areas where it could be streamlined or innovated

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