Discover How Businesses Can Thrive in a Post-COVID Reality

Last year, we all looked forward to a jolly 2020. The truth is, the reality hasn't been anywhere close. The economic disruption that accompanied the pandemic was calamitous as businesses around the world struggled to come to grips with the virus.

Agreed, the scientific community is working their socks off in producing a vaccine, but we very much know we would be living with the virus a little longer, don't we? Therefore, it has become essential for businesses to fathom systems that would allow them to survive and thrive in the pandemic.   

With the economic terrain significantly distorted, business owners can't roll like before, so you can stop holding your prized 2019 playbook dearly to your chest like a prized lover. 

Now is a time to build more robust business models and reinforce their distinction. To thrive in the post-COVID world, businesses will have to put a larger emphasis on expanding (or consolidating) their revenue streams, refurbishing their business operations, and, most notably, aggressively adopt digital solutions.

 Sounds interesting?

Strap your seat belt on let us take an enjoyable ride through these processes, looking more in-depth into how brands can party in the pandemic like it is '99.  

Expanding revenue streams

We all need money! Even the white-haired grandpa down the street wants some new Air Jordan sneakers to look cool. 

There is no denying it, the pandemic financially injured many businesses, especially by shutting down their revenue streams. It is crucial to recover revenue – and speedily at that.  

Therefore, it is paramount to reevaluate your revenue profile to position your company to thrive in the long run ahead of your competition. Yes, some structural adjustments would be needed.   

First, humans need to be at the core of your operation. As a business, while you are envisaging ways to speed up your revenue accrual, you must focus your models on providing your employees with the best conditions and resources to thrive best. 

Go digital NOW 

Don't do business the old school way anymore. When furnished with the appropriate technologies and leadership, remote work arrangements aren't any less effective than the traditional approach. An insightful McKinsey survey in the first part of April shows that businesses that deployed remote sales models saw they were 31% more effective than traditional channels.  

Tell me, aren't you drooling already? 

The pandemic further emphasized the need to jump on the digital bandwagon. Digital channels are fast proving to be the new cool. They are longer dedicated to that techy nerd with the Harry Porter goggles anymore. 

When data is aptly combined with cutting-edge analytics and other revolutionary technologies like satellite imaging, you can make a helluva fortune! By accelerating the adoption of digital technologies, executives are better furnished to make more intelligent strategic decisions at a much faster pace, resulting in amplified revenue accrual. 

To build more vibrant and sustainable revenue streams, customers must be at the forefront of anything you do as a business. This is about amply feeding them with value and deploying acutely personalized customer experiences that integrate health and safety protocols.   

Put more emphasis on the customer 

Before the economic recovery is fully consolidated across the country, there are some critical moves you don't want to miss on. For example, now is the time to launch well-targeted campaigns to consolidate brand loyalty on the part of your customers. Digitally analyze customer data (sourced from this pandemic era) and build your promotions and pricing models accordingly. 

The pandemic was financially strangulating, making austerity is a crucial virtue. This is not the time for experimentation. Reallocate expenditures to channels that have proven beforehand to be efficient in generating revenue.  

Therefore, you should be looking to digitize your sales channels, leverage flexible payment gateways, maximize more automation to relieve sales reps for more delicate and intelligent tasks, and furnish your sales force with the needed digital suite of skills execute remote selling. 

Refurbishing your business operations 

Don't try to hide from reality. The pandemic was no summer party! Customer spending power has been significantly downsized. Customers suddenly fell more in love with their $1 bill, and are now very reluctant to part with it.   

Also, with increased emphasis on health and safety, demand patterns have radically changed. More also, the pandemic opened our eyes to the alarming absence of resilience in global supply chains.     

Need for more resilience 

With volatility an assured guest this pandemic period, businesses need to build supply chains and service networks that can better handle shock to the system.  

You will agree with me that before now, we were fanatic about global sourcing and product-driven value chains. The pandemic exposed the fragility in this. Now, as we seek to achieve more resilient supply networks, companies would have to opt for regionalization.   

Successful brands will be localizing their value chains to consolidate their operational resilience. More than this, these businesses would be better prepared for the rainy days by procuring supplementation for internal operations from external suppliers.  

We anticipate an increased trend of cross-training in the workforce with diversity in capacity preferred as a better response to shock and disruptions. 

Cost transparency is more crucial today 

The post-pandemic era is one where there is a massively magnified need for cost transparency. Businesses now need to renovate their spending approaches. The best way forward? Leveraging digitized approaches to ramping up cost transparency. This will save loads of time and effort. 

Processes like portfolio rationalization, clean-sheeting, capital-spend diagnostics, and end-to-end inventory rebalancing can be appreciably digitized, simplifying the whole process. Who doesn't love it easier? 

Also, it would be wise to adopt "as a service" approaches in transmuting fixed capital expenditures into variable costs.    

Reevaluating the organization 

Conservative business leaders and fans of the traditional slow-and-steady approach will be forced to adopt speedy changes. The pandemic has made the business terrain least tolerant of corporate bureaucracy. Now is the time for flexibility and spontaneous inventiveness.   

To consolidate their competitive advantage, business leaders must now be focusing on how fast we can work and how well can we grow? This calls for a thorough reevaluation of the profile of the organization. No doubt, the paradigm of customer-brand interaction is fast changing, thanks to the pandemic. 

The businesses that will survive the socioeconomic evolution (triggered by the pandemic) are those with a consolidated business identity. In this case, both the frontline employee and the high-level executive must be on the same page, sharing similar purpose and performance ethics. They must know how to get things done, and quickly too! 

Adopt more delegation of responsibilities 

The question, of course, boils down to how well these companies work in this period. For that manager that is keen on micromanaging the process (even up to stating the number of seconds an employee smiles to the customer), now is the time to take a chill pill and trust your staff to do their jobs. 

More than ever, dynamism and flexibility are desperately needed in a post-COVID business ecology. Flatter organizations (in terms of smaller teams) are winning it for how energetic and adaptable they are.  

The companies thriving today are those where leadership is delegating responsibilities to smaller units to make them more specialized and effective. This way, decisions are made faster as opposed to those that stay days and months in the pipeline, costing valuable time.  

Decentralization is lavishing organizations with more adaptive resilience and efficiency, enabling them to tackle emerging conditions more promptly and effectively, rather than waiting for orders from the boss high up the Eiffel tower. This dramatically enhances their competitive advantage in their market space.

More technologies please 

The next question is how these companies grow in this pandemic period. It is paramount to create educational platforms that allow both the company and individual employees to experiment and synthesize insights faster. Companies should enhance their real-time decision making with AI-optimized models while also maximizing the Internet of Things for data accrual. 

Also, a shift to digitized customer management and remote fintech solutions will prove more rewarding and resilient (in the case of unforeseen crisis) than one-to-one transactional relationships and traditional closed systems. 

There you are! This is an explicit handbook of how businesses can thrive in a world ravaged by the pandemic. At Eula Blue, we are aggressively powering the economic resurgence of companies affected by the COVID. We consolidate their processes and structure by leveraging cutting-edge analytic and branding solutions, consolidating their authority in their spaces.  

Indeed, we have been lavishing these businesses with seemingly impossible opportunities we intelligently picked out in their market, giving them a formidable competitive advantage in their niche. Book a session with us today let us make the pandemic a memorable blessing that would grace the finest pages of your diary!