COVID TO PROFIT

There is doubt that COVID has hit businesses very hard, your small business has likely been hit harder than big organizations.

To make matters worse you may not even have the means to hire a consultant to help you make sense of it all and devise a way forward. I hope this write up will help in some way in that direction.

The Covid to Profit plan is the same process big organizations will go through in analysing their business and planning for the future, theirs would just be more elaborate.

 Internal Analysis 

First, you must look inwards, look at your financial performance, your operational performance etc, they will tell you how you have performed as a business, they will also reveal gaps, wastages etc. 

You should also carry out a SWOT analysis for the business, for those that are solopreneurs, this would essentially be a personal SWOT, again try to gain a better understanding from this exercise.

 You may also want to do Business Model Canvas on your business. You will discover that the BMC is one of the most comprehensive yet easy to use tools for understanding a business.

 External Analysis

 Hopefully, you now have a better understanding of your internal business environment, it's now time to look outwards since your business doesn't operate in a silo.

 Again, there are many tools for doing this, but you will find the PEST a useful and easy to use tool, essentially what you are doing is taking each of these variables and asking, “how will this affect my business” and the variables are Political, Economic, Social and Technology.

For example, I worked with a client that makes garments for educational institutions, it became clear during the PEST analysis that COVID and online learning was going to negatively affect their business in the near to medium term. 

 Strategy

 If well done the above exercise will be telling a story about your business and likely path towards profitability.

 You must now use the information gathered to devise a strategy for going forward. Some of the options open to you will include:

 

1   Market Penetration: selling more to the same market 

2.    Market Expansion: Taking your products and services and selling them to new markets 

3.    New Product development: to develop new products or services to sell to your existing market. 

4.    New product development for a new market: you develop new products or services and sell them to a new market.

There are more options, but this just gives you an idea of what is possible.

Action Plan.

 Six birds were perching a tree, 5 decided to fly, how many birds are left on the tree? The answer is 6 birds, it says they decided to fly, they have not yet flown away. I hope you get the message.

 All your planning efforts would come to nothing if you don’t act.

 A simple approach to effective action planning is to ask and answer the following questions:

 

·      What do we need to start doing?

·      What do we need to stop doing?

·      What do we need to continue doing?

If you would like a bit of handholding, then take my online course at https://kobocourse.com/noruwa_joseph called “REPOSITION YOUR BUSINESS FOR SUCCESS POST COVID”.

Use this coupon CTP001 for a 50% discount. This offer is valid for a limited time only.

 See you at the top.

 Noruwa Edokpolo.

BUSINESS START-UP CONSULTANT.