How To Turn Financial Distress Into Financial Success

The COVID-19 backlash on business has been unprecedented, and the pandemic is considered a once in a lifetime event. In the UK over half a million companies have struggled with the lockdown and they’re financially distressed.

The challenge is how to ramp up sales activity, particularly when you’re a small player in your industry. In this article, we consider how taking control of the future of your business starts with the basic fundamentals of operating with a robust plan.

Review and Revise Your Business Plan

So you have a business plan, but it’s been some time since you’ve needed to review it.

Now is the time to consider where it can guide you to success, and this starts with reviewing all its components. For example, how relevant are your funding model and sales projections in the financial management section?

Revise every part of your business plan, so it is a working document for where your business is today.

Emergency and Disaster Recovery Strategy

Plus, your business needs an emergency preparedness plan. This is a template on what to do in a similar event like COVID-19 or any time your business is severely compromised. For example, if your business needs to close again, what happens to your staff, do you have a remote working plan? How will you keep your customers happy and revenue coming in?

Questions will identify vulnerabilities within the business and the need for an action plan to mitigate from loss of revenue or failure to communicate or worse process sales and deliver products or service.

In your disaster recovery plan, make sure key staff know how the business is capturing, storing, accessing and backing up data and systems. Plus who within the company will be responsible for the process for restoring systems from a backup?

While it may seem commonsense to communicate with staff how you do it in an emergency will determine how well your business can recover and get back to normal. The same goes for how you liaise with customers and your supply chain. Do you know what your suppliers will do in an emergency that threatens their ability to operate?

Stay Informed

When there’s a major event the Government will create a site you can visit for updates. For example here is their Coronavirus site

Check the relevant websites every day and keep up to date with the changes that impact on your business as they happen, including what you need to do within your place of office to allow your staff back to work.

Workplace Ready

If your staff have been working successfully from home, allow this to continue until your workplace is ready for their return. For example, with the Coronavirus, the focus has been on social distancing and keeping workspaces clean and sanitised regularly to help stop the spread from human to human.

Take a look at CDC’s advice on how you can keep your workplace safe and add the cleaning procedures and social distancing measures as recommended steps in your emergency plan.

Lead By Example

As the leader of the business, how you react and act in unprecedented times, will rub off on your staff, and they will follow your lead.

• Stay calm and follow your emergency and disaster recovery plans
• Communicate regularly with staff and customers
• Be positive about the future

Summary

There is no need to panic about your business when you can resort to your robust and relevant plans and templates.

Even when you’re not feeling at ease, you can communicate with your suppliers, workers and customers with confidence and eloquence. Then the end result will be your business reversing any financial distress into financial success. Remember preparation is key – we don’t plan to fail we fail to plan!