In the Business Beyond Covid series, CEOs and other business leaders and experts in their sectors look to the future after Covid-19. What effect has the pandemic and resulting lockdown had on their industries and the SA economy as a whole? Which parts will bounce back first and which will never be the same again? Most importantly, they try to answer the question: where to from here?
Coping with the change has been terrifying, invigorating and exhausting. You’d be forgiven for wanting to take a breather about now, but with no signs of a let-up in infections or a cure, now is the time to start thinking beyond survival and preparing your business for what’s next. No-one knows if it will be one year, two years, three years or more until the immediate need to contain the virus is over, and the disruption caused is likely to continue longer than that.
Right now, for example, there is a strong temptation for many businesses to start reducing prices, and there are two reasons this might seem a good idea. Caught between falling customer demand and tightening cash flows, it could be a sensible way to kick-start trade in tight times. Publishers quickly learnt that the majority of their costs also applied to digital products — editors, designers, proofreaders and marketing departments all still need paying, as does the author, sometimes. Initially this left some readers who had been expecting price cuts disgruntled, but since the value of the product doesn’t change based on its medium, that didn’t last long.
Even this early in the pandemic crisis, we’re seeing that the businesses that will thrive and survive are the ones that have been able to quickly innovate their product lines and business models to suit this new low-touch world. Good examples abound: take the fuel companies that have switched production to hand sanitiser, or the engineering firms fulfilling demand for ventilators.
Certain costs. Preparing for opportunity means holding a reserve for the investment to make it happen. Our certain costs that we will incur include retooling and reskilling equipment and teams for new product lines and development. We can include the ongoing costs of digital transformation — more laptops and mobile Sims, training on agile project management tools and investments in HR to find new ways to support staff remotely.
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