COVID-19 is the crisis that just won’t go away. From a business perspective, it is critical to factor the pandemic into business management, and it is, thankfully, not an onerous process at all. A good crisis management plan that is put into action will protect and promote your business.

It may only take business owners an hour to bash one up with all of their inside business knowledge. We recommend six simple steps, with responses written down. What appears on paper is more likely to happen.

1. Objectives: What are the two or three things about your business values that you need to maintain throughout the crisis? This may be: ‘uncompromising quality of products’ or ‘integrity of service and trust from customers’ etc.
2. Build up your team: Who is in your tent on this crisis? What professional support do you need to put in place, and what are their brief role descriptions? It’s important business owners have objective consultants throughout the crisis that you can call on to share the load and broaden the perspective on the challenges faced.
3. Define the crisis: This is an important step in weeding out fact from fiction. When it comes to COVID-19, what you know might looks like: ‘# of cases per day’ or ‘political response involves x, y and z’. Keep emotion and opinion out of your definition. If you have strong feelings about the facts, create a dedicated column for your feelings so that they can be acknowledged as exactly that – feelings.
4. Draw up a scenario plan: What are all the possible outcomes in this crisis? Let your imagination go wild here. All sorts of things are possible.
5. Rate the likelihood of each scenario: This will help you to identify the priorities. The most likely scenarios deserve your attention and priority.
6. Draw up an action plan for the most likely scenarios: What do you need to do to defend yourself against certain scenarios, or even better, get in front of them before they happen? This may involve outsourcing something, innovating a part of your product or service, marketing differently or setting up administration and finance systems. Each action should be tested against your original objectives – will this task help me to maintain the most important values of my business reputation?

Once you have your action plan, you can start moving through it at pace. When unforeseen challenges interrupt your progress, as frequently happens in the COVID-19 crisis, pause and revise step 3 to 6.

You got this.

For business advice through the COVID-19 pandemic, AdviceCo’s team of business consultants can provide strategic support and financial guidance at all levels. Contact Troy Marchant on 02 4320 0500.