BUSINESS CONTINGENCY PLANNING AND CORONA: Section 2
Business Contingency planning for grasping the opportunities
Written by Moh Yarmohammadian; PostDoc, Professor at IUMS & International Advisor, WBIUS
Neither give up to Crisis, nor let it go to waste. Have a good look at events that bring new threats as well as opportunities for you and your business.
We reviewed introduction to contingency planning in section 1. You can go to the section 1 for primary discussion.
When a crisis happens, it brings some threats and opportunities to you and your business. It is important to confront well, have a good look at it and see it as a chance. Chance is like moving cloud. Make a plan for the next few weeks, then the next month. You should be flexible and you plan should be contingent. These plans will change during the time, but you can consider a few principles when develop your business contingency planning:
- Focus on your employees. Make sure your employees are assured about being protected. You should retain the key essential persons of your business. Set your specific policies for your staff and customers you’re your business and write down safety protocol regarding the virus.
- Be Flexible. You have to have a new plan or adjust your previous plans or decisions to remain resilient during and after crisis.
- Keep tuned to public authorities and respect to ethics. Communicate and release any policy changes and information to your employees, even sick ones. Watching out for the safety of your employees and customers. You should know that your employees are more worried than you because they are sensitive to future of their job, they don’t have access to your planning information, which could cause serious problems for your business. Use conference calls and webcams to communicate to your key people and major clients.
- Stop hiring unless there is a competent candidate, whom you’ve been trying to recruit. Don’t miss them. You should do your specific Human Asset Accounting. For example retaining multifunctional or multilanguage employees is always crucial especially during crisis. Hard decisions will need to be made. Make a talent assessment in your company on who is valuable and how your business will be affected if you miss or this person does not work for you next week.
- Lock downing your business, is sometimes sophisticated but hard decision. Maybe it’s wise sometimes to close the doors entirely and re-open in the future. Taking such drastic action doesn’t make you a failure. But it’s better to plan and implement an Immediate Financial Triage, before lock down your business.
- Immediate financial triage for your business. some important steps to take on the financial front as soon as possible:
- Create a cash-flow budget listing with fixed versus variable costs. Fixed costs will generally keep the doors open and must be paid. Create a list of priorities about which ones are most important and try to set money aside based on the timing of when they are due.
- Analyze cuts to unnecessary costs that aren’t producing revenue or securing key business functions.
- Layoffs, terminations or furloughs of employees. Remember, your employees can be one of your greatest assets, and if you cut too deep, you may not get them back.
- Find additional financial sources of revenue. Be creative in your sales and marketing.
- Consider any savings or resources, including possible loans. Loan is still LOAN, this may seem like a safe or logical choice. However, remember this is still a loan that has to be paid back.
