Businesses seeking to revive after the Coronavirus period may have to rebuild, rethink and reorganize their operations.
Marcia Ashong, founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Boardroom Africa on the fourth day of the Citi Business Festival stressed the need to improve business performance post-COVID-19.
She was speaking on the topic, “Business Readiness Post-COVID” and here are the four key areas she highlighted for businesses to respond to the dramatic disruptions brought on by the pandemic:
Having business continuity plans: If you are not already doing so, it is important for you to adopt a business continuity plan. It will allow the company to prepare its services and ride away from major disruptions. It also involves determining a range of scenarios to create a plan of how to ensure business continuity during these times. Retrenching back to your core services and letting less important activities go until the situation takes a turn over for the better. It will ensure that the personnel and assets that you have are protected and are able to respond quickly. They are not just supposed to be designed for the present but also in anticipation of the future. After everything is over, we are still going to live in an environment where there is going to be a change in human behaviour. So any business continuity plan has to account for. This is to enable companies to assess their risk, explore mitigating factors prior to crisis period to determine how agile your company is and how quickly you respond to certain challenges in the market and whether you have built enough of your systems that foster resilience.
Taking advantage of existing opportunities: Another thing businesses can do is to look at opportunities that exist. You will have to take stock of the areas in our economy that are still largely underserved and what better times it is for what we can produce locally to respond to the slowing down of export and import activities and how can local businesses leverage this gap in the market.
Pivoting: Also is thinking about how to pivot your services to respond to the specific needs of the market looking at the industry or areas you are playing in and what the effect of that industry has been. How services and consumer habits have changed and most importantly, what are the opportunities that exist for a different module or changes to the ways that you do things using current resources.
Going ahead of government interventions: Government interventions are good. However, as a business owner, just waiting for the government to step in is also not a prudent thing to do. You have to consider ways you can optimize your business to take control of the opportunities that lie ahead.
About the 2020 edition of the Citi Business Festival
The 2020 edition of the Citi Business Festival started on Monday, June 1, 2020, with a line-up of radio and TV programs. It will feature virtual business forums and will be live on Citi TV.
The month-long festival of business events and on-air activities provides inspiration, business ideas, and information for persons who are starting, building or growing their businesses.
This year’s edition of the Citi Business Festival is sponsored by Absa Bank, GIPC, Citi 97.3FM and powered by the most comprehensive business news website; citibusinessnews.com.