How to rebuild a business after covid and Lockdowns.

For many people who run companies, the past 2 years have been really hard to navigate. As we enter 2022, it is important to start looking at how to rebuild and implement what has been learned. It is not always best to go back to the old ways, as the world has changed much already and plans to do so more. So looking at how you can rebuild for the future is a pressing and urgent matter for many businesses. 

In this News and Insights post, we look at a few of the simple business tips to help start rebuilding a business after lockdowns and a pandemic.

Do a SWOT analysis:

A SWOT analysis is a good, standardised practice to help any business assess its current strengths, weaknesses and overall current performance. Standing for Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats:

Strengths – areas you don’t need to fix, that are performing on task and don’t need further reassessment.

Weaknesses – this could be a retailers lack of an online store, or a restaurant having no where to view it online. You would assess areas that are causing your business pain. Otherwise known as pain points.

Opportunities – you would want to take a look at areas your business can easily establish responses to. Things that could be deployed quickly with little cost, think of your industry and what is trending and compare that to what is accessible for your business.

Threats: Think about the past 2 years, what kind of threats your business has faced during that time. That would make a good base point to start building on. You’ll want to start looking at what kind of threats you could be facing in the next few years that would generate pain points for your business.

A SWOT analysis looks at what you are good at currently and what you are not succeeding at for your industry, as a business you can use a SWOT analysis to structure a response to current changes in your industry.

Find your strong areas

After you’ve built your SWOT analysis, you can take a further look into your Strengths through data driven, fact based analysis of your businesses strengths. This will be where you’re business can rebuild from, capitalising on each of your strengths and translating them into areas you haven’t explored. It’s worth exploring accessible options that are easy to achieve and cost effective for your business. Assessing where your  business can succeed is worth using data for, this is where fact based and data driven analysis comes into it.

Try to support your businesses strengths with factual data generated from the business, whether this was from before a lockdown or in response to it. So consider all areas where your business has built up data worth looking into and use that to generate a response.

Productivity

Think of any new technology your business can make use of. This can be free software like a marketing automation platform or an analytic service for marketing. Or if there’s any surplus sales available that could help your industry. Many businesses  have found ways to increase productivity through new technology.

Think about running a survey of what your employees need to help boost productivity on their end too.

Build a response that is derived from the data you explored in the SWOT assessment,   

Any new technology you can use can support your business in rebuilding during a time of returning to operation.

Any new ways to work

Within each business the question of hybrid and remote working has come up. So it’s safe to assume all businesses are at least caught up with a status on if they use hybrid working and working from home. Bearing this in mind, consider again the pain points of your business you found during the SWOT analysis and if your business could gain any benefit from establishing new modes of working. It could allow you to fill vitally needed positions or allow for new regions to be marketed to. It won’t be right for every business but that’s why you’ll refer to your SWOT analysis  consistently, to reference where your business is succeeding or failing will help your business build a reliable understanding of if your business needs multi modal ways of working.

Team

With the right team success in reopening will be no problem, you’ll however want to consider what gaps you may have in your team that were present before lockdown, if so could you see them helping with a pain point assessed in the SWOT analysis? You’ll need a good understanding of the threats of your business to decide if the new team member needs to be able to handle these issues.

Another angle you need to tackle for successful rebuilding is the issue of skills and training, how easy will it be to train staff  to respond to issues and what new skills will they need to tackle your businesses threats. This is where you can reference your data once more, by cross referencing what your business already does and who’s doing it, you’ll know who needs training and who already has the skills needed, this could help you understand what gaps need filling and where your team needs support.

Customers

Using your SWOT analysis here would be helpful, you’ll be trying to build on your strengths and opportunities, customers are an essential means of doing that. By  building up analysis of customer habits within your industry, you’ll be ready to use that analysis to establish a means of reaching new customers. This is achieved by doing research about the trends of customers and market trends, understanding the way customers buy and what ways they buy things in your industry and compare this to what areas your business already may be able to do this.

By comparing the ways people are buying things within your industry, with if your business can supply this method, you can build a response based on the data gained from your SWOT analysis, this is where you can build a case for if you can win customers through those trends, if not, observe your market again and assess other routes, compare to your business and keep running this cycle until you find something that is easy for your business to achieve.

Strong areas

The reason why we started with a SWOT,  is that you focus on what you do the best as a business or the best product lines or areas. Ensure these a profitable ones and not loss leaders.  Focus on what you do the best, put to one side all the other areas and focus on the strong areas. Ask yourself, do you have the right technology, skills and equipment for this, if not, this might need reviewing and replacing.

If part of the above you thought, you need new team members with new skills, the team here at HtE Recruitment can support you with this.   Our team for 15 years have supported a wide range of companies like yours, to help in a time of transition. 

HtE Recruitment News & Insights

This news and insights page has been written by Josh our Marketing Coordinator. HtE Recruitment take no responsibility for this post.