How to Adapt and Survive

We are living in a chaotic world where our “reality” is changing almost by the hour. However, business must continue. We must push forward and adapt to working in this new normal where our clients and prospects are working remotely or with reduced hours. 

I’ve been in business more than 25 years and have seen many ups and downs and recessions. I started my business about 6 weeks before Hurricane Andrew hit Miami (if you don’t recall, I am in Miami). I had no power for almost 4 weeks. There was no internet. And I didn’t get mail for almost 10 days. Needless to say, it was a very difficult time to be starting a business.

Luckily, it was just me back then. So, to survive I bartended at festivals on the weekends and occasionally at an outdoor concert. At least with that I could pay my bills and it didn’t affect my daily work life of building my business. Because I was going to build my business. 

And I did.

Business was moving along quite nicely when the terrorist attacks of 9/11 occurred. At that time, the majority of my business was in travel and tourism and I lost 80% of it overnight. I thought because I worked with so many different travel companies I would be fine, not realizing that I was too “industry” heavy (my accountant had mentioned it just a month before). It was a lesson learned the very hard way.

But we survived.

I did learn and diversified quite extensively over the next few years. And then the recession of 2008 happened. Another scary time when people cut way back. Luckily because of our diversification, while the impact was tough, we were able to continue.

And we survived.

Today, we are even more diversified. I have seen some of our travel industry clients take a huge hit (yes, we still have many of those same clients from 2001) and of course it is affecting us with cancelled and delayed orders. 

This week I was so happy to have eight client and prospect meetings on my calendar. Only to see them all cancel one by one. I was able to change two to telephone meetings and one has already rescheduled for May. And I am working on the others. 

Two of my account managers still had in-person meetings this week and I’ve encouraged them to try for phone meetings as well. Of course, this is so new to so many they can’t think towards the future. So, we will have to be pleasantly persistent in the coming weeks to have a conversation.

We are fortunate that not all our clients are reeling from the affects of the Coronavirus and are looking ahead and still making inquiries. And we are being proactive, reminding everyone that they need to keep their brand in front of their customers and we can help. 

I know we will survive once again. Because, failure is not an option.

However, we can’t just sit and wait for the business to come to us. So we’ve been brainstorming some ways for outreach:

1. 1. Give prospects & clients the choice to have a phone or video call meeting now rather than waiting for an in-person meeting to be feasible

2. 2. Develop a follow-up package to be mailed after the calls

3. 3. A weekly email to prospects and clients with branding opportunity specials

4. 4. Product video presentations added to website, social media & sent via emails

5. 5. Develop a work from home essentials kit to send to key clients

6. 6. Develop a food gift to send to key clients

7. 7. Regularly remind customers and prospects that events will be rescheduled, meetings will happen in the future and they don’t want to be caught scrambling when we get the all clear

8. 8. Develop podcasts about products and varying marketing strategies for business growth

9. 9. Increase social media posts on business growth strategies

10. 10. Order new self-promotional materials so we are ready when in-person meetings begin again

We are already working on a few of these and will start our outreach program next week. If this is the new normal for a while we need to adapt and help our clients be ready. 

Because we will survive. Are you ready to adapt and survive?