It wouldn’t be an understatement to say that the last few months have been unprecedented – on a global scale. The arrival of the pandemic has forced many businesses to make sharp pivots to their services and seen some forced to shutter completely. If you’re a service business, especially in a non-essential capacity such as personal training, beauty services or travel, you will likely have found the period since March difficult, stressful and anxiety-ridden. I get it.
The good news is that this is also a period ripe with opportunity and the perfect time to sit down and hone in on strategies to future proof and scale your business. There are doubtless changes that you can make to improve profitability, increase efficiency and streamline operations no matter how finely tuned your organisation.
1. Invest in ecommerce
It’s no surprise that ecommerce is absolutely booming right now. With even non-online shoppers forced to go online during the coronavirus induced lockdown, billions are now being transacted in cyberspace. This period of forced online shopping has rapidly accelerated ecommerce adoption and shown just how versatile this route to consumer can be. According to Econsultancy’s latest Ecomerce Quarterly report, “It took 10 years for ecommerce as a proportion of all retail to grow from 10% to 20%. During the pandemic that proportion has grown from 20% to 30% in about approximately eight weeks.”
While offline businesses were worst hit by the pandemic, those with an online presence could still make sales. Now is the time to scale up your ecommerce investment and tap into the huge uptick in online ordering.
2. Introduce new products and services
The introduction of new products and services goes hand-in-hand with ecommerce investment to diversify your offering and bring in new revenue streams.
If you’re a personal trainer for example, you could begin to offer online classes for a fixed fee or small monthly subscription or set up a web shop to sell your own apparel, digital home work out plans tailored to each client, fitness equipment or nutrition products.
Look for solutions that compliment your core business or allow you to repackage your existing expertise in a new way to grow your profitability.
3. Upskill your staff
Your most expensive and most vital resource is your staff. Whether that’s a party of one or small team of 20 or so people, investing in your team is a tried-and-tested way to scale your business and improve profitability.
The type of upskilling that will benefit you most will depend very much on your team and their strengths and weaknesses. If you have someone who is very creative, a graphic design course could mean you no longer have to pay an external agency to create things like social media graphics or flyers and will give you talent on demand. Likewise, a customer service course could help to improve the client experience, a business finance course could give you a better understanding of the numbers while enrolling someone else in a digital marketing course could transform your whole sales and marketing activity to generate more leads and close more sales.
These may be small changes to the person’s job role but, redistributing skill sets and adding skills to bridge gaps gives your business more flexibility and more agility, allowing it to better respond to challenges and grasp more opportunities.
