A survey showed more than 5,800 small businesses between March 28 and April 4, 2020 to investigate the impact of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on small businesses. There were a few recurring themes. First, just a few weeks into the crisis, mass layoffs and closures had already occurred. Second, the likelihood of closure was inversely proportional to the expected duration of the crisis. Furthermore, businesses had widely differing perspectives on how long COVID-related disruptions would last. Third, many small businesses are financially vulnerable: at the time of the survey, the median business with more than $10,000 in monthly expenses had only about two weeks of cash on hand. Fourth, the majority of businesses intended to use the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act to obtain funding. However, many people anticipated difficulties in obtaining the programme, such as bureaucratic red tape and difficulty determining eligibility. We also compare loan take-up rates and business resilience effects to grant-based programmes using experimental variation. Below mentions are some points to re-establish your business after the Covid-19 pandemic: 

Recover revenue as soon as possible- 

Companies will not be able to recover revenues gradually as the crisis subsides, so speed is critical. To position themselves for the long term and stay ahead of the competition, they will need to fundamentally rethink their revenue profile. Companies must SHAPE up in order to achieve this. 

The mindset of a startup. Action takes precedence over research, and testing takes precedence over analysis. Establish a fast-paced schedule to promote agility and accountability: daily team check-ins, weekly 30-minute CEO reviews, and twice-month 60-minute reviews. 

In the end, we’re all human. Companies will have to rethink their business models based on how their employees prefer to work. Sixty percent of companies polled by McKinsey in early April said their new remote sales models were as effective as (29%) or more effective (31%) than traditional channels. 

Digital, technology, and analytics are all moving at a faster pace. The COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the shift to digital, which has already become a cliché. The best companies, on the other hand, are going even further by improving and expanding their digital channels. 

They’re successfully combining new sources of data, such as satellite imaging, with their own insights to make better and faster decisions and strengthen their customer relationships, thanks to advanced analytics. 

Customer playbook with a purpose. Companies must figure out what customers will value after COVID-19 and then create new use cases and tailored experiences based on that knowledge. 

Adaptability and ecosystems Adaptability is critical in the face of supply chain and channel disruptions caused by crises. This will necessitate a shift in the ecosystem, as well as nontraditional collaborations with partners at all levels of the supply chain. 

Rapid revenue response is more than a means of surviving a crisis. It’s the new normal for how businesses must operate. How do company leaders decide what to do, assuming they are in good SHAPE? Three steps are visible. 

Make a list of revenue opportunities and rank them in order of importance. What’s important is to identify the primary revenue sources and, based on that, make the “now or never” decisions that must be made before the recovery can fully begin. This could entail launching targeted campaigns to re-engage loyal customers; developing customer experiences centered on improved health and safety; adjusting pricing and promotions based on new data; reallocating spending to proven growth sources; and so on. Retraining salespeople to support remote selling, establishing flexible payment terms, digitizing sales channels, and automating processes to allow salespeople to sell more. 

Once identified, these factors must be prioritized based on their impact on earnings and the company’s ability to execute quickly (exhibit). 

Act with haste. Businesses have worked faster and better than they could have imagined just a few months ago during the current crisis. Keeping that sense of possibility alive will be a long-term competitive advantage. 

Consider the case of a Chinese car rental company, whose revenue dropped by 95% in February. Company executives didn’t just stew because the roads were deserted. Instead, they acted as if they were a startup. To guide personalization, they invested in micro–customer segmentation and social listening. As a result, they came up with new use cases. For example, they discovered that many tech companies told their employees not to take public transportation. This information was used by the car rental company to test and refine targeted campaigns. They also called first-time customers who had cancelled orders to reassure them of the company’s various safety measures, including “no touch” car pickup. They put together three agile teams with cross-functional skills to manage the programme and created a recovery dashboard to track progress. Prior to the crisis, it could take up to three weeks for the company to launch a campaign; now it takes two to three days. Within seven weeks, the company had recovered 90% of its annual revenue—nearly twice the rate of its main competitor. 

Create a flexible operating model. Due to a sense of urgency, marketing and sales leaders are becoming more willing to embrace agile methods, such as jumping on quick videoconferences to solve problems and delegating more decision-making authority to remote teams. Of course, it’s also critical for cross-functional teams to keep the big picture in mind and avoid panic. 

In this context, “agile” refers to establishing a new operating model centered on the customer and supported by the appropriate processes and governance. For example, agile sales organizations prioritie accounts and deals on a regular basis and make quick decisions about where to invest. However, this is only effective if there is a clear growth strategy in place that outlines how to win each type of customer. Rapid decision-making between local sales and global business units, as well as rapid resource reallocation between them, necessitate a stable sales-pipeline-management process. 

Reconstruction efforts are underway- 

The coronavirus pandemic has shifted demand patterns for goods and services across industries, exposing weak spots in global supply chains and service networks. Simultaneously, many companies have adapted quickly, achieving radical new levels of visibility, agility, productivity, and end-customer connectivity. Now, leaders are asking themselves, “How can we keep this up?” Five themes are emerging as operations leaders seek to reinvent their work processes and thus position themselves for the next normal. 

Increasing the resilience of operations. Companies that succeed will restructure their operations and supply chains to protect against a broader and more severe range of potential shocks. They’ll also move quickly to rebalance their global asset base and supplier mix. As new technologies and consumer demand patterns encourage regionalization of supply chains, the once-dominant global-sourcing model in product-driven value chains has steadily declined. This trend is expected to continue. 

Other levers to strengthen operational resilience, such as increased use of external suppliers to supplement internal operations, greater workforce cross-training, and dual or even triple sourcing, are likely to accelerate adoption as a result of this global value chain reinvention and regionalization. 

Digitization of the entire value chain is being accelerated. Creating this new level of operational resiliency could be time and resource intensive. The good news is that leading innovators have shown how “Industry 4.0” (the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s suite of digital and analytics tools and approaches) can significantly lower the cost of flexibility. In other words, low-cost, high-flexibility operations are not only possible, but are already taking place. Before the coronavirus, most businesses had already begun to digitise their operations. They will likely see significant productivity, flexibility, quality, and end-customer connectivity benefits if they accelerate these efforts now. 

Transparency of capital and operating expenses is rapidly increasing. Companies can build their next-normal operations around a revamped approach to spending to survive and thrive amid the economic downturn. A comprehensive set of technology-enabled methodologies is speeding up cost transparency, reducing months of work to weeks or days. Procurement-spend analysis and clean-sheeting, end-to-end inventory rebalancing, and capital-spend diagnostics and portfolio rationalization are all examples of digital approaches. Companies are also looking to use “as a service” models to turn fixed capital costs into variable costs. 

Embracing the work of the future. Work’s future, defined by increased automation and technology, was always on the horizon. COVID-19 has accelerated the process. Employees from all departments, for example, have learned how to complete tasks using digital communication and collaboration tools while working remotely. Changes in operations will be more rapid, with a decrease in manual and repetitive tasks and a rise in the demand for analytical and technical support. This shift will necessitate a significant investment in workforce engagement and new skill training, much of which will be delivered using digital tools. 

Reimagining a long-term competitive advantage in operations. To create competitive advantage and new customer value propositions, dramatic shifts in industry structure, customer expectations, and demand patterns necessitate equally dramatic shifts in operations strategies. Successful companies will reimagine the role of operations in their businesses, creating new value by being far more responsive to their end customers—including, but not limited to, accelerated product development and customer experience innovation, mass customization, improved environmental sustainability, and more interconnected, nimble ecosystem management. 

Taking the initiative. Companies have moved quickly to keep up with COVID-19. Sales and operations planning used to be done weekly or even monthly, but now it’s more common to do it on a daily basis. Speed will continue to be critical in order to build on this progress. Companies that recognise this and are willing to set new standards and challenge old paradigms will gain a strategic advantage in the long run. 

The organization is being rethought- 

In 2019, a major retailer was pondering how to launch a curbside-delivery service, with an 18-month timeline. The COVID-19 lockdown was activated in the United States in just two days. There are numerous other examples of this type. “How can we ever tell ourselves that we can’t be faster?” a consumer company executive recently enquired. 

Call it the “great unfreezing”: organisations have been forced to work in new ways as a result of the coronavirus crisis, and they are responding. Changes in operating models are responsible for much of this progress. Corporate bureaucracy has been replaced by clear goals, focused teams, and quick decision-making. Leaders must now commit to not going back as the world moves into the post-COVID-19 era. Their long-term competitive advantage will be determined in large part by how they rethink their organisations. 

They must specifically decide who they are, how they will work, and how they will grow. 

We are who we are. What matters in a crisis becomes very clear, very quickly. Strategy, roles, personal ownership, external orientation, and supportive and demanding leadership are all much more visible now. We believe that the employee-employer social contract is fundamentally changing. “Whether you actually acted to put the safety of employees and communities first, or just said you cared,” one CEO told us, “Will matter.” One distinguishing feature of companies that have successfully adapted is a strong sense of identity. Employees and leaders share a common sense of purpose and a performance culture. They understand the company’s values, in addition to shareholder value, and how to get things done correctly. 

How we work. Many leaders are reflecting on how important decisions were made faster and better by small, nimble teams formed in a hurry to deal with the COVID-19 emergency. What companies have learned, namely, that a flatter organization with decision-making delegated to a dynamic network of teams is more effective, cannot be undone. They’re rewiring their brains to make decisions more quickly and with less data and certainty than before. Companies that can institutionalize these forms of quick and effective decentralization will leapfrog the competition in a world where speed trumps slowness. 

Organizations are also showing a greater appreciation for matching the right talent to the most critical challenges, regardless of hierarchy. Successful leaders will see the value in continuing to simplify and streamline their organizational structures in a cost-cutting environment. Experience has shown that there is a better way, with critical roles linked to value-creation opportunities and leadership roles that are much more fluid, with new leaders emerging from unexpected places: the emphasis is on character and results, not expertise or experience. However, this will only work if the talent is present. 

To attract and retain top talent, the most valuable resource, companies must create a unique work environment and commit to a renewed focus on talent development. 

How to develop. Organizations must answer important questions about growth and scalability as they emerge from the crisis. The ability to embed data and analytics in decision making, the development of learning platforms that support both individual and institutional experimentation and learning at scale, and the development of an organizational culture that fosters value creation with other partners will be the most important factors. 

During the crisis, those organizations that are transitioning from closed systems and one-to-one transactional relationships to digital platforms and networks of mutually beneficial partnerships have proven to be more resilient. “Every business is now a technology business,” remarked a retail CEO, “and what matters most is a deep understanding of the customer, which is enabled by technology.” 

Technology is revolutionizing how organizations relate to their customers and their customers’ customers by organizing to encourage insight generation—for example, by linking previously unconnected goods and services. As a result, developing digitally enabled ecosystems is critical because they catalyze growth and allow for rapid adaptation. When the crisis struck, one company relocated all of its full-time direct employees to a virtual operating environment, while its outsourcing partner “hid behind their contract and played one customer off against another,” according to the CEO. It’s easy to see who will be better positioned to succeed in the post-COVID-19 business environment, where value creation is shared and strategic partnerships are even more important. 

To enable reimagination, accelerate digital adoption- 

The way we interact with loved ones, work, travel, get medical care, spend leisure time, and conduct many of the routine transactions of life has changed dramatically in the last few months. These shifts have accelerated the adoption of digital technologies at unprecedented scale and speed across all industries. One tech CEO remarked, “We are witnessing what will undoubtedly be remembered as a historic deployment of remote work and digital access to services across every domain.” He is correct. Digital will also play a significant role in the COVID-19 recovery. 

Business leaders will face some fundamental challenges during the early stages of partial reopening. One is that consumer behavior and demand patterns have and will continue to change dramatically. Another factor is that the way the economy recovers will vary from country to country and even city to city. Consumers may feel more at ease going to restaurants before boarding a plane or attending sporting events, for example. Early signs of increased consumer demand will most likely arrive in waves. 

Companies will need to analyze these demand signals in real time and adapt quickly to restore supply chains and services if they are to successfully navigate the recovery. 

To address these issues, leaders will need to set a bold digital agenda—and deliver it quickly, on the order of two to three months, rather than the year or more that has been the norm in the past. This agenda consists of four parts: 

Refocus your digital marketing efforts to keep up with shifting customer expectations. Companies must rapidly rethink customer journeys and accelerate the development of digital solutions in order to adapt. Each sector will have a different focus. For many retailers, this means providing a seamless e-commerce experience that allows customers to do everything they need to do online, from research to purchase to service and returns. For automakers, this could imply developing new digital distribution models to handle trade-ins, financing, servicing, and vehicle delivery to customers’ homes. Ensure health and safety in industries like airlines by reinventing the passenger experience with “contactless” check-in, boarding, and in-flight experiences, for example. 

To better manage operations, use data, the Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence. Companies must also incorporate new data and develop new models in order to make real-time decisions. The use of data and analytics will need to be re-calibrated to reflect the post-COVID-19 reality, just as many risk and financial models had to be rebuilt after the 2008 financial crisis. Models will be validated quickly, new data sets will be created, and modelling techniques will be improved. Companies will be able to successfully navigate demand forecasting, asset management, and dealing with massive new volumes if they get this right.  One airline, for example, created a new app to manage and maintain its idle fleet and support its return to service, while a North American telecommunications company created a digital collection model for customers in need. 

Modernize technology as quickly as possible. To reduce their cost base and fund rapid, flexible digital-solution development, businesses will need to greatly improve their IT productivity. To begin, this necessitates cutting IT costs as quickly as possible and making them variable wherever possible to match demand. This entails determining which costs are flexible in the short-to-medium term, such as evaluating non-essential project or maintenance costs and reallocating resources. Second, this entails defining a future IT-product platform, determining the skills and roles required to maintain it, mapping these skills to the new organizational model, and developing leaders capable of training people to fill new or adapted roles. Third, the adoption of cloud and automation technologies, including bringing cloud operations on-premise and decommissioning legacy infrastructure, will need to be accelerated. 

Boost the speed and efficiency of your digital solutions. Companies must not only develop digital solutions quickly in order to deal with the crisis and its aftermath, but they must also adapt their organizations to new operating models and deliver these solutions to customers and employees at scale. Integrating business processes, incorporating data-driven decision making, and implementing change management are all required to solve this “last mile” problem. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways. From banks to mining operations, a wide range of companies have sped up delivery by establishing an internal “digital factory” with cross-functional teams dedicated to aligning business priorities with digital practices. Others have created new business–building entities in addition to reinventing their core businesses to seize new opportunities quickly.