This communication is is meant for SME entrepreneurs (mostly S, in plenty out there) who will find it more useful than enterprise owners who still may have the resources and connects to get going through the post Covid times.
Without explaining any further on each, it would suffice to mention that demonetisation, faulty GST implementation, natural calamities and now the Corona pandemic had done you in, right royally. While hopes are on (it must be, that is what makes us tick), we must be realistic in our understanding on how the business is going to be for SMEs for immediate and short term future
You will have huge cash shortage, your receivables will not come on time (some of which, you will never get at all!), your liabilities including payables will be very high and killing, your market would have evaporated, you would not see any growth possibilities in front of you. So, it is introspection time - why do you want to continue to do this business and for whom are you doing it?
If this question had reached you, it is good, reality had hit you!
Therefore, do you want to Continue to do this business post Covid ? You must realise that business is not charity and if it does not give you the returns, there is no point in proceeding further. If so, will you take a call to end it or will you, as an eternal optimist, want to carry on the burden further?
The fact is, many SME businesses for the last two to three years are just about dragging on, no profit, no cash flow, no growth but high liabilities.....!
It would be heart-wrenching to let go the business. You will no longer be called a businessman, how will the society, community, family and friends take it, right? You think that people will consider you as a loser and a goner. Can you accept the failure?
But please do realise this, it is your business that failed, not you! It is not your incompetence that led to the closure but those circumstances, none of which were in your control. The other solace is that there are so many like you out there in the world now. So you are not alone!
Post Covid, most of everything is going to be the ‘new normal’. You must imbibe this thought with clarity. Do put efforts in knowing what are the new normal and how they are going to work. For e.g. ‘work from home’ is a new normal, so are ‘online learning’ and ‘tele-medicine’. These are just few, there will be many new normals! So many new technologies will be driving the new normal, say, IoT, AI, ML etc.
Now think calmly, can you utilise your Covid locked-in time to conceive a new business model (that could be related to your business or something absolutely new), research it, talk to your confidants about it, brainstorm it, look out for technologies that could be used to create and run it, create a POC of your new business solution etc. al?
Just to give you some examples, an entrepreneur running a small software company, after having told by his clients to keep their projects in abeyance, looking up the future, has started concentrating on providing digital marketing services online and surely in future many companies will start depending on digital marketing for lead generation than having sales/mktg. personnel to do so. He is already talking to many prospects and he tells me that the interest levels are high. Another entrepreneur who was successfully dwelling in OOH advertising infra is now going online to creat a platform/market place for bringing in customers & suppliers of the same. A lady entrepreneur is now using zoom platform free to teach skills to the clients. These are just some examples for the doubting Thomases.
Remember, Covid is a game changer. What it was is not what it is going to be. My dear SME business friends, are you keeping your ears to the ground to see what are the opportunities in the anvil, are you willing to learn, are you willing to embrace the change? If yes, you have a future but if you are still tied to your almost dead business and trying ‘somehow’ to rejuvenate it with no resources available to undertake it, then you have my sympathies.
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