Small Businesses Prepare for the Coronavirus (COVID-19)
For the past couple of weeks, our clients have been reaching out to us with questions like, Will the Corona virus affect my business? How will it affect my business? And what can I do to be prepared? I’m gonna share with you some of the problems we’ve talked about some of the solutions we’ve talked about and also some general information about how you can prepare your business or the possibilities of this virus affecting your economy.
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Hi, my name’s Kirsten Graham was six figure business coaching, and we help people just like you start and build successful businesses, and we cover topics like marketing and branding finances. And, of course, today what can happen if something comes your way, whether it’s a hurricane or in this case of virus because all we can do is prepare the best we can.
There’s really nothing else. Weaken. D’oh ! There’s no point in being fearful. There’s no point in sticking your head in the sand. But you can look at things in every direction and think, What can I do to be proactive, to keep my business profitable and up and running strong? So first of all, the stories that I’m gonna share with you in this video are about some of our clients, and the decisions that they’re making are not necessarily the decisions you would make in a similar situation. And remember, everyone’s situation is different.
So I get I’m gonna share some stories with you and the thought process behind the decisions that our clients are making. And hopefully this will just help you have a better idea of how you can look at all the different scenarios that could happen and prepare the best way possible.
So the first thing I want to talk about is one of our clients is supposed to go out of the country, and she’s young and she’s healthy. And if she got the virus, she most likely be fine. The only problem is, this trip is literally a couple of weeks before a very large event that they host, and it’s a huge moneymaker for them, so it brings in a lot of their annual income. So the question waas should I still go on this trip? And we talked it out and we talked about all the different ways that could play out.
So the first way is she goes on, the trip comes back and everything’s fabulous, right? No big deal. Worst case scenario, She goes on the trip, and she gets quarantine is she can’t get back. That’s gonna put her business partner in a really rough situation. It could really affect their business adversely. And it’s not ideal. Plus, being quarantined would keep her away from her family. So that’s not ideal.
The next kind of worst case scenario. If she comes back from the trip sick, which again she could get sick just going to the grocery store. But we’re looking at scenarios around this trip, so she comes back sick from the vacation, and it’s not a good time to be sick because they’re preparing for a big event.
So after thinking about all of the all of the ins and outs of this trip and how it could play out. The bottom line was she could go on this trip at any other time. Yes, she’s gonna use lose a little bit of money because she’s got deposits down and tickets paid for. But the end of the day, the decision that’s gonna make her feel best about her family and her business is to postpone the trip to go another time. So again, that might not be the right decision for you. But it’s the right decision for her.
Another one of our clients has a full time bookkeeping business. And if she is a single mom of three little Children and she was kind of reached out in the sky was falling, you know? Oh, my gosh, economy is gonna go to pieces, and I’m gonna lose all of my clients. You know what I’m gonna do? So we had obviously, that could happen. You know, you never know what could happen, but it’s not likely. So what we talked about was her individual clients, and the bottom line was, she has two clients who she’s a little bit worried about. One of them. His payment often has to be re.
She does automatic bill pay, and so sometimes she has to reprocess his bill payment because it doesn’t go through or he’ll have to give her another card number. And obviously, because she’s a bookkeeper, she sees their numbers. She knows that his company is struggling, so she doesn’t feel really confident with him, because if something happened in the economy, he may choose to do his own bookkeeping. Or he may go out of business. And then she’s one other client that she’s a little bit worried about.
Now this particular bookkeeper is great with her money, and again, she has a lot of responsibilities because she’s a single mom with three kids. She has six months reserves for business in six months, reserves her for her personal financing. But the more we talked about it, she decided that as her business has grown and she’s got really steady clients, she’s become more efficient and she’s got the systems in place. Taking on additional clients in her mind would cover her if someone else dropped off.
If she lost clients down the road, having some additional clients would give her extra money and make her feel more secure, so we felt like that was a good way to go. What that was gonna take away from her, though, was time with her family. But again, she has become more efficient than she was in the beginning of her business. And she feels like, yes, she’ll have to work some more hours, and that’s not ideal, but she feels like it’s the right thing to do. So we talked about the number of clients that she wanted to try to bring in right away, and we ended up deciding on a dollar amount because her smaller clients obviously paid last monthly than her larger clients.
So the goal is for her to take on an additional $2500 a month in revenue from bookkeeping clients, and she plans on banking that money and then just keeping her head down. If nothing happens great, she’ll have extra money in the bank, and her ultimate goal is when her youngest child goes to school, which is in two years. She wants to actually build a full on business. She wants to hire other bookkeepers and just build a you know, business it doesn’t revolve just around her.
So the thought was, Well, if I take on more clients than maybe I’ll end up hiring a part time bookkeeper sooner and really start to scale the business. Ah, little earlier than I had originally planned. So we kind of talked out all of those scenarios, and that seemed like the right decision. And I said, Well, let’s add in a different idea. What if yes, you go after the $2500 a month of additional client revenue, but what did you take? Four or $500 of that? And you pay someone to either do some of your marketing for you, or maybe to clean your house and do your laundry.
What could you do to pay someone else to take some of the burden off of you? So you’re not taking time away from the Children? Because again, all of that money that she’s bringing in is just gonna go into savings anyway. And the purpose of getting those additional clients is simply to kind of see why a in case, you know, the virus gets bad, the economy goes bad, and she loses some of her current clients. But she has children and she wants to spend time with them and she wants to have a life.
So the end of the conversation, I think that’s the plan. She’s really thinking about what she could outsource with some of that additional revenue, which will make her feel good because you can’t use additional clients if she loses clients. She’s putting more money in the bank, and she feels like she’s prepared for whatever could come her way. So if you started thinking about what you could do to prepare your business, please give us some comments below about some of the things that you’re doing or maybe even questions about some of the things that you’re thinking about.
We love to know what’s going on with you and how you’re preparing for this virus and how it may or may not affect your business. Another situation we talked a lot about as we have two clients who were in the process of buying large equipment so thereabouts invest between 20 and $50,000 on equipment and the question came up. Should we buy now? Is this the right thing to do? Should we keep the money in the bank. Guys, there’s no one answer.
If it’s all so again we were talking about Do you need the equipment? Now? How is that gonna affect your productivity? Isn’t something that could be postponed. Do you have money in the bag? How much reserves do you have? And ultimately one of our clients decided to go ahead and buy equipment and the other decided to hold off. And the reason just had a lot to do with personal finances, like how much money they had in reserves and whether or not they absolutely needed the equipment to move them forward.
So again, there’s no right answer. Wrong answer it. Relations depends on your particular situation. Now again, we don’t know what the virus is gonna do It, you know, really have no effect on our economy or can really affect it quite strongly. So you have to look at your industry and how it could affect you. But money in the bank is always gonna be key.
So when I talk about our general things that you could d’oh and we’ll talk more about that along with doing one on one coaching. We also work with people who are planning to leave their 9 to 5. So they’re not group program where we help them with their branding, their marketing in their business plan. You know everything that they need to d’oh to prepare themselves to start their business before they leave their 9 to 5.
And on a group coaching call this week. The conversation became up about the virus, and one of the ladies in our group was planning to build her business slowly. Over the next 12 months, you know, she was gonna work on her Web site. She was just gonna kind of do a lot of things on her own and just get it up and running and try to leave her full time job in 12 months. But she is in the travel industry, and obviously that’s an industry that is already seeing some effects of the Corona virus and said she had some concerns.
So the conversation was is she willing to give up her nights and weekends and just really hunker down and trying to get everything set up for business and start taking on clients now? If she could do that, she may be able to transition from her full time job into her business sooner if she absolutely had to. So that was something we were talking about, was what can’t you? D’oh ! If you’re in the middle of starting a business and you’re excited about starting your business but you’re worried about, you know what could happen with the economy?
My advice to you would be keep moving forward. You’ve got a full time job to do everything you can do to get all of those little things done to start a business again. Your marketing plan, your business plan. You know, your website done that who your ideal client is, Understand your messaging to them and start getting some clients on the side. Start your business as a side hustle, get some money coming in, and then bank that money because it will allow you to leave your job with security of knowing that your business is gonna be successful.
So, general advice about what you could do to prepare for the virus how may or may not affect your economy and how it may or may not affect your business. First of all, don’t fall in the sphere place just because we’re talking about the virus today, and we’re talking about how it can affect economies. I don’t want you to get fearful. I often find that people who are fearful or is someone said to me the other day. Oh, you’re just really bringing me down.
Talking about this just lowers my vibration. That really bums me out kind of thing. Well, first of all, no one should have control over your emotions other than you, so you’re gonna take control of that yourself. But secondly, if you’re talking about this and it’s causing a lot of fear, it may mean that you need to look at things and prepare right. So if you’re thinking about taking a trip and you don’t want to talk about this and maybe because the right decision maybe not taking that trip or if you need to buy equipment and talking about the virus just freaks you out and maybe because you’d rather have your head in the sand and just do what you wanted, Thio. That’s kind of human nature. We want to do what we want to d’oh.
But by going ahead and looking at all the ways you think this could affect your business and doing some simple things. Stuff spending money. If you can look again trying to control your spending personally in your business, make sure those reserves are solid. Go after new business, get out there and hustle. I don’t Facebook the other. It was so funny. Someone said if I gave you $100,000 if you got five clients in 30 days, could you get five points and 30 days? And I think most people would say, Hell, yeah. At least I’m gonna try really hard. So we’re home growing and building your business. Take that energy and that anxiety that can come with the unknown and really focus
it on good things.
And also think about how can you contribute to society. You know what could happen if things do happen. How could you volunteer? Could you give more to a food bank? What could you do to be part of the solution? I’m not part of the problem, yes, they’re all things that, I think, make us feel confident. They make us feel secure and they make us realize that no matter what happens, we’re gonna be okay. And we have no control over what happens. Always control is what we do to do smart things right now.
Obviously, I didn’t talk about washing your hands and all that fun stuff because that’s all you’re hearing about. But I will talk about this as far as your business goes. If you tend to have an outbreak in your area. And if you have a compromised immune system or you just don’t have the down time to be sick or whatever the reason you could do zoom calls. You can do video conferencing with people, so also think about innovative ways that you could do your business if you just don’t want to be out in the general public for any reason.
Um, we’re pretty much doing business as usual, not really changing a whole lot of other than just trying to be smart about what we’re doing this far as running the business. But we’re out and about in the public, and you know, we feel like we’re healthy and things are going to go. However, if we had a massive outbreak in our area, I might change my mind and stay home or and again. There’s nothing wrong with that. However you choose to play that out.
But there are things like zoom calls. You can do phone calls rather than going out meeting people in public if that makes you feel better. But you do not want to lock yourself at home. If most of your business comes from networking, you know you still need to be out and about and building your business as long as you feel like it’s safe. And that’s the key. Don’t let anyone make you feel bad about the choices of the decisions you make in how you run your life or in your business.
As the beginning of this video, I told you that there will be an opportunity to speak with us about your business. In the description below, there is a link to book a call with us. We’d love to jump on a call with you and figure out if there’s anything we can do to help you start or grow your business again.
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