Ninety percent (90%) of the start-ups and small businesses close down with-in the first 5 years of launch. Of these 25% close down with-in the first year. Traditionally, there were two core key reasons that experts identify this could happen (1) insufficient revenue and (2) unsustainable cost of operation. Interestingly, the pandemic accelerated both these reasons thus causing severe impacts on small and medium businesses.

What went wrong and what could have been done differently? The businesses that had designed their business models to be agile and technology-enabled demonstrated higher resilience and sustenance during the crisis. If the business demand was impacted, such business houses were quick to react to calibrate and realign their capacity and available resources to continue to sustain. Some of the avenues companies leveraged in such times which we experienced and supported first hand for several companies include:

  1. Shift employee capacity to a remote working model while cutting operational and transactional costs where feasible
  2. Accelerating digital adoption by scaling already deployed collaboration technologies and migration of core functionality/applications to the public or private cloud infrastructure
  3. Building rapid and agile technology and process architectures and implementing them with rapid change management for accelerated adoption
  4. Where feasible eliminating non-core functions or rapidly shifting them to outsourcing providers so that management can focus on strategic enablers and their core competence
  5. Building a virtual extension of the team in remote locations while educating the management teams on the art of virtual management.

What was earlier thought to be a maturity journey that would happen over years, suddenly became an accelerated reality that needed to happen immediately, sometimes in less than 3 months. Most companies adopted remote working models and realized that their resources had access to all the infrastructure that they had access to in their office and the only difference was that they now worked remotely. Such has been the pace that many companies are now already in steady-state and looking to automate tasks using a combination of labor, cloud, analytics, and automation so that the “life-and-shift” that happened can also start seeing productivity gains. The realization that remote-working is here to stay in some form is now real and most surveys today indicate that if not all at least 25% of the roles can continue to work remotely even after the pandemic.

SMB’s would have no other option other than to revisit their business models. If you have not acted so far more strategically, the time to act is now. Most traditional SMB’s don’t have the knowledge, expertise, and deep pockets to undergo this transformation. You, therefore, need a collaborative partner who can work with you on your strategy, plan your roadmaps, and align experienced resources to drive the execution.

We at ValueOptim recognize these challenges and offer a mix of advisory, planning, technology adoption, and resourcing options to SMB’s businesses. Our primary focus is to be a strategic partner to SMBs in multiple industries. We will focus on understanding your current state and leverage your existing investments as much as possible to keep your costs low while improving your business sustenance without compromising on the quality. Our approach is consultative in nature as we work with you to plan your digital transformation roadmaps. We will provide you with solutions that are cost-effective and improve your competitive positioning.

We welcome to schedule a no-obligation discussion today to discuss your challenges with us at http://www.valueoptim.com/getstarted/ or email us at value@valueoptim.com