I read an article the other day from an executive who suggested that post-COVID, returning to business as usual was the key. It was an article that was dismissive of the impact the first half of 2020 had on any business. A minor hiccup. Regardless of where you are at on this subject, one thing that is fairly important is to understand the strategic relocation of your business, as it relates to 2020. Strategic relocation of your business is the post-recovery changes and costs associated with your products, services, customers, and competitors being in very different locations. For instance, if you were an office furniture company prior to 2020, you were designing towards open and collaborative spaces. Post recovery, almost all of this business is now focused on exactly the opposite. Individual, isolated, and safe workspaces are now the design emphasis. In other words, the business relocation changes and costs will force the office furniture company to change products, change designs, and perhaps change customers. Instead of office furniture in the classic sense, the new sales emphasis might be home offices.
The problem facing most businesses is that they have not used this time to ask the key question. How has our business landscape changed? This question has not been asked because there was a larger question that over-shadowed it. What will be the definition of the new normal? We had always believed that it was simply returning to work. So it became very unlikely that we thought about work never returning.
At Advok8, we are asking our clients to think strategically about the resumption of business.
- Has work at home and virtual office provided a new normal for your business?
- What products and services will be forever changed based upon any new reality caused by:
- COVID pandemic?
- Economic recession?
- Black Lives Matter; resultant ethnic, race, or orientation relations?
- What jobs or people were simply not missed during the down time?
- What products and services need re-design to make them more appropriate for the future?
- Of competition, which companies will survive or which will exit the arena post-2020?
- What customers have changed and how does that impact my business?
- How will the sales model change going forward?
The most important strategic questions lead to a stronger business model, and an appropriate shedding of older, weaker notions. In a positive light, this time has shown a number of things. First, it has shown that telecommuting and working from home can be very beneficial. Second, it has shown that some of our practices were just not that important. Thinking back on my own experiences, constant large meetings are something that always seemed a waste of time. Third, I think we will see collaboration and team work start to fade. In its place will be the individual performer, as work is individually submitted from home to the mother ship.
The last issue is the sales process itself. How do you make a sales call when you customer works from home? How do you make a sales call when access to a company is controlled and limited? How do you
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