COVID-19 and Your Business
I’m old enough to remember the annual summer polio scares, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and practicing for nuclear attacks (as if crouching under your school desk was going to do much good). I’ve survived the Y2K “crisis”, a half-dozen economic downturns and a handful of personal existential threats, mostly self-induced. So I’m pretty sure that we’re going to make it through the COVID-19 threat.
That’s not to say it couldn’t get pretty ugly– the “Spanish Flu” of 1918-1919 killed more than all the combat deaths of the First World War. Perhaps this could be as bad. I don’t think so, but I’m a lawyer, not a doctor– what do I know?
What is possible is that there’s a really decent chance that this thing will impact your business and mine before it settles down into an annual nuisance. And if that’s a reasonable prospect, each of us has two options: be prepared, or whistle in the dark.
For those who aren’t gifted whistlers, there are a handful of useful things we can do to lessen impact on our ourselves and our businesses:
1. Calm down, and encourage everyone in your office or shop to do the same. By way of morbid reassurance, most of the high-risk old codgers like me have retired. The worst that will likely happen to younger people in reasonable health is that they’ll feel lousy for a while and be out of commission for a couple of weeks. And even that is unlikely.
2. Encourage habits to limit transmission. Reduce the frequency of face to face meetings, excuse yourself from handshakes, sneeze into your elbow, keep about a metre’s distance, wash your hands frequently, avoid touching your face as much as possible– a dozen little things to keep yourself and others safe.
3. As much as possible, work from home and enable others to do the same. Use this season as a testing ground for distance technology. Meet clients through Zoom or the like, use document transmittal and collaboration technology to move matters forward. While many of us are pretty sophisticated with these things, some may find it novel, and for those, now is a good time to take the leap.
4. If someone becomes too sick to work, and too sick to communicate, it would be great if someone else knew what they were working on. Especially if it’s mission-critical.
5. Watch your cash flow. If you find that you’re not prepared for a long drought, take action sooner than later.
6. If you find you have idle time on your hands, don’t waste it. There are systems to write, disaster plans to put in place, technology to learn, efficiencies to work out… for heaven’s sake, I could probably go on for a year doing all the “someday” things.
7. And if you have even more time than that, read a good book! Seriously, when was the last time you sat in an easy chair with a nice cup of tea and had a really, really, good read?
8. If your stock portfolio gets beaten up, take a pill. The market will come back, and then some– it always does.