When it comes to the last couple of years, there has been plenty that could have derailed your business. Regardless of what you do, which niche you operate in, or the business model you use, the pandemic would have steamrollered its way through everything you do and left your business looking very different from how you would have pictured it at the start of 2020.
Of course, some businesses have been ideally paced for unprecedented growth, and others have watched the rug get pulled from under them and are slowly starting to put the pieces back together. It doesn’t matter if you are either of these examples or even somewhere in between; there are a couple of areas that you need to examine and take notice of the actions that need to be taken as a result.
#1 It’s the office – but not as we know it
If your business had any sort of office space at all, it would have seen some changes in the last 18 months. It may have spent much of the time empty as your team worked remotely, and now it may be more sparsely populated as hybrid working proves to be a handy solution to keeping contaminations in the workplace to a minimum.
This situation clearly has its advantages. You can make the most of them by making your projects more accessible by moving them to the cloud so they can be accessed by all of your staff whenever or wherever they happen to be working. Migrating your Microsoft 365 services sounds like a big task (and it can be) but once done, it opens other doors where you are no longer as limited with your headcount or recruitment pool and can expand way beyond any restriction that having a physical office may have presented.
#2 Make online the norm, not the exception
Some of this may already be in place, but now it’s time to evolve online alternatives to be the main bulk of what you do and not just a temporary solution. After doing the necessary due diligence into what shape your digital products or services need to take, you could double down and perfect these to be the flagship products for the next 12 months.
Even if you are a good old-fashioned brick and mortar business with physical products, you probably need to consider expanding the range or the presence of the products available online. This may involve a full-scale upgrade for your website or taking on a logistical partner to get things from A to B. This can be as simple as listing your products on Amazon or having something more bespoke created that you can develop further over time.
A few final thoughts
For better or worse, your business will have changed shape within the last two years. The movement from physical to more digital solutions has opened up other opportunities to those who have embraced new working methods and boosted their online presence. Making the same move yourself could make you ready for whatever happens in 2022.
