4 Tips to Reinvent your Abu Dhabi Business after the Coronavirus

If you're a business manager you'll know your business will never be the same after the Coronavirus crisis. You may have taken immediate decisions to reduce cash burn and during this self-isolation or quarantine time, you have enough time to contemplate the future of your business. Although, it's unpredictable to say when we will emerge from this crisis, as a business manager you can reinvent your service or product offerings to survive in the post-coronavirus economy. 

While supply chains are missing a connection, business owners have little cash on hand, employees are eager but scared, consumer confidence is low except for staple products and services, and consumer habits have shifted to online-only channels. To start, here are the four tips for you to reinvent the business and to plan for the post-coronavirus economy.

1) Deconstruct and Innovate your Business Model

The business model should be at the core of any company’s corporate strategy.  It defines how the company creates, delivers, and captures value.

Most start-ups fail because they lack a viable business model.  Even for enterprises with established business models, they often need to revisit and innovate on their business models. It's the right time where you need to focus on customer needs that are currently unmet. 

To succeed, focus on the four components of the business deconstruction model such as Customer Value Proposition, Profit Formula, Key Resources, and Key Processes. 

If your business does not make anything itself, instead act as a platform to connect buyers and sellers, focus on the facilitation of the interaction between buyers and sellers in a marketplace.

2) Create Alternative Solutions

The next step after deconstruction is to employ your imagination to create a long list of alternatives for each of your products or services. 

If nothing strikes your mind, brainstorm with employees and friends. Do not filter or criticize any of the possibilities. Just make a list. This step requires managers to transition from decision-maker to facilitator in order to solicit ideas from employees and business partners. This can be a difficult transition but would help you to bring out imaginative ideas that have the possibility to succeed. 

3) A/B/C Testing 

To avoid making poor decisions or to improve your chances to succeed, the next step in reinventing your service/product or entire business is to conduct rigorous testing of each one of your ideas independently without spending any money by having conversations directly with customers. For this method to work out, you could use direct emails, surveys, phone-contacts, messages or any other possible options that you feel will bring responses. 

This testing should be done in three separate phases. 

1. The first phase is explorations of the problems customers anticipate to face after the virus subside.  

2. Once these initial conversations happen, in the second phase of testing you will narrow your list to a handful of options that seem to address real customer problems and re-state each of these as a testable hypothesis that adds some concrete predictions to your guesses.

3. While in the third phase of testing, you return to your customers – ideally new contacts, to ask them these simple sentences and track their answers. This will help you to collect vital pieces of evidence to determine if your assumptions are valid. It generates useful, actionable evidence to improve decisions, and it costs you nothing.

However, you may need to delay the testing process as your customers are already scared and may not accurately predict their needs after coronavirus. It is uncertain for them what will happen to their job, their business, their family, their health and to the economy if the virus spreads.

4) Create Simplified Versions at Low Cost

Create simplified versions of your product or service to offer your regular customers to suit the marketing conditions of post-coronavirus. These simplified versions of your pre-coronavirus service or product with post-coronavirus marketing and pricing might help your customers solve a problem that they are already facing. 

Let's Sum Up

To be ready to face an unpredictable future after Coronavirus, let's reshape our businesses, bring critical or urgent situations to rapidly solve business challenges, sustainably improve results and reshape our business for a better future. Make the right decisions to protect your organization and make immediate strategies to recover your business.