How To Support Your Clients Through This Crisis So Your Business Survives

The Crisis

Hey everyone. Hey, people out there. Doesn’t this suck?

I’ve had five phone calls with other business owners like myself today and everyone has a scenario in ways where work is cancelled. You know things that we were looking forward to and doing professional development stuff. 

All that’s been put on hold, holidays, and a whole lot of stuff. All of that is not life-threatening, but added up, you know makes things hard and I kind of feel for you and feel for everyone as we just get used to this new normal.

It’s been one of those weeks where the unexpected happens and that’s the theme of the video today. So the theme of the video is there is an impending challenge coming, pandemic coming of a virus that’s gonna seriously or potentially seriously impact your team.

The one thing I want to share is what I’ve been talking to all my colleagues about, people, other coaches, people who run small businesses. Bunch of people have been asking my advice about how to get through this, so I’ve been going on walks and just chatting people and doing my bit to help sort of coaching council people through.

I reckon I’ve had 10 phone calls this week and what I want to share with you was what I’m hearing from people and a framework that might help you think about the stages that this at the businesses will go through during this time and what it might mean for you.

The Framework

So you can see how it’s sort of two parabolas that intersect one another the top one here the orange one that goes up, that’s the flatten curve that everyone’s talking about right, so we know at the moment whereabouts here – it’s stage 1, which is the cases are going up and they will reach a peak and then they will recede and that’s that magic six month time where everyone is saying eventually this you know will not be a problem anymore.

And then this blue line underneath that is everyone’s emotional response and everyone’s reaction to this. So stage one is what we’re in right now, which is essentially avoidance of loss and the emotion that everyone feels during the time of avoidance of loss is fear. And from fear what we’re trying to do is minimise or restrict the amount of impact that’s going to have on our revenue and on our ability to operate.

Your job at this point as a business owner as someone who runs a business is to be able to be as helpful as you can to the challenges and needs of your staff right now. 

So, for example, the content I’m sending out is all about how to respond to this, about how I think about this challenge. Another friend of mine who’s an HR guy, he’s got a whole bunch of people he supports from the HR’s point of view. He’s looking at running Lockdown challenges with his clients where they focus on their health and their fitness and lots of stuff. Just trying to meet wherever they are right now and be helpful.

The bottom part of the curve is as I’ve written there the words when we’re reaching new normal. When you’ve minimised the loss that you can, the losses have reached, have bottomed out and the way we’re operating becomes normal. So we’re used to be working from home. We’re all getting used to that and business starting to, even though things are still crazy on the outside, it’s stabilised.

When Things Are Stabilised

Firstly, over the next two or three months, two or three things are likely to occur.

So when things are stabilised that could be two, three, four months away. That’s when people are open to new offers and new opportunities that support where they’re at right now.

That could be 2 months away, could be 6 weeks away, but I would council you not to offer your clients anything new or to talk to them about anything new until you feel right. Feel like we’ve reached that new normal. Because otherwise they’re going to be really resistant because they’re trying to avoid loss.

And then the third phase is when the curve comes up, the blue curve, as we come out of this, there will be a whole lot of things that will be different and opportunities for you.

So given that you’ve got three months. You know to two, three months where you’re not going to be working in your business all the time.
This is a great chance to actually think about how you operate your business. Could you take more of it online? Could you do more of it virtually? and is there a different kind of client or different type of product that you want to launch? All that work that you would have been putting into delivering the client, could you be doing it using it to work on your business? 

Summary

So I hope that’s been useful. That’s kind of how I’m thinking about, as awful as it is. How the Curve goes up in terms of this virus. How the curve looks like in terms of how we respond and those three phases of at the moment:

• avoidance of loss trying to be as helpful invaluable as you can and
• second is realising at some point it’s going to be a new normal and we’ll get used to this and that’s a stage in which you can create new products and opportunities and offers for people,
• and then the third one is accelerating your strategic work towards creating the future that you want because you’re gonna have the space to do that.

Leave me a comment or Get in Touch

Hope that’s been useful. Look after yourselves and lots of love to you and your family’s talk soon. Take care. Bye.