What Has COVID-19 Taught Us?

You might be thinking, what could we possibly learn from this crisis?

The coronavirus/COVID-19/Rona/whatever you want to call it has dramatically exposed our weaknesses not only as individuals, business owners, but also as nation.

World leaders are scrambling, just like the rest of us. If COVID-19 has done anything, it has leveled the playing field. It doesn’t care about your nationality, what color your skin is, what language you speak nor does it care your social class.

So really, as an Agency Owner, what has COVID-19 taught us by exposing our weaknesses?

It should have taught you the need for a full comprehensive contingency plan. Many were caught off-guard and unsure of what to do next.

Having a well thought out contingency plan that takes every possible scenario into consideration is crucial. As you already know, a business contingency plan is a course of action that your organization would take if an unexpected event or situation occurs.

You can have some plans that are very common and simple such as what to do in a power outage or what to do if the internet goes out. Other plans could be more complex such as what to do in the event that the team is reduced by half or what if we are forced to work from home.

Here are a few steps to take when making a contingency plan:

  1. Complete a SWOT Analysis – for anyone not familiar with this term, a SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
    1. identify your business-critical operations and your risk management to prioritize your resources
      1. Teams, tools, facilities, etc then prioritize that list
  2. Identify you Key Risks – figure out where you are vulnerable. It is very important that you get your team involved with this as they may point out things you wouldn’t otherwise think of – 2 brains are always better than 1
  3. Draft a Contingency plan for each risk identified. Concentrate on what would have to happen to resume normal operations – communications, responsibilities, timelines and resources
  4. Share and discuss the plan with your team members
  5. Revisit the plan often. Things change over time; you will need to update your plan often to make sure it stays up-to-date.

I hope this helps you with creating your contingency plans if you did not already have them. Sadly though, we cannot tell the future. There will always be curve balls every now and again.