Business Continuity Tips From Industry Experts To Keep You Going During COVID-19

Most enterprise-level organizations have business continuity plans to tackle unlikely events such as natural or human-based disasters like fires, earthquakes, floods, cyberattacks, and so on. But none of them were ready to face the threats that COVID-19 has brought with it.

Consequently, a lot of businesses have faced an economic meltdown because of the unprecedented crisis that occurred in the last quarter. Hence, in order to survive in this competitive world, business owners must remain analytical and proactive to preserve their business.

We, at Ace Cloud Hosting, reached out to a few industry experts to help you make better business decisions. Here are some tips they think small business owners should keep in mind to protect their business form the COVID-19 crisis:

Aldo Ceccarelli

Aldo is a skilled executive with over 25 years of experience in Information Technology (IT). He oversees the development of the enterprise IT strategy and architecture and alignment of IT with the business strategy. He is also in charge of internal and external IT sourcing, development of an IT governance framework that defines the working relationships and sharing of IT components within the enterprise.

He led his current company IS/IT in its earlier Copernican digital revolution by implementing a quite complex and self-sufficient information system, which gave us a peer seat at transaction digital table with partners across markets.

Currently, he is ranked in The Top 100 Most Influential Chief Information Technology Officers.

Find him on social media at LinkedIn.

Here’s what he has to say:

Technology-wise, the CIOs, CDOs, CTOs, CISOs, marketing execs, and other business and IT are mostly concentrating on planning for security outages, power failures, natural disasters, and now pandemics.

Both process and technology playbooks need to be created to consider how to service the core business and key stakeholders during the pandemic. First effort can be for Resiliency. Organizations must think of creative approaches to provide continuous availability, workforce mobility, and flexible access to compute and storage for both planned and unplanned events.

From IT technology perspective, the focus is on Cloud push. Projects to support hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, and private clouds are accelerating. Organizations investing in self-reliance and redundancy possibly may consider adding mainframe capabilities to their private and public cloud environment.

Christine Crandell

Christine is a career B2B board member, advisor, customer marketing, and digital transformation consultant. Her superpower is driving growth based on user experience and customer success for late-stage SaaS platforms, manufacturing, and technology companies.

She partners with the boards and CEOs of her clients to examine their business challenges through a lens of shared curiosity and truth-seeking. As a domain expert in digital transformation, customer experience, and turnarounds, she’s a student of emerging trends and product-market fit.

She brings 30 years of leadership and pattern recognition that dramatically accelerates the velocity and quality of sales pipelines, marketing programs, customer expectations, and ROI that my clients achieve.

In this interview, she has shared her story – http://disq.us/t/3bs5zqr

Here’s what she has to say:

This pandemic is the tipping point of a new economic and cultural era. In that light, business continuity is less about maintaining the status quo than how to rapidly innovate while preserving revenue streams. The bottom line is to not shy away from the disruption we are in; step into it. Three business continuity tips I recommend are:

Set 10% aside for innovation.  Preserving cash is a top business’ priority yet starving growth is a fast path to failure.  Invest a portion of cost savings in new products/services that directly address emerging market needs; launch fast and refine.

Go the extra mile for loyal customers. Be responsive with a big dose of empathy and compassion. Everyone deals with stress differently; it’s not personal.  Help customers overcome social isolation, remote leadership, and home-schooling stress by sharing expert advice and creating social communities that connect customers with each other.

Focus on agility instead of optimization. Tomorrow’s leaders will excel at agility and speed. Achieve that by rethinking in- versus outsourcing. Outsource where skill needs will rapidly change; in-source what’s core to differentiation.

Len Herstein

Len is a classically trained CPG Marketer with specific specialties in Brand Strategy, Brand Positioning, Brand Activation, Brand Identity, and in launching successful new products as well as turning around the struggling brands.

He is a lifelong student of all things brand – now leveraged into ManageCamp Inc., a premier brand conference and training company as well as Audiobrain, a leading Sonic Branding company.

Follow him on social media: LinkedIn

Here’s what he has to say:

1. Stay calm. Nobody ever made their best decisions when they were panicking. Take a breath and make sure everything you do reflects your long-term strategies and not just your short-term, fear-driven needs.

2. Be willing to pivot. The world is changing. Customer and consumers are changing. YOU are changing. We all know Einstein’s quote that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” However, I think my friend, and marketing guru, Tom Asacker has a better definition. He says, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting THE SAME RESULTS.” Doing the same thing today that you did 6 months ago WILL NOT yield the same results. You have to adapt.

3. Value RELATIONSHIPS over TRANSACTIONS. Before you send that next email or make that next sales phone call, make sure it is the right thing for your CUSTOMER, not just yourself. Pushing transactions in a time where your customers are hurting can seem insensitive, tone-deaf, and selfish. And it can ruin long-term relationships. It may not seem like it now, but we will get to the other side of this. What will your contacts think of you when we emerge?

Wrapping Up

The bottom line is that businesses must adapt to the changes in order to survive in the industry. Business owners have begun to integrate technologies such as cloud for better team collaboration, automation, and third-party application integration. Ensuring business continuity will help companies not only to sustain but grow during these testing times.