Beyond 2020: how to survive and thrive

Is there a guide that can help a small business owner transform to compete in this newly emerging covid19 world? The TT Chamber’s Nova committee intends to work with micro, small, medium enterprises (MSME) to provide the answers and develop a roadmap for the times ahead.

Covid19 may be this generation's "world war", one more challenging than previous world wars since today we are fighting an enemy that we cannot see, with effects on our businesses and lives that we cannot fully predict. And, in many cases, we are fighting these impacts with outdated tools.

Nova has been listening to our MSMEs and trying to identify their principal concerns. As a team, the Nova Committee and the TT Chamber are working with members to navigate the uncertainty and return to a more secure footing.

The first response of many of our member MSMEs to the covid19 impact was to focus on navigating the immediate business continuity challenges. The most significant of these was to retool and focus on their customers' online-user experience so that they could provide the same or better service than was done face-to-face.

While the solutions were known, the resistance to change was fuelled by the "if it's not broke don't fix it" principle.

Typical questions now are: how do we maintain our creativity and the benefits of working face-to-face as a team, if we are working remotely from home? Or are our customers willing to accept the perceived security risk of doing business online rather than continue in the traditional approaches, now that the risks to their health are more top of mind?

The second response to the covid19 crisis was more personal to members' business survival in the future. Perhaps the most frequently asked question is, how am I going to adapt my business to a rapidly emerging new normal which is uncertain, complex, and unclear?

In responding to this question it became increasingly clear that covid19 had dramatically changed the discussion from why should we incur the costs and risk of adopting digital technologies to can we survive if we do not pivot and utilise enabling digital technologies to meet our customers' needs.

TT, as a still-developing economy, would be well served by studying the global best practices of successful economies as a starting point in understanding what is possible.

This was demonstrated in the experience of one entrepreneur who, faced with these challenges, posed a question related to one of the many conspiracy theories around to his daughter living in England. The conspiracy claimed that the new English £20 note had symbols of a 5G tower and the covid19 on it. Because he did not accept this conspiracy theory to be true, he asked his millennial offspring for an explanation of the symbols being referred to as the 5G tower and the covid19.

The answer was short and blunt, yet very profound.

She responded that she had neither seen the new £20 note nor did she extensively use paper money.

Rather, they conducted most of their business digitally.

It became clearer that while we in TT are now pivoting our businesses to include online channels, this digital transformation is well advanced in the developed world.

The bigger lesson is that the business disruption being experienced is not the covid19 per se, but rather the speed at which digital transformation needs to take place so that our businesses survive and thrive during and after covid19.

Nova is responding with a free webinar series Beyond 2020: How to survive and thrive – an MSME roadmap to digitally enabled transformation. Business leaders are encouraged to visit the Chamber’s website www.chamber.org.tt for more information and take the opportunity to register at events@chamber.org.tt.

(Content courtesy the TT Chamber of Industry and Commerce)