How to... ensure SMEs can roll with the pandemic punches

The Covid-19 pandemic has affected people around the world, throwing their ​personal and work lives upside-down.

“The repercussions — personal, professional, national and international — will reverberate for years to come. As entrepreneurs, we need to be making the right decisions for right now to ensure that our businesses and our people’s livelihoods do not become another casualty of the virus,” says Allon Raiz, CEO of Raizcorp.

He has the following advice for SMEs:

• So much has changed, and that includes your clients.

“You need to spend a lot of time considering just who your new client is. A client, by definition, is someone who purchases your product or service to fulfil a need or want. If that need or want changes or disappears, so too does your customer and potential customer.”

• Realise that you may need to change the product or service you offer to remain relevant.

“It is important for you to remain relatively true to your established core competencies and, as far as possible, use your existing competencies to create new products for the new market.”

• If you find that you have to develop new products to meet the needs of new clients, you cannot use the same old methods of production.

“New products to new markets generally require new systems and processes to be delivered efficiently and effectively. Without an emphasis on building these new processes, the ability to deliver them efficiently and cost-effectively will be hampered and may cost the business its reputation and financial damage.”

• The pandemic has given us all a better understanding of how much can be done locally and internationally using various technologies. Your new clients might be from different parts of the world, and you may need to use new distribution channels.

“With most of the business world being forced to operate online it has effectively opened a global market to any company, large or small. This is a great opportunity to stop thinking locally and to open our minds to a national or even global market.”