COVID-19: The Coronavirus and your business

While we understand the impact of the COVID-19 Coronavirus on our health I’m sure any small business owner is also immediately aware of the effects of society’s reaction to the bug on their bottom line. While I avoid making predictions, this could be one of the biggest financial disasters we’ve seen as a society. 
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Remember this blog is about small business and tourism marketing and that’s the focus here. 

As we see fewer and fewer people coming to our businesses we are faced with some grave choices to make. And as a very immediate lack of customers may dictate, those choices will likely affect our teams as well. 
These are not good times. At all. 
But there are a few things some businesses can do to minimize or even mitigate the impact to their operations. Here are some suggestions that may work and have for some so far. 

• Restaurants can offer take-out services and customer pick-up services. Instead of having customers come in the restaurant a curbside pick-up might mitigate some of the losses of patrons coming in. One of our local establishments quickly added an online ordering system to their website so customers can literally sit outside in their cars and order food on their phones. 
• A local bed and breakfast offers in-room breakfasts so guests don’t have to leave their rooms at all. This property has the side benefit of customers being able to park right adjacent to their rooms so they don’t have to interact with anybody. 
• Make sure your website is up to date and, if there is any way your products or services can be offered to people without their having to leave their homes, now is the time to enable this. 
• If you’ve been building up your mailing list now is the time to get that to work for you and make your digital presence work as hard as possible. 
• Consolidate your messaging. If everything you say you say in one place and go from there, you’re in a better place. 
• Offer gift certificates. If you can, perhaps gift certificates can be a temporary infusion of income while we all ride this out. 

I’m hoping our economy can withstand this hit we’re taking. To say that this is serious from a medical and economic standpoint would be the understatement of the year but let’s work together to support small business as much as possible. I think we all depend on it.