3 Easy Steps to Mitigate Economically Depressive Factors (Also know as “How To Keep Your Business Going When You Get Too Much Snow”)

17 Feb 3 Easy Steps to Mitigate Economically Depressive Factors (Also know as “How To Keep Your Business Going When You Get Too Much Snow”)

Photo courtesy of onlysimchas.com

Social Media is a wash in posts about the winter weather in New England, and especially the hard hit city of Boston. 97.5 inches of snow in less than a month is kind of a lot even for a city in that region of the country.  When you get past the whining and moaning of all this talk though you may uncover some real hardships. Boston is now a city that is choked with snow.  Public transportation is shutting down everywhere, pedestrian pathways are impassable, those forced to drive have no parking options and are stuck in endless traffic in single lane roadways.  All this has an economic impact that will be felt well into the summer months if not longer.  The fact of the matter is that it is just near impossible to work at anything close to capacity for most Bostonians and those from the area that have to commute to the city.

Now this type of regional economic impact as a result of circumstance isn’t unique to Boston.  Different regions of the world each have had their own challenges that impact the economics of that region.  Political strife, weather, nature’s wrath, construction projects, and even our children’s propensity to be ill all effect our ability to work and produce.  The economic impact of influenza each winter is tracked and charted because of its wide spread economic impacts.  While the WHO (World Health Organization) is looking at it from a very macro level anyone who has ever missed work due to a sick child, or even being ill themselves, knows the micro impact of a sick day on their bank account and on their productivity.  Now let’s multiply that for the number of employees a small business may have.  Many startups and small businesses don’t have a huge cushion.  Weeks upon weeks of missed deadlines, employees who can’t get to work, additional costs, and closed doors can put a business under and quickly.  So how do we create systems that allow us to mitigate these economically depressive factors?  How do we create a business that isn’t ever, or maybe only rarely, effected by the natural and human factors that cause us to slow down?

First, we need to look at decentralizing operations wherever possible.  Can you create an operation where the “office” is accessible without physically going there?  The cloud computing world has made it possible for many businesses to get their operations securely online.  Getting as much of your operation remotely accessible as possible is essential.  Hosted accounting, inventory, time tracking, and other proprietary software mean the team can continue to work from the safety and comfort of home.  With minimal investment in security software, good firewalls, video conferencing, mobile data plans and back up power sources team members can continue to forge ahead on projects and ideas as well as daily tasks such as bookkeeping.   When this is implemented your team can keep their germs at home, avoid hazardous travel conditions, get working faster and keep competitive with regions and companies not being impacted by the external forces your company is.

Second, find multiple streams of revenue that you can draw from if you need to.  This can be VERY hard for brick and mortar retail and restaurants especially.  Do you have online sales capability or could you?  Can you draw passive income from various sources such as referral revenue, vendor discounts, or commissions?  The less dependent you are on a single stream of revenue the less the impact of a weather event or widespread illness in your area will have.

Third, you need to have a plan, share the plan and practice the plan.  Fire drills are key.  Know your plan of action should some obstacle to productivity appear, such as 97.5″ of snow say.  Who stays home?  Who must make an attempt to arrive at operations headquarters?  Are there things you must do in advance like charge up power supply devices?  Write down the plan.  Then you need to share the plan.  If the team leader is the only one that knows what to do and he or she isn’t available to lead it is all for nothing.  Share the plan early and often with all of your team.  Then practice the plan.  If your team has never used Skype or a remote cloud hosted access point before the learning curve will be steep.  However, if you use those things day to day and integrate them into your daily business functions it will be a smooth transition to your emergency plan.

After 15 years of business on an island 30 miles out to sea with a highly seasonal population and high frequency of weather related issues my business naturally evolved to be a business that could forge ahead regardless.  We moved to a multi-state model to minimalize impact both in our client base and our employee base, got our business into the cloud and found revenue streams that weren’t dependent on tax return preparation.  Happy to say 97.5″ of snow don’t seem to have slowed us down for more than a minute.