Growing A Business That Shrank

The recent pandemic has affected every single small business owner, sometimes in ways that could have been expected, but also in ways that are were novel and often quite scary. If you found that you’re one of the many business owners who found their business shrinking thanks to the pandemic, here are a few things that you can do to get it back on track.

Remember what you love about your business

The first thing you should try to do is fall back in love with your business. The past two years might have left you drained and feeling like your enthusiasm and hope have taken a long walk. However, it’s time to get back in the saddle and regain some footing. Giving your business a facelift, getting more involved in your business community, and creating a new business plan can help you set the stage for a return to form even beyond what you achieved pre-pandemic.

Start offering your services online

Take a look at the services that you currently offer and think about what you can do to offer them online, shifting your focus to the digital rather than the brick and mortar set-up. For a lot of businesses, this might mean establishing an e-commerce site and using your store as more of HQ for the online business than just its own storefront. For another example, a lot of personal trainers and gyms have started offering online training sessions, where clients can follow lessons via webcam rather than needing to be directly in the same space as the leader.

Diversify the services that you offer

If the services that you offer aren’t well suited to the new business landscape and their popularity has been falling off lately, then you might want to think about changing client needs and what you can diversify and expand into in order to help them. For the aforementioned example of the fitness business, rather than just straight fitness, you can also offer nutritional plans after getting your sports nutrition certification online. Consider the steps you have to take to reach customers that might no longer see the appeal in the services that you used to offer while tapping into a potential new target audience, as well.

Anticipate future interruptions

Given how long the ongoing pandemic has been raging, it’s safe to assume that we can’t anticipate things going back to “normal” for a long period of time or that, even if they do, there’s no guarantee that they will always stay that way. You should try to anticipate business interruptions as best as possible in the future. This might mean saving profits as a rainy day fund for the business, or just continuing to diversify how you offer your services so that even if you’re unable to offer options A or B in the future, you still have C, D, and E to rely on.

There’s no guarantee that your business will ever go back to the way that it used to be, and trying to fight for that can be a waste of time, energy, and money.