How Small Businesses Pivoted During COVID-19 to Stay Alive and Relevant

The effects of COVID-19 brought a critical eye to the challenges and successes of small businesses. Last year, businesses were tested in their ability to act – and adapt – quickly. They implemented new public health practices, like face coverings and distance markers, and they increased the sanitation of high-contact surfaces. Business owners also made important decisions about operating hours and locations and staffing and resources, choices that are still affecting businesses today.

With so much change in a short period of time, not all businesses were able to survive. For those that are still managing their expenses and revenues, the pandemic is highlighting a new way of looking at how businesses offer products and services, one that accepts uncertainty as an opportunity to pivot.

Rethink Products and Services to Diversify Revenue Streams

Manny Cosme, president and CEO of CFO Services Group, suggested businesses look at diversifying their revenue as a first step in keeping relevant during changing times.

“[There are] three channels you want to think about,” he explained. “It’s what I sell, who I sell it to, and how I deliver it. The more you can diversify along these three channels – which is really just coming up with new ways of doing each of those things – then the more diversified you’ll be. As you start to change one channel, all of a sudden, you have a new revenue stream that you develop. So it actually exponentially grows.”

Cosme gave an example of a change to a business’s customer base: “I challenge people to think beyond just your direct customer. Maybe there are some parallel customers, horizontal customers, that you can sell to. For example, if I sell accounting services to a small business, maybe I can sell accounting services to another accounting firm or to other professional accountants – or maybe even to a nonprofit that services people needing accounting services.”

​ A Creative Look at Resources Is an Opportunity to Pivot

The diversity of revenue streams does more than provide a steady customer base. It gives businesses the flexibility to evolve with the current needs, of customers, workers, and the industry they serve. Cosme described this as, “thinking outside the box and putting on the entrepreneurial hat.”

“The more you can diversify along those [three channels], the better off you’ll be because you can quickly pivot,” he said.

He gave an example of entrepreneurial creativity in one of his clients, the owner of a business in the event space industry. Event spaces were largely affected by the pandemic, but this business owner found a way to quickly pivot.

“Because he had such a large workforce, using that workforce, that resource that he had, retraining them quickly on doing something else, [he] was actually able to keep his business going afloat,” said Cosme.

Ultimately, he said, saving a business is about thinking critically, looking at resources and the three channels – what’s being sold, who it’s being sold to, and how it’s delivered – to generate creative solutions that are ready to embrace change.