Nourish Your Business to Recover from Disaster
by David Dean Menzies
A couple years back Hurricane Florence came ashore just south of Topsail Island, a 26-mile stretch of sand between Jacksonville and Wilmington, North Carolina. She did serious damage to the beach towns in my neck of the woods, trashing homes, washing away dunes, forcing business closures (some permanent), and halting tourism in its tracks.
The COVID-19 outbreak is having a similar negative impact economically, albeit on a wider scale. Economists and pundits are wondering aloud how a coronavirus pandemic recession might impact small businesses in the long term, and whether they could vanish altogether. Here at the coast, our hospitality industry is getting hit especially hard. Savvy business owners, however, are doing more than wringing their hands about what the future might hold and waiting for things to “get back to normal.” Instead, they are taking action to flatten the curve of lost revenue and opportunities. Here are some steps they are taking to set themselves up for post-coronavirus success.
Utilize Resources on Hand
After Hurricane Florence, one of the priorities of the three beach communities of North Topsail Beach, Surf City, and Topsail Beach was rebuilding the dunes. This is an expensive, long-term process involving pumping sand onto the beaches and implementing measures to keep it in place.Flo hit in September, and locals navigated a different world throughout a muted Halloween and Thanksgiving holiday season. As Christmas rolled around, the call went out for folks to put their trees to good use—instead of dragging them out to the curb for garbage pickup, we were asked to bring them to central drop-off locations.
The reason? Beach nourishment.
It turns out that Christmas trees are great sand catchers. Community leaders took hundreds of donated trees and tied them down along the entirety of Topsail Island. Today, you can still see half-covered trees at work, slowly but surely doing their job to stop further beach erosion and building up dunes.
Area Food trucks are taking a similar approach. With their usual customer hot spots of festivals, farmers markets, and breweries limited, many began looking at what other local resources were available to find hungry individuals and families. They found them in local neighborhoods—specifically in neighborhood Facebook and Next Door groups. They began connecting with residents and setting up regular visits.
Here in my neighborhood we’re seeing food trucks drawing a steady stream of customers on Friday or Saturday nights who are lining-up in responsible social distancing fashion to support local businesses. The food trucks are using social media to share menus, create brand awareness, and thank customers, building loyalty that will be remembered well beyond the end of this crisis.
Partner with Like-Minded Businesses
In today’s world of quarantine, self-isolation, and social distancing it may sound counter-intuitive to talk about reaching-out to other businesses for help. But the uniqueness of the current economic climate means there aren’t just a handful of businesses struggling due to individual bad business practices or poor decisions. Every business—brick and mortar as well as ecommerce—is encountering some level of customer drop-off.Look within your business tribe of peers, mentors, and co-dependent operations to find ways to cross-promote your products and services. (Let's be honest, some may be better at certain things like marketing; why not leverage their expertise?) Here in the Cape Fear region, craft breweries are huge. They’ve also been hit especially hard by COVID-19. Rather than go into isolation, they’ve ramped-up efforts to work together, such as collaborating to brew special batches of beer, sharing one another’s loyal customer bases to introduce beer aficionados to different local options. They are furthering this “rising tide lifts all boats” approach by working with local bottle shops and grocery stores to carry one another’s products, spreading the word via their social media accounts and a regional craft beer group. They are also inviting food trucks on-site, positioning them near customer areas for walk-in sales and curbside pickup.
Content is King
Bill Gates wrote his famous “Content is King” essay when talking about the internet in 1996. I’ve been encouraged by the number of small businesses heeding his advice over two decades later, continuing to produce original content and, in some cases, increase the amount of content they are publishing on website blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms.These businesses are using thoughtful combinations of text, photos, and videos to stay in front existing customers if for no other reason than to let them know they are still viable options for products and services. In some cases, businesses are discovering upticks in previously underutilized aspects of their online presence: our aforementioned local craft breweries, for example, are driving visitors toward online merchandise sales.
In addition to providing some degree of revenue continuity now, this is an essential part of setting your business up for success post-coronavirus in terms of brand awareness and all-important SEO. Delivering fresh content (ideally a minimum of 300 words which is necessary in order for blog posts to be ranked in search engines) and updating your old content can help with your rankings in Google. Maintaining high search engine rankings means customers will see you before competitors once spending increases post-pandemic.
Start Today for Success Tomorrow
Like beach dunes and Christmas trees, it will take some time for your business to completely recover from this current disaster. Just like catching one grain of sand at a time, if you make an effort now to start catching every little sale you can, over time you will start to see them build-up into protective shields for business growth and success.David Dean Menzies is a writer and marketer with a passion for innovative and inspiring people, places and things. He is also a published fiction author on Amazon.
