This is not business as usual.

Not for so many of us. We have no idea what’s gonna happen, right? We don’t know if our jobs are going to be there when we get back. People are filing for unemployment who have never had to before. This is a crisis of a global scale, and there are things that you need to do in order to stay competitive that you didn’t need to do three weeks ago. Let’s talk about these things one at a time.

You could have gotten by with just a static website before – but now you can’t.

Before you didn’t have an online presence, or maybe just had a brochure website. Your business was completely based in in-person events and you didn’t need a website that is regularly updated. Well, now you do. And not only that, your website doesn’t just need to look good, it needs to do work for you.

It’s still going to be the thing that convinces people to do things. I have an old training on my site that is about the six jobs that you need to give your website because done right your website is the cheapest employee you will ever hire. Make sure it does work. Make sure it’s converting. Make sure you have subscribers. Make sure you have something to give subscribers.

And that leads me to my next point.

You need to think about webinars.

I have been hammering the drum of webinars for as long as I’ve been online but now people are listening because you can’t do your in-person events, at least not the way you think you can. I just saw an e-mail come into my inbox that said something about trying to figure out how to turn a three-day event into something that can be streamed live.

The answer is you can’t. You can’t do it that way.

With a three-day event the magic is telling somebody that if they show up to your event they get to only focus on that: put the cell phone on silent, make arrangements for the kids to be cared for –  you’re leaving your house. You’re getting on a plane, you’re getting in your car, you’re going somewhere for three days.

You cannot expect people to be able to do that online. The only quiet I’m getting right now to write this is because my family got in the car
for a ride because they needed to escape the four walls of the house. My three-year-old said I gotta get out of the house today, and so instead of dropping something in the mail, they’re dropping something off at somebody else’s house across town.

These are extraordinary times. I don’t have eight hours of quiet to dedicate to networking or conferencing or anything – and nobody else does either. If anyone could do it, it would be someone who is very accustomed to working online like me, but I can’t. So you have to adjust, you have to pivot, you have to change your expectations of what you could do in an in-person event.

So again, so you need your website. You need a webinar.

You need to pivot your idea of what it is you provide.

And this is where the small business has an incredible advantage. You have a lower rent overhead, if at all. You have this ability to turn your e-mail list into a group of people that will provide for you.

I was in a mastermind call yesterday and my friend was telling me that a friend of hers who owns a hair salon. She said what if we asked people to buy gift cards instead of having to close down. She still has rent. She has to pay, but she can’t be open. So they did an Instagram campaign for selling gift cards in advance and they made $2,500 in three days, and they can stay open for a while longer.

It just takes a bit of pivoting and if you want help I am happy to give you 20 minutes of my time trying to brainstorm ways that you can stay agile and make it through this downturn without having to close your doors forever.