Economic Development Recovery and Resiliency Playbook - Flipbook - Page 88
Guidance for Recovery
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the business community was in a
state of flux, subject to a shifing ordinance landscape and sudden swings
in customer comfort regarding in-person services. It can be a challenge
to distinguish exactly when a small business is entering recovery and how
to best engage it during that phase. The following are a few key indicators
that small businesses are advancing into recovery.
Stabilization of revenue. As the threat to life and property diminishes
over time, opportunities for increased sales are likely to occur as business
and commercial areas reopen, customers return to some type of preincident state, and business owners are more easily able to shif their focus
from survival to revenue growth.
Increased employee hours or new hires. An increase in customer
demand is likely to result in an increase in employee hours or hiring
additional employees, a positive sign that a business is moving into the
recovery stage. In addition to increased hours for current employers’
personnel, other signs of recovery related to labor could include a rise in
wages and job creation.
The Montecito Debris Flow blocks U.S. Highway 101
in January 2018, separating many business owners
from assistance resources.
Improved small business confidence. An increasingly positive future outlook ofers an additional key indicator that a small
business is moving into recovery. When an entrepreneur feels that the worst is behind them, there is a greater chance that
business owners are moving toward a return to normal operations or even growth. Periodic small business pulse surveys can be
useful to help track small business confidence and status as the incident cycle unfolds.
Business data that can indicate progress toward recovery can be captured directly through surveys of the local business
community, or with the assistance of entities that are actively engaged in collecting this data directly from business owners,
or from government data sources such as chambers of commerce, economic development organizations, or small business
technical assistance providers.
Opportunities and Tips for Building Business Resilience
In July 2020, the Harvard Business Review (HBR) issued A Guide to Building a More Resilient Business,109 which describes certain
principles of long-lasting systems that businesses can adopt to boost organizational and decision process resilience. These
principles include:
• Redundancy — duplicating business elements or by having diferent elements that achieve the same business objective
to ensure that systems do not fail catastrophically;
• Modularity — structuring an organization into smaller components with well-defined interfaces that allow individual
elements to fail without the whole system collapsing and allow for more rapid reorganization;
• Adaptability — evolving through trial and error or embedding processes and structures for flexibility and learning;
• Prudence — operating on the precautionary principle that if something could plausibly happen, it eventually will. This
calls for developing contingency plans and stress tests for plausible risks with significant consequences;
• Embeddedness — aligning a company’s goals and activities with those of broader systems. This is deemed critical to
long-term success as companies are embedded in supply chains and business ecosystems; and
• Diversity — employing people of diferent backgrounds and skills and creating an environment that fosters multiple
ways of thinking and doing things.
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https://hbr.org/2020/07/a-guide-to-building-a-more-resilient-business
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