The world is different than it was just a few months ago, and as a result, so is the way we do business. With most everyone working from home now and the practice of social distancing, you need to find new ways to generate business, as well as keeping your employees active.

Here are 6 projects you can start during this pandemic that will hopefully drive revenue when things open back up:

  • Customer Data Collection

    Everyone’s at home. They’re bored. They’re not spending money in-person and probably rarely online. Right now is the perfect time to feed people content and collect as much customer information in return.

    By creating a contest or a fun game, you can grow your database for when things do open back up. And when they do, have an email plan in place for how you’re going to turn these new names into revenue.

  • Employee Training

    We’d be lying if we said we weren’t all somewhat limited by working from home. So if your employees have downtime right now, why not schedule some online training? Not only will it help your employees when we’re all back in the office, but just the extra interaction with people can go a long way right now. It also sends a great sign to your employees that you have their back and care about their success.

  • Freshen Your Reporting

    With more hours to yourself, now is a great time to dive into data. Whether you’re looking at existing reporting or wanting to build something new, use your 2019 data to make the best of the remaining time we’ll have in 2020. You might find a diamond in the rough that you never would have seen normally.

  • Employee Contests

    It’s important to stay in frequent contact with your employees during this time. And a fun way to do this might be through contests. This could be something like asking them to come up with a new business idea and the best one receives a prize. That is a win-win for both you and your employee.

    Or another fun contest is to ask employees to create their own videos from home. You can then use those videos on social media and build a more personal connection with your customers. And the video with the most likes could win another prize.

  • Discounted Gift Cards

    We’ve all seen the struggle in the restaurant industry right now and we encourage everyone to buy gift cards to help them out. But what if buying a gift card wasn’t just to help your local business. What if you offered a $50 gift card for $40? The customer gets a deal and you get revenue coming in. If you have historical data on redemption rates, you should be able to get an idea of what kind of discount would work best for you, but we recommend something that will make a customer more likely to purchase right now.

  • Self-Optimization

    Most businesses today are forced to adapt their processes to accommodate remote working scenarios, which brings a whole host of technological challenges. As employees settled into the ‘new norm’, it’s likely they have self-optimized their workloads to balance other home activities (kids etc.).  As a result of this self-optimization, there are bound to be opportunities to execute formal Six Sigma projects that would either invent a new way, or, improve old ways of doing business.  If properly conceived, this could have massive cost savings implications.

    Power BI just released a needed improvement to a standard analysis step in any six sigma project – control charts.  Click here if you would like to learn more.

 

We hope you can apply some of these 6 ideas to your business. And more importantly, we wish everyone health & happiness and look forward to things getting back to normal soon.

Your friends at PBI Advisors