At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses large and small were scrambling to figure out how they would rise to the challenge of keeping customers safe. Then they were just figuring out how to survive. Today, as the shutdown begins to ease and businesses reopen under new regulations, it’s more important than ever to have a clear plan for navigating your own reopening. Here are 5 tips from the Brand Poets team:

Resolve: Before you do anything, you need to step back and establish a realistic understanding of your business’s starting position ahead of reopening. Where were you back in February and where are you today? This will reveal immediate challenges to your operation, your team and your customers.

Resilience: Thriving in a post-shutdown world will require planning for multiple scenarios and outcomes. In this step, you should address both near-term challenges, like revenue and cash-flow, as well as develop potential solutions to longer-term threats to your business, such as a spike in coronavirus cases triggering new restrictions.

Return: Before you open your doors, create a detailed plan to return to business and scale quickly. This is an opportunity to evolve what you do, how you do it, where and when you do it, etc. Once open, your business needs to have a clear position and direction – and stick to it.

Reimagination: As you rethink your business in the context of the new normal, you may see opportunities to make strategic changes that will reduce your future exposure, improve operational agility and even boost productivity.

Reform: Finally, part of resiliency planning should involve understanding potential changes to the regulatory or business environment, and developing clear action plans in the event of a change. These should be automatic trigger points, so that the moment A happens, we do B.

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About Brand Poets

Founded by Tana M. Llinás, Brand Poets is a collective of strategists, storytellers, and digital artisans crafting smart, poignant campaigns that command attention.

Instagram: @BrandPoets

This article was originally published in the Community Newspapers.

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