The world wide pandemic has left business owners with a great sense of loss and frustration. We’ll all impacted economically, many of us with a fraction of our staff remaining and some of us may not survive the economic fall out of COVID-19.

In essence we’re all at sea, and need a new map to work to in these changing circumstances.

A friend and client has called these VUCA times- Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous.

Volatile indeed! With their core business and revenue stream decimated, many business owners are just abdicating, hibernating or acting in denial of the current situation. The outlook is grim, and there’s no certain timeline for improvements on the horizon.

So what kind of map do we operate by? I’m inspired by a dead hero- DR. STEPHEN R. COVEY “Begin with the end in mind”, and “Always Be Sharpening the Axe”. He wrote in ‘The Habits of Highly Effective People’, about the power of imagination–the ability to envision in your mind what you cannot at present see with your eyes. It’s based on the principle that all things are created twice. You’re probably aware of this phenomenon: a mental creation precedes physical creation. The physical creation follows the mental, usually in complete detail mental, just as a building follows a blueprint. If you don’t make a conscious effort to visualise who you are and what you want in life, then you empower other people and circumstances to shape you and your life by default. It’s about connecting again with your own uniqueness and then defining the personal, moral, and ethical guidelines within which you can most happily express and fulfil yourself. 

So whatever plans you had for 2020, are now irrelevant. We need to rethink, repurpose and PIVOT to a fresh and evolved vision for what our business might look like, post-pandemic.

SEO is a favourite topic of mine. If you don’t engage in SEO, you may have to pay for Google Ads. Google has a captive market now and for the foreseeable future. Google controls search results through their (secret) algorithm, and also via Google Ads. You see, all other forms of advertising are now deprecated to the searches performed online. Especially now with the world wide lockdown due to COVID-19.

In April 2020, people are in their homes, not looking at business signage, billboards or vehicle signage. Advertising messages on television, have lost their coverage with the likes of Netflix and recordings that skip the ads.

Google has a stranglehold on searches performed (90%+) and dictates who is in the top 10 searches for a set of search terms.

Many of our clients have agreed to Google Ads to remain visible in online searches. Their investment ranges from $500 to $5,000 a month, just to attract eyeballs to their website or special offers. Imagine if every business globally agreed to pay for visibility on Google’s advertising platform. That would be the biggest business in the world. Hang on, that’s what they are already… right?

So what’s the alternative? SEO, or search engine optimisation attempts to get better visibility in searches, without paying for Google Ads. Sometimes it works, but it’s a slow old process. You see, Google has a goal for the ideal search result to be everything the searching public wants- authority, novelty, credibility and popularity. If your website had more hits, more visits, with people staying longer- then it would rank higher due to popularity. If your website had 3,000+ word articles that were scholarly and cited references and research- it would be more credible and authoritative. If your website structure features Questions and Answers- it may be ranked higher especially for current popular topics, like COVID-19, coronavirus or pandemic.

Welcome to the new normal- remote working, zoom meetings, and virtualisation. Lots of us are used to these tools and processes. Others will need a rapid upskilling and orientation on ‘Monday’ and other delegation tools.

What’s not normal is supervision by phone call, texting, email or video. For all of us used to management by walking around- it feels like staff are just slacking or doing their own thing.

Enter the idea of team on a screen. It’s not necessarily surveillance or mistrust, but it does satisfy some business owners requests for increased accountability. We’ve been commissioned to develop some simple technology for screen sharing and recording. In this way we can time stamp screen time, meetings and shared documents to better plot time on the job, even when staff are at home.

The system will also feature status colour coding, tasks in queue,  act as an automatic time recorder and offer stats on remote worker engagement and productivity.