Knowing what you know now, how would you have prepared for COVID-19?

If nothing else, the 2020 pandemic has shown everybody—particularly business owners and entrepreneurs—the value of being prepared and ready to pivot.

We asked members of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization what they would have done differently knowing what they know now. 

Declutter. Declutter. Declutter.

Andrea Grisdale, founder and CEO at IC Bellagio

Had I known back then what I know today, I would:

• Declutter all aspects of my life and lead a much leaner life both professionally and personally
• Appreciate the simple things in life and appreciate the difference they can make to the day
• Take more time to fully think things through
• Juggle fewer balls
• Remove the “fat” from all aspects of my business

Ensure that your cash position is not skinny

Daniel Dickson, managing director at Amarco Enterprises

Ensure the balance sheet is in good condition, and the cashflow and cash reserves can support the business closing for an unknown period of time—without the assistance of government subsidies and laying off staff. Ensuring that your cash position is not skinny going into a pandemic is the greatest business relief.

Also, ensure that supplier agreements allow special dispensation in times of a pandemic.

Ensure your staff stay informed. It’s an enormous relief for people to not have uncertainty as to what is next.

Have a plan for the worst-case scenario

David Fastuca, founder at Ambisie and Locomote

Have a plan for the worst-case scenario. For example, what if your business had no revenue for 12 months?

Some questions to consider are:

• If my business had no revenue for 12 months, what does this reality look like?
• What actions need to take place so that my business survives?
  How fast do I need to act?
• What does my business need to look like so that it can survive 12 months without revenue?

Embrace remote teams and cloud-based technology

Jamie Skella, chief operating and product officer at Mogul

I’ve had the privilege of building distributed teams and working almost exclusively with cloud-based systems for about a decade now—often with no office or no on-premise IT infrastructure. I have used Zoom for more than half of that period.

The picture looks very similar in my current business, which has left me—let alone the entire company—in the fortunate position of frictionless transition into a COVID-19 world.

You could call this lucky; no one could have predicted this pandemic (although Bill Gates came close). But I’ve long been a believer in the stark benefits that flexible working environments enable. It felt inevitable that the world would follow suit.

However, I did not expect that our hands would be forced in this manner, leading to an incredible acceleration of decentralised workforces and processes.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, summarised this new reality with a startling yet unsurprising remark on the company’s recent quarterly earnings call: “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.”

Transition completely to virtual and focus on profit vs. revenue

Keith Roberts, founder and creative director at Zenman

There are two things I would have focused on:

1. Transition completely to a virtual workplace. COVID-19 has shown us that we can be productive and can collaborate effectively in a remote environment.
2. Have laser-focus on profit versus revenue. Put more in the coffers for rainy days, and operate as lean as possible whilst still producing exceptional work.

It’s what you do before the storm comes that most determines how you look after the storm passes

Kym Huynh, founder at WeTeachMe

I subscribe to the adage “fortune favours the prepared” (and the disciplined). The application of this idea in my life reveals itself in the strategic decision that I only enter battles that have been won before the fighting starts.

On being prepared, the main question I ask myself is: “Have we built disciplines in our personal, family and business that we live and breathe during both times of good and bad?”

On discipline, the questions I ask myself are:

• Business: Are the meeting rhythms set in stone, diarised, communicated and running like clockwork? (Daily huddle, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly.)
• Personal: Have I scheduled in regular check-ins with myself?
• Family: Have I scheduled in regularly touch-points with my family?
• Business: Do we have a regular communications cadence? (During bad times, increase the communications cadence.)
• Business, personal, family: Do we have cash buffers and reserves? (How long can my business, myself and my family survive without external assistance? How many months, years do we/I need so that we/I feel safe?)  Is my business, my family and I maintaining the discipline of regularly setting aside a portion of the income in a difficult-to-access savings account? Are my key relationships strong? Cash and capital is oxygen, but the best kind of capital are my relationships.
• Business: Do I regularly check-in and cultivate the relationships with people and businesses that have a vested interest in my or my businesses’ survival and success?
• Personal, family: Am I cultivating the relationships with the people most important in my life?

COVID-19 is not the first global pandemic and it won’t be the last global pandemic. We know with 100 percent certainty that there will be more, we just don’t know what they will look like and when they will appear. So when the inevitable storm hits, maintaining my discipline and protecting the things that keep me disciplined, keeps me in good form.

The importance of time, and the importance of people

Raymond Chou, founder and CEO at Infront Consulting Asia Pacific

Time is a resource that once taken, cannot be returned. However, how many of us really shape our lives around this? COVID-19 taught me that there may not be a tomorrow so I like to do things now.

I also look into who I invest my time with, who I invite to join me on my life journey, and what I need to engineer in my environment so that I achieve my goals in structured and date-stamped manner (rest and relaxation included).

On people, I have taken the time given back to me during COVID-19 to be more honest with myself and really consider the people around me as they have an indelible influence on the shape of my life.

A version of this article originally appeared on Kym Huynh’s blog.

For more insights and inspiration from today’s leading entrepreneurs, check out EO on Inc. and more articles from the EO blog.