Adapting to the crisis

Without a doubt, you have heard the phrase “in these unprecedented times” more than you can count in the last couple of months. The isolation and lockdown have taken a pretty big toll on almost all aspects of life and small businesses are no exception to this. As someone who is running a small business and who works closely with small businesses, I have experienced the challenges first-hand.

With that being said, it has also been quite interesting to see how businesses – small and big – have responded quickly to the crisis by changing the way they conduct business on a day-to-day basis. When the lockdown was announced by the Government of Canada, my inbox was flooded with a barrage of emails from different clients asking me to put up notifications on their websites. These notifications were not all about business closures. In fact, most of them were about notifying clients on the new processes that they quickly introduced to continue serving their client base. Physiotherapists introduced online appointment processes; businesses selling physical products quickly started offering their products online via e-commerce; I even have a long-time client who started organizing kids’ parties online through Zoom and other platforms.

The Chinese word for “crisis” is often invoked in the western world as being composed of two characters signifying “danger” and “opportunity”. As cliché as this may sound, we have seen this concept in action throughout the last couple of months in the way that different parts of society found new and innovative ways to respond to the crisis at hand. It has been a true test of our resilience and adaptability as a society and so far we managed to survive it.

As the restrictions are slowly being eased and economies slowly opening, it will be very interesting to see the long-lasting effects of this in the way we conduct business. Some say that remote work is here to stay and that this is the beginning of a new era of telecommuting while others say that as soon as the lockdown is over, we will slowly go back to the old ways. Regardless of what happens, one thing is for sure: human ingenuity and creativity will always find ways to adapt to its environment and keep pushing us forward.

A big shout out to all healthcare and frontline workers, as well as my clients who keep amazing me with their ideas every day!