Take a look at your business right now and see if you can identify the next challenge it may face or the next opportunity it might have. Is is sales? Is it order fulfilment? Is it customer service? It is e-commerce? Over the past 6 weeks many businesses have been forced to re-evaluate what they are doing and how they are doing it. The economy and market may take a while to normalize but in the meantime, you have an opportunity to help your team improve and upgrade their skills to better match what you business needs today and going forward.
One of the challenges faced by many small businesses is that there is limited time available to invest in people. Many people working for a small business have very full days and there isn’t a lot of excessive time to use for training and learning new skills. Many times an entrepreneur will hire a new person who will add the needed skill to the business but the business technically can’t afford them. The catch 22 is that the business can’t afford to not hire them either. An entrepreneur will usually hope that everything works out and that the cost of the new hire will be absorbed by the increase in revenue (or drop in expenses) that may get realized with the new skill.
When your business has some downtime it’s usually the best time to re-evaluate how tasks are done and to find new ways of doing them. The best opportunity an entrepreneur has is to train the people on their team who already know the result that is needed and simply need to learn how to use new tools and resources to get it. Is this a good time for you to evaluate the gaps in your business and help your team fill them in?
