The coronavirus has paralyzed practically all of Europe, China and other countries in the rest of the world for two months. All commercial activity has come to a standstill overnight. As the different phases are overcome to return to relative normality, businesses are reopening their doors.
Depending on the type of business, we must follow a series of restrictions such as social distancing, the use of masks, limited capacity ... These limitations they may be the nail in the coffin for many entrepreneurs and freelancers after having been without activity for two months
Many are entrepreneurs and freelancers who are trying to find methods to be able to keep the business open, trying to lose as little money as possible or at least cover expenses until the situation improves in the coming months. If you want to know some methods that can help you overcome the crisis that the coronavirus has caused, I invite you to continue reading, since surely, you will find several ideas that had not crossed your mind.
You may think that this is one more article than you can find on the internet of this type, but the first thing you should know is that I am also an entrepreneur, therefore, I know perfectly what are the problems that now affect us and those that we have what to try seek a solution as soon as possible.
Comprehensive management applications
Tax and labor consultancies allow us to manage payroll, invoices, taxes, accounting ... in a very simple way and without worrying. But, depending on the volume of our company and the number of employees, it is likely that each month, the invoice of our advisor is one of the expenses that we will not be able to cover.
Before this situation our recommendation is: manage your company in the cloud. It is an increasingly simple and economical process, since we have at our disposal a large number of services concentrated in one place and at a much lower cost of which a dedicated advisor may represent.
Negotiate with our suppliers
Many are the companies and freelancers that are trying to regain normality on after the passage of the coronavirus. One of the most important aspects in a company is related to payments. Before thinking about reducing expenses, which can be harmful in the long run, we should sit down to dialogue with our suppliers.
Depending on the economic situation in which the coronavirus has left our supplier, they will most likely accept delay the collection of pending invoices. Keep in mind that any company or self-employed prefers to charge, even if it is late, than not to charge.
Obviously, before sitting down to try to extend payments, we must take into account the turnover of our supplieras we are probably not the only customers requesting a deferral.
Work from home
Most of the office work that is not carried out in front of the public in person, it can be done perfectly from home, as long as a work discipline is established that both employees and workers must comply with.
Working from home, not only allows to reduce the space of the offices, allowing the entrepreneur to look for smaller offices and thus reduce the amount of the monthly rent. It also allows the employer to save money on allowances or mileage if necessary.
Applications to meet the needs of any company for its workers to work remotely, there are all kinds of applications that They allow you to work remotely without any lacks.
Organize work
Microsoft's Teams application is designed to allow companies to work remotely, whether establishes a common and individual communication channel with each of the users.
Microsoft Teams, integrates a video calling platform that allows us to hold virtual meetings without having to find ourselves having to set up a space in the office to be able to hold them, whether they are periodic or one-off.
He works hand in hand with To-Do, Microsoft's task application, which allows us to organize work pending of each of the employees and check their status. It integrates with Office 365, allowing several people to work together on the same document.
Although Slack is an excellent alternativeAs it does not offer video calls and the integration with a task manager, it does not make it a recommended application, since as far as possible it is a question of grouping all possible functions in the same application.
Virtual meetings
When it comes to making video calls, the number of valid options is very wide. If we have chosen to use Microsoft Teams, we can make video calls through the same application, so no need to resort to other services.
If this is not the case, the options offered by both Google Meet and Zoom are improvements in both the number of services and the number of participants (100 in the same video call). Both applications, like Microsoft Teams, are also available for mobile devices.
Remote connection
If we use a management program in our business, the first thing we must do is ask the developer if the application offers the possibility of remote access, so that with a single computer, all employees can continue working as before.
If this is not the case, we can make use of remote management applications, applications that allow us to connect from anywhere and make use of the entire computer, not just the management application that is installed on the computer. TeamViewer is one of the most complete solutions available on the market, since it also offers us applications for mobile devices.
Create an online store
If you have ever considered creating an online store may now be the ideal time. On the internet we can find different services that allow us to create a web page, manage the payment, the shipping methods ... Depending on what our business is, it will allow us to expand the potential audience that we can reach.
In this sense, if the Facebook page of our company usually has a lot of activity, we can make use of the new Facebook platform called Facebook Stores, a platform that helps small businesses to sell their products through Facebook and that has been launched earlier than initially planned by Mark Zuckerberg's company with the aim of helping small businesses in these uncertain times.
According to this platform, create an online store through Facebook Stores it is a very quick and easy process Through the different templates and tools that they put at our disposal, so if we have an image of all our products, we can have our own store available in a few minutes.