By Bernie Heine

PROPHYLAXIS: the prevention of disease or control of its possible spread.

So, you want to reopen your business! There’s only one issue facing every business everywhere right now: How to ensure people know they won’t become sick and possibly die because they come into contact with your enterprise. We cannot go back to “business as usual”; COVID-19 is still out there and will be for the medium term. Because of health fears, employees and customers will opt out of face-to-face meetings in offices, UNLESS we make them feel safe.

We must add a whole new feature of social distancing into our products. A whole new aspect of “disinfection” to our services. It will be costly, and it will take time, so the sooner we begin the better. But remember: It is also an opportunity to take the lead in your sector and to enhance trust in your reputation and brand. The 4 Ps of marketing have to become 5… price, product, packaging, placement, and prophylaxis.

Read on below for the 4 steps to apply this 5th P.

4 Steps towards the NEW NORMAL business
Step 1 to reopening your business is to assess this new business environment and evaluate the impact of all of the changes you deem necessary to achieve 100% health confidence in your company from your employees and customers. There are 4 phases to achieving this first step…

  • Understand that “COVID-proofing” your business environment is the ONLY solution to ensuring people know they won’t become sick and possibly die because they come into contact with your enterprise.
  • Personally lead a whole company consultation on adapting your business in this time of the pandemic. This demands that you engage ALL of your employees in drawing up a “solution-impact” diagram. The solution we need to get to is that everybody feels (and in reality IS) physically safe in our hands. The aim is to generate as many ideas for achieving 100% confidence as are necessary.
  • Organize each idea generated by your solution-impact consultation into categories. As a guide only, we suggest 6 as per the diagram below: 
  • Rank in priority order the ideas you will implement. Some criteria to consider when prioritizing suggestions for action could be: How far will each idea go in achieving 100% confidence in our prophylaxis measures? How much will it cost? How easy or difficult will it be to implement? Allocate teams to get them done.

Step 2 is to embed all of your prophylactic adaptations into “new normal” business and revamp your business plan in line with the necessary changes that will bring employees and customers back at the same time as you ensure their health and safety.

Step 3 is to appraise all sources of funding and finance because we are all going to need help to get our businesses going again.

Step 4 is to create contingency plans, because we know this can happen again. Hope for the best and plan for the worst by taking the most pessimistic economic and public health forecast as your baseline measure.

This month, all U.S. states are easing “stay at home” orders, but our offices and work facilities can have no semblance of normality until we all learn how to be safe. It is up to business leaders everywhere to rise to this challenge.

Professional Business Coaches, Inc.
(781) 319-9820
Call PBC for a free consultation on these tactics for prophylaxis or on any other business issue. We’re only too glad to help.