Hey all! ✨Hope everyone is having a fantastic week thus far.
Today we're wondering..
If there’s anything the pandemic taught me about running my business and what’s needed to evolve in this new world, it’s ________.
Fill in the blank! What did the pandemic teach you about running your business? What was needed for you to evolve to this 'new world'?
We look forward to reaching your replies! 💫
If there’s anything the pandemic taught me about running my business and what’s needed to evolve in this new world, it’s that I'm Jon Snow..... I know nothing!
Still learning new stuff every day & the past year has made that ever more apparent!
Gotta say so many of the responses ring true - makes it kinda nice to know that the challenges we've been facing here aren't personal or because I've got it all wrong before, but more that we're all just dong the best we can in a situation I don't think any of us have been in.
I've loved reading these replies! I think you're so right, it's a situation no one has been in yet and everyone is just doing their best! ✨Ty for sharing.
If there’s anything the pandemic taught me about running my business and what’s needed to evolve in this new world, it’s be nimble and adapt, collaborate with other business and bring forward new initiatives.
In the first week of the Lockdown we found our sales dropped 50%, I also noticed that our local taxi's had no work as everyone had locked down. We are located in a small town in central Victoria, Australia so as a small town we have no third party delivery services. So once I knew that as a take away store we could continue to trade I approached the taxi's to do our deliveries for us. They agreed, we worked out the rates and within 24 hours we had a delivery service up and running.
We had to shut our waiting area due to density requirements and we found customers getting frustrated due to not being able to know when their orders where ready. So after a bit of research I found an app that would broadcast to a TV the names of the orders that where ready. This solved this problem but was manual entry and staff didn't priorities this when we got busy.
As we had only taken over in October of 2019, my new website was good but not integrated into the POS we where using at the time. Once Covid hit our online ordering took off and we had a lot more orders online which then had to be manually entered into the POS. So after looking into integrated POS with website, I found Square's solution and in Feb 2021 we launched new website and new POS, with Fresh KDS running the Kitchen displays and TV displays. All the manual entry was taken away. We are now so much more efficient it make our old setup look Archaic even though it was only 12 months old and worked great. This integration also saved us around $100 a month in subscriptions.
The taxi deliveries are still running to this day and our customer are both grateful and happy that they can support both businesses with one transaction.
So what have we learnt,
1. There is always a better way
2. Use the downtime to improve your systems and process
3. Look at the problems from your customers perspective
4. Try collaborating with other businesses.
Take care and good luck.
Chris
