Resilience

One of the lessons we should take away from the COVID experience – in a business context – is the ability to recover quickly from unexpected challenges.

Firms in the hospitality and entertainment sectors are excused as they have had no power to act in their own best interest due to government lockdown directives.

The rest of us, to varying degrees, have either managed to weather COVID disruption or been forced out of business.

Financially, if your business had significant cash reserves or other assets that could be converted to cash, then it would be in a much better place to survive COVID disruption than firms who had stripped out cash reserves to support the lifestyle costs of the owners or that were already in a parlous financial state due to difficult trading challenges prior to the COVID outbreak.

There will always be a trade-off between retaining profits as a rainy-day fund, investing funds in business development or withdrawing funds to support personal goals.

COVID has woken us up to the value of resilience, one more factor that we will be wise to consider when planning our businesses development from now on.