He is currently the CEO of Leverage, Ext, Grow + Scale Mentors, CEO of the War Room Mastermind and Principal in DigitalMarketer.com, Traffic & Conversion Summit, Praxio.com, TruConversion.com and Real Estate Worldwide. Roland also co-founded and/or is the principal of 5 different inc. magazine fastest growing companies (e-commerce, e-learning, SaaS and real estate). He has a Bachelor in Science Major in Accounting from the University of Richmond and Virginia Commonwealth University. He also has a Juris Doctor in Law from the California Western School of Law. Roland’s specialties include scaling business through marketing, negotiation, copywriting, marketing strategy, putting deals together and looking for business to buy, sell and re-position.
Roland starts off with the question: How are we going to cope up with the COVID-19 Pandemic?
It is important to know that WE ARE GONNA GET THROUGH THIS. We may not know how long it’s going to last but it will definitely end at some point. And life will return to a somewhat normal situation.
So, instead of just waiting for things to happen, WE NEED TO PREPARE. We need to think about how we make it or how we continue our business.
You can be one of those people who are afraid to do anything because they are focused on their fears and sense of their panicking. So they choose not to do anything right now and just watch NETFLIX and hope that things are going to be ok. If you don’t do anything now and you don’t have enough income to last you for 30, 60, or 90 days, then it’s likely that your business will not survive.
Or you can go thinking about fighting your way through this while doing everything that you can to take advantage of every opportunity. Even though you are not going to thrive or there is a possibility of failure, you are still focusing on thinking up new strategies and positioning your business.
The important fact here is YOU HAVE A CHOICE. Once things start to return to normal, people who have frozen their businesses probably won’t be here anymore. Some may need to do a little bit of catching up as they are indecisive on what to do. Or you can be one of those who are fighting by strategically positioning themselves and be at a big advantage once everything is back to normal again.
So it’s very important, as we’re going through this, for you to position yourself as somebody who is going to:
- TAKE ACTION
- BE DECISIVE, and
- THINK STRATEGIES of how to move through this challenge we are all facing right now.
The first thing we need to do is change our mindsets. Get past the fear knowing that this thing is going to end eventually. Don’t stay in the same place that you were when you started. You need to get far ahead and think of strategies on how to survive in this situation.
There are four things you need to focus on: FINANCE, PEOPLE, OPERATIONS and MARKETING.
When your business is closed down or if sales are dramatically down, you may find that you are operating at a loss right now. But you can maximize your runway. Plan on how long you can go on with the cash you have right now and what you expect to receive in the future before you run out of cash. Figure out what is your runway. Then look into ways you can cut costs and also think about the possibility of integrating barter because you can trade what you do for your products or services. The more we are financially prepared, the better off we are.
The next thing would be to manage your people. Communicate with your staff and learn to delegate tasks they can do at home and empower them to step up or even upskill. Then reach out to your customers and keep the communication line open. Offer them various options to ensure and guarantee you business. You can also talk to your suppliers and this could be your landlord or it could be anyone who’s providing you with inventory or marketing services and asking them to give you a discount. You can continue to employ them and at the same time provide you services.
Then, learn to manage your operations. Since you want to have your valuable employees still available when this ends, you can either offer them to reduce the number of hours that they’re working for or have them do different jobs than what they did before since some of them might not be able or impossible to do the same tasks at home.
Lastly, strengthen your marketing strategies. You could do challenges as they are performing well right now where you say you were to do a 5 day beauty challenge and each day while they’re at home, they do a different thing and then they see the benefits of that and then you offer your product at the end of that or you can have your little messaging at the last part.
There’s a lot of pent up demand from everybody that’s been shut in so I know people will be eager to get beauty treatments, eager to go to salons, eager to travel again as soon as this thing ends.
Watch the replay of Roland’s talk here: https://youtu.be/ln-RMTGJdx4
