Business Adaptability

How is small business adapting to COVID19?

NOTE: Since this article was posted it has been updated with new information.
 
When governors issued stay at home orders and business closings it was a shock to say the least. Businesses were deemed essential or non-essential, the latter being ordered closed for the foreseeable future with no re opening date. Small businesses of all sizes and industry are desperately hurting. It’s interesting to see how businesses have adapted to either reach their customers while closed or try to keep customers while operating under restrictions.

Businesses that provide personal services such as salons and barbershops do not have much choice. Restaurants were given a reprieve in that they could provide take out or delivery. Some businesses that were allowed to stay open are still seeing a decline in sales. People are just not going out. Even these businesses have had to become creative to develop more customers. One of the new buzzwords is contactless. Companies are using that description to reassure customers that you can obtain products without having to meet someone face to face. Businesses like hardware stores have begun offering curbside pickup to encourage shoppers that may not want to go inside the physical store. Ecommerce has increased especially for stores that are closed and have had to find other sales outlets.

A contactless marketing coup has been Little Caesar’s pizza portal. They offered in store contactless pizza pick up before contactless was a thing. They quickly adjusted marketing with the new terminology to point out their system of pizza delivery. Other delivery pizza companies are ensuring drivers wear gloves and masks, and leave the thermal delivery bag outside the door for the customer to retrieve the products. In addition to deals and sales there’s been other creativity to entice customers. Restaurants are offering ingredient kits to make your favorite menu item at home. Bakeries are selling cake and cupcake decoration kits. Gardening and craft projects, the list grows everyday of small businesses adapting to new marketing schemes.

What about when the restrictions ease? When everything reopens how are businesses going to change to reassure customers that it’s safe to patronize? As we’ve seen with the beaches around the country, when there’s a reopening some people are going to come out droves. Others will wait a few days or weeks to see what happens. And others may not return to restaurants and at all. A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll of 1,005 people found that Americans are wary to return to restaurants and retail.

Retailers will have to demonstrate what sanitization and distancing procedures are being taken to reassure customers that it is safe to visit. The stores that are open now are taking measures to sanitize. Grocery stores are limiting shoppers and installing shields at checkouts. Restaurants are limiting capacity and reassigning staff to compartmentalize duties to one person-one task. Other types of retail are installing shields, social distanced queue markers, and ramping up contactless pay devices. Others that didn’t normally wear gloves are now. And, of course, everyone is wearing masks. Store signs use to read-No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service. Now, No Mask-No Service!

Patrons have to know what is being down to ensure their safety. Receiving communications as to the efforts and seeing the physical efforts, employees wearing masks, limited capacity, shields at points of sale. all this goes a long way to reassure customers that they will be safe when shopping.

Some companies that sell services and some product based are able maintain operations by allowing employees to work from home. How will that change? Will companies move towards or relax work from home rules? If you’d Goolged the word zoom in January 2020 the search results would have been much different than they are in May 2020.  Now instead of the online dictionary definition (a more likely result) the first return is the website for the online video conferencing company. “Zoom” quickly became synonymous with web meetings. Japan’s business culture is having great difficulty with work from home. As technologically advanced as Japan is their business world is steep in tradition, requiring in person transactions and paper documents. 

What will go away and what will return to pre COVID? Sanitizing wipe downs, gloves, masks, and register shields will probably stay. Will we shake hands to close a deal? Or will elbow bumps be the new social norm of greeting and accords.

The deeper we go into the economic shutdown news of businesses adapting is breaking everyday. Here are a few approaches to rethinking how we do business. 

Still operating drive-in theaters are seeing a boom and entrepreneurs are looking to open new drive-ins. Music promoters are experimenting with drive-in concerts where venues will allow.

In addition to drive thru, Chick-Fil-A expanded curbside and added another feature. When the food is delivered to your car, it is carried inside of a plastic container. The customer then lifts their food bags out of the container. 

LYFT issued guidelines to reassure riders how they are ensuring clean and safe rides. https://www.lyft.com/blog/posts/lyft-launching-health-safety-program
A video of how Dutch restaurants are protecting employees and customers was released. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kz3oi4WIKl0

There’s been a breach

Note: This post was originally published in 2015. It has been updated with new information relating to the topic. 

Last week Twitter announced a breach of passwords. Twitter claimed that no personal data was released and encouraged users to change passwords. Since the big breaches from the fall of 2014 it seems like every month we have heard about a new breach. If not banks then major retailers or healthcare systems. The private information we entrust others to keep safe is being violated on a regular basis.

Try as you might to stay off the “grid” by paying cash, getting paper statements, or banking in person, eventually you will be a victim of identity theft or some sort of financial intrusion. Either because of convenience or because a company demands you use an electronic system. It is difficult to navigate in today’s world without having some portion of personal data stored on an institution’s computer.

Personal data

Ever check out at a store that you shop infrequently and they ask for your address, phone number, or name, and you’re in their system? Freaky right? At some point you’ve provided them with your personal information. Larger companies own smaller companies…your personal data is bought and shared daily.

Tax season just passed and it’s a good bet that when you filed your taxes, electronically of course, your return was rejected by the IRS because, surprise, the return associated with your social security number has already been filed.  

The IRS estimates that more than 122 million returns were filed electronically in 2017. While the IRS has seen a decline in personal tax fraud, falsified business returns have increased. The IRS identified 10,000 compared to 4,000 fraudulent business returns in 2016.  The IRS doesn’t publish everything it is doing to combat tax identity fraud. Some of the public efforts are tightening access to private sector filing software and more thoroughly scrutinizing refunds. When your SSN has been compromised the IRS issues you an electronic identification number for future filings. This solution should keep your tax information safe, as it is a unique number. But so was you’re your SSN at the time it was generated. 

We use to worry about someone stealing a driver’s license or credit card. If that didn’t happen you didn’t have much to worry about. Years ago, while working as an undercover detective, and when I say “years ago” I mean before there was a computer in every home and a world-wide inter web of computers.  A senior administrator had a briefcase stolen that contained contact information for all of the detectives. Not just name and phone numbers but addresses, birthdays and yes the coveted social security number. Not sure what we called it then, but it wasn’t a breach. But in today’s terminology, the breach compromised so much personal information what could one do? You couldn’t completely change everything. In those days though we were more concerned with operational security than identity theft. Yes, identity theft occurred, but not on the level or frequency as today. The criminals at that time weren’t as sophisticated in that skill set as they are today. Plus, copying and sharing was a literal concept. The documents would have to be photocopied and personally distributed. 

We knew that if we worked hard and fast to recover the documents, we could determine the extent at which the information had been distributed. The faster the culprit was caught, the less chance the information could be distributed. Today, your information can be stolen from a third party vendor’s database by a criminal in another country and uploaded to a distribution network all from a keyboard, in a matter of minutes.

Document, document, document

The tenets of the paper world of long ago still hold true. Identify the breach and work fast to stop the leak.

Once you’ve identified a problem, you need to start working to quickly plug the leak. Contact the source in which you became aware of the breach-credit card, driver’s license, IRS, etc. Get that entity started on resolving the issue. File a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, your State’s Attorney Generals Office, even the FBI if you seem to be apart of a larger breach. File local police reports also. It may seem for naught but you’ll have a record of the report and a case number to go with any other complaint filings. Most of the entities you will deal with, including law enforcement, have online complaint forms. It doesn’t take long and you can get it done in less than a day.

Document, document, document, everything you do and the entities you’ve contacted. Keep your notes for future reference.

Consider a monitoring program. There are lots of companies out there that perform this service. Of course do your research and choose wisely. If the breach occurred from a major retailer, financial, or health institution, they may offer some sort of credit monitoring or identity repair service for free. Take advantage of it.

Update, update, update

If you get notification of a password breach or hear it on the news, such as the recent Twitter breach, don’t ignore it. Like Twitter, companies publicize that no personal data was infiltrated but passwords “may” have been compromised. It is important to regularly change passwords as a matter of routine. However, when a company has had their password database specifically breached it is important to act quickly and update your settings. It is equally important to update other accounts in which you use that same password. Maybe get in the habit of updating passwords whenever there is a breach in the news. 

We should have different passwords for every account but let’s face it no one does that. So when one password is compromised the other accounts that use that same password are now in danger of being hacked. Cyber-criminals have highly sophisticated search processes. They may not be searching for you, specifically, but once they get your logon or password they can use that to find other accounts. Once they have one piece of the puzzle it is isn’t that difficult to break the rest.