Reinventing your Business in the COVID-19 Crisis Like Julius Caesar Would
This is a thought leadership article by Stephane Grand, Managing Partner at PrimeGlobal member firm S.J. Grand (Beijing, China) which looks at how you can reinvent your business during the COVID-19 crisis.
I have been looking into the lessons of history lately, on how we humans managed to rebuild and come out stronger after catastrophes hit. Any crisis, including this pandemic, is an opportunity to stop simply going with the flow, but to do things better or differently and to embark in totally new adventures. When the question is about survival, business as usual for doing whatever everyone else is doing simply is not the answer. In this sense, we actually should be expecting greatness from ourselves, challenge the status quo and really come out of our comfort zone.
In 49 B.C. on the banks of the Rubicon, Julius Caesar faced a critical choice. To remain in Gaul meant forfeiting his power to his enemies in Rome. Crossing the river into Italy would be a declaration of war. Caesar chose war (1).
Periods like the one we are living are beyond challenging. Even if your business has or had abundant cash a year ago, the effects of the sanitary crisis should already become noticeable. If your business is still profitable but slowing down, it is time to rethink it completely because slowdown is what happens before something comes to a grinding halt. At this point, we are already seeing a large number of victims of the sanitary crisis before the economic crisis has even struck. This is when we, owners and managers of companies of any size, see how interconnected we really are. Our clients are suffering, our suppliers are suffering, our competitors are becoming more aggressive, there is no time to lose.
Your very own Rubicon
If you are the founder or a partner in an SME, you have already made the most important decision of your business life. You have crossed your Rubicon when you decided to launch yourself in this venture. Now, there is no turning back anymore. You will think out-of-the-box or be buried in it. In a certain way, this is a wonderful time because you are given the opportunity to make yet another life-changing decision: entrench yourself and trust in your habits hoping to survive this crisis, or get out there and conquer Rome.
In a much humbler way, at SJ Grand, I have decided to grow and diversify instead of staying in place. For 18 years, the firm I founded has been providing the best Western-quality service to foreign investors in the difficult environment of China. The team and our geographic reach grew over the years, as we acquired more and more competent professionals. Taking advantage of this crisis and the obvious need for reinvention, I organized a competition amongst all of the employees of the firm, asking them to come up with creative solutions to the practical problems we were facing. I was amazed by how involved everybody ended up being, by how pragmatic and disruptive the proposals were. I am proud to be heading this team of such great people and qualified professionals.
18 years in the trenches
SJ Grand has been at the forefront of automation and data science applied to financial services since 2008. However, it was when the whole team was solicited and challenged that technology really became part of our corporate DNA, that we collectively decided to change the way we worked, and brought in more explicit and stringent policies to govern our relationships with clients, their employees and public officials. We established very clear and practical anti-bribery and anti-corruption policies and communicated on them. We reviewed our methods of communication with all the stakeholders in our work. We brought even more automation and machine learning into our daily operations. We reinvented ourselves and came out stronger.
This puts us in a better position to get even more leverage to do business out of our international mergers and acquisitions network. We created an e-commerce platform to have our clients reach the Chinese consumers. We created packages to help those of our clients in difficulty manage their working capital needs as well as to put their companies in hibernation or to get their losses and liquidate. We relaunched our tax practice as a separate one with a crack team spanning Greater China, Taiwan and Singapore.
A change in business environment as pervasive and profound as the one caused by this pandemic forces us, leaders of small and medium enterprises, to be creative and take risks. If immobility can lead to an almost certain death on a competitive battlefield that will have changed by the time the dust settles, it remains critical, however, to have a very clear understanding of the potential weaknesses of one's business. "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" works mostly when you are not facing a sea of torpedoes or when your hull can sustain some hits.
The Legion at your service
With 18 years of experience and data on foreign businesses in China, having gone through every sanitary and economic crisis that the world threw our way and survived them, we are in the great position to help determine a strategy for you. I want to see my clients and fellow business owners survive this crisis and come out reinforced. For this, SJ Grand offers you, free of charge, a risk analysis in English, Chinese, German, French, Spanish or Portuguese.You can contact SJ Grand below.
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S.J. Grand Financial and Tax Advisory
S.J. Grand Financial and Tax Advisory is a professional services firm that specializes in assisting foreign-invested companies and multinationals in Mainland China. Established in 2002 in Hong Kong, we now operate a network of offices across China’s leading hubs of foreign investment: Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. Our professionals offer a wealth of expertise for the financial, tax and consultancy needs of companies operating in China, with profitability strategies that are designed for improved performance, value creation and long-term growth.
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