Archive for category: Article

Ideas for start-ups are often clouded in uncertainty during the best of times. In the midst of unprecedented global uncertainty, you might think it’s best to shelve any such plans for the time being.

In reality, it could actually be the best time ever to launch. With the growing demand for new ways to work and sell in light of health concerns and desire for new ways to access in-demand products, your startup idea could be just what’s needed. Here’s how to decide.

Whether your business idea is in demand

Over the course of the last three or four months, it has quickly become clear what type of gaps exist between what’s needed right now and what’s actually available. Quick searches uncover where there are supply chain issues and a lack of domestic manufacturing for much-needed products and for services to expedite those products.

Now’s the time to create the type of change that could help solve such issues. This might not be the only time we face a crisis of this magnitude. The question is whether your business idea fills the right role or not. If it does, then move quickly and find ways to accelerate its launch.

Determine if you can change the idea to meet new demand

If your small business idea isn’t quite ready for primetime just yet, consider whether it meets the new demand with some slight modifications or a pivot. If you are willing to redirect your business vision, it might be well worth putting in the necessary extra research rather than wait for the next good economic cycle to return.

Business owners will need to explore ways to alter their current business plan and evaluate the costs, resources, skills and timing necessary to do so. Evaluate the competition and funding availability to make it possible.

Seek funding to help launch the new business idea

One of the biggest deciding factors will be your ability to obtain funding. If you can make the case that your business model helps to solve a problem and can put people to work, then you might be able to attract investors.

Search for talent to help get the business idea off the ground

Another critical factor is whether you can find the talent willing to join your startup and take a chance on it during such uncertain times. Depending on the financial position of available talent, they may or may not be able to work on an equity basis. Ask potential talent about whether they would consider working for a startup and under what conditions.

Pressing the pause button is an acceptable choice

If you decide that this is not the right time for your startup idea, don’t feel bad about pressing the pause button. These uncertain times will pass and you’ll have another opportunity to launch. This moment to reflect may even give you more time to research, plan and develop your business idea to improve its odds for success down the road.

 

Source

During a slowdown, entrepreneurs can boost their business and prepare for a positive resurgence when the country recovers from COVID-19 and its economic impact.  Here are some ideas.

Connect

Now is the time to reach out to customers, but without the sales pitch.  Your customers are most likely struggling and stressed over everything from work and income to their kids.

Instead, connect with your customers on a more personal level.  Ask how they are doing.  Find out what they need in terms of advice or resources.  Share what you’re doing as a business to help people in your community.  Consider creating your own online course or a video guide series for your customer base.  Balancing your news with genuine interest about your customers’ welfare will help you get to know each customer on an individual level.

Research

You may now have time to get to all that research you filed away to read before a crisis hit.  Why not conduct market research to grow your business and explore opportunities for expansion?

Start your exploration with industry organizations.  These groups typically produce research reports, studies, and surveys to alert member companies to trends, regulatory issues, challenges, and opportunities.  Check out what your competition is up to and compare strategies.

Develop

When you’re running a business, there’s never enough time to work on your own professional development goals. But with a business slowdown, you can carve out time on your calendar for one or more of the many online courses available on digital learning sites.

Whether it’s a skill you want to learn or improve on, or a more formal goal of finishing or adding a degree, you’ll find lots of resources to help you meet your development goals.  From online sites to universities, courses are available on different subjects of your choice.

There are endless opportunities to transform into a better version of yourself.  Libraries and audiobook sites are now offering free access to a wealth of knowledge for your personal and professional development.

Train

While you work on yourself, ask your employees if there are skills they want to refine or company improvements they want to suggest to take the business to the next level.  You can conduct online training sessions now so that your team will be ready to put that training to work to provide better customer experiences when restrictions are lifted.

If your market research has identified new opportunities, this could be the time to alter your business model.  Though you should make a plan and take a tactical approach, you can launch fairly quickly without a complete model in place.  In doing so, you may find that business picks up.

An unexpected economic downturn may cause irritation, stress, and worry.  But it’s important to develop a different perspective.  Be proactive in assessing how you can transform the negative of a business slowdown into something that will make business better now and well into the future.

 

Source

Currently, the aviation industry is focused on the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on its growth.  In the longer term, aviation is likely to undergo structural changes with regard to demand and the degree of industry consolidation. That transition provides an opportunity to rebuild the industry for a low-carbon future, something that airlines have been grappling with for some time.

Even before the coronavirus pandemic began, the industry was facing the challenge of reducing its carbon emissions in line with international goals to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

The option that could be transformative, aligning the industry’s growth ambitions is sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). Compared with fossil kerosene, SAF could mean a reduction in carbon emissions of 70 percent to almost 100 percent.  To help push options forward, airlines can make targeted investments and purchase commitments that would increase SAF use while reducing costs.

Because of the scale of the challenge, any solution will require a multi-stakeholder approach that also includes governments, tech players, and suppliers. The trick is to create a suitable regulatory framework and supporting incentives so that no single player is penalized for going it alone.

The case for action

The aviation industry has taken steps to address rising emissions. In 2009, it set ambitious targets that include carbon-neutral growth from 2020 onward and halving its net emissions from 2005 levels by 2050.

We don’t know what the pandemic will mean for emissions growth over time. But the target for all industries, companies, and countries is to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, as laid out in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change goals of limiting global warming to no more than 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.  As the energy and transportation industries create a path to decarbonize, sectors in which climate effects are hard to decrease are coming under more pressure, and aviation is no exception.

Airlines shouldn’t risk the perception that they aren’t doing enough about CO₂, especially amid mounting scrutiny from the flying public, the media, investors, and regulators. With half of industry growth coming from Asia, including China, India, and Southeast Asia, de-carbonization can work only if airlines from those nations are on board.

Tech and efficiency gains

Airlines are already working to align emissions cuts with their bottom-line interests. They have encouraged operational efficiency and optimal air-traffic management (ATM) and invested billions of dollars to modernize aircraft with more efficient aerodynamics and engines using lighter-weight materials.

Operational efficiency

Fuel typically accounts for 20 to 30 percent of operational costs—one of the largest single cost items. Every kilogram of kerosene produces 3.15 kilograms of CO₂.  Airlines therefore have an intrinsic motivation for adopting more fuel-efficient flying, taxiing, and airport operations.  They are also eking out fuel-efficiency gains by decreasing the extra fuel loaded onto aircraft and introducing lighter materials to reduce aircraft weight.

New aircraft technology

New models have highly efficient engines, and modern long-haul twin-engine aircraft are replacing four-engine aircraft, which enables up to 20 percent fuel-efficiency improvement per passenger. Regarding commercial-fleet strategy, executives should consider not just fuel-price predictions but also the future cost of carbon. Applying carbon emissions as a fuel-cost premium could lead to an accelerated fleet rollover and faster adaption of future aircraft technology, including some electrification.  Electric propulsion could start with hybrid or turboelectric flying, enabling further improvements in fuel efficiency as jet engines become smaller and lighter, using less fuel.

Carbon offsetting

Carbon offsetting, provides a large-scale and industry-agnostic means of compensating for CO₂ emissions by reducing emissions elsewhere. Airlines are on board with offsetting; indeed, the industry is expected to be a key sponsor for global reforestation. Offsetting is also the basis for such market-based measures as Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA), the International Civil Aviation Organization’s carbon-reduction initiative.

Offsetting allows worldwide investment in projects to compensate for emissions, independent of buyers’ own efforts to reduce their footprints.  Yet offsetting as a longer-term solution is controversial. A credible environmental-footprint strategy includes reducing emissions through renewable fleets, fuel efficiency, and other measures as the role of SAF grows over time, in addition to offsetting emissions that remain.

Sustainable aviation fuel

Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is a solution that can achieve full de-carbonization, but it comes with challenges on both the supply and demand fronts. When burned, SAF creates the same amount of CO₂ emissions as conventional jet fuel. The improvement results from the fact that its production process absorbs CO₂, leading to a reduction in CO₂ emissions of 70 to 100 percent on a life-cycle basis.

The use of synfuels derived from hydrogen and captured carbon emissions could become a scalable option. Such synfuels require water, renewable electricity to produce hydrogen, and CO₂. Today, these power-to-liquid fuels are several times the cost of conventional kerosene, though we expect a significant cost reduction for green hydrogen (via reduced costs of renewable electricity and “electrolyzers”) in the coming years. In a first step, CO₂ could be captured as waste gas from carbon-intensive industries, such as steel, chemicals, and cement.

Long term—and to become net-zero CO₂—the required CO₂ needs to be extracted from the carbon cycle (taken from the air with direct air capture). While this is costly today, the process benefits from cheaper renewable-electricity generation in the future.  While synfuels could become an answer to cutting emissions over the long run, it is unclear, at this point, which SAF sources will emerge as winners.

The coronavirus pandemic has hit aviation hard. Yet as the industry emerges from this painful period, there is an opportunity to move closer to low-carbon goals.

 

Source

Purpose, even during tough times, is a key branding strategy.

Here are some important factors to develop this strategy during COVID-19 era.

Control what you can. 

It might feel like your life is out of control right now, so it’s important to focus your mind and efforts on the things that are within your control.  Reach out to neighbours, friends, family, and co-workers as a way to keep yourself grounded, while also helping those in need. When we’re supporting others, it gives us a sense of purpose.

Get a lot more personal. 

The world is operating in crisis mode, which means you should be communicating more.  Double down on your empathy by addressing the personal needs of your employees and vendors. This concern will be remembered long after the pandemic is over.

New services for new needs. 

Priorities have shifted for many people the world over, but your insight and expertise are still valuable. Learn what the new needs and pain-points are for your customers, clients and prospects. Provide them support and assistance, knowing that you are making a difference in their lives. It can alleviate stress and provide a sense of order.

Adapt to the realities of this strange time. 

Many coaches are working free-of-charge, or at deep discounts to help businesses figure out how to adapt. People’s priorities have temporarily, but drastically shifted, so please avoid obvious attempts at profiting off the pandemic, people will negatively remember those who kept acting as if this was a business(profit)-as-usual time.

Align around supporting the broader community. 

Think outside the box and put a concerted effort into actively supporting the community.  Businesses redeploying workers and equipment to create much needed life-saving devices and supplies, providing food and shelter to emergency workers, medical professionals traveling to hard-hit areas to work in hospitals.

There are free ways to help. 

Assess your available resources – not only financial, but also time and skills – to contribute to community efforts. The Purpose of life is not to be happy.  It is to be useful, to be honourable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.

 

Source

Across the globe, business leaders are beginning to consider what a “return” to the office means. While we all crave a return to normalcy, the workplace will never be the same. Leaders are being called upon to carefully navigate the way forward, making crucial decisions in un-chartered territories.

Given that, now is the perfect time to ask: How has my leadership changed for the better because of the pandemic?  There are two leadership traits that we hope leaders will continue to embrace going forward.

1.   Empathy:

Empathy is the ability to see the world as others see it, sense their emotions, and take their perspective, without judgement.  Individual employees in these progressive organisations feel seen, heard and understood. They feel safe to be vulnerable. Therefore, they are more likely to let their managers know what they need and what they can realistically produce. This in turn helps leaders meet those needs, manage expectations, and keep the work moving forward.

While this is the right thing to do for employees, it’s also led to another surprising benefit which we call the empathy advantage. Because leaders have become more oriented to seek perspectives and understand the needs of others, they are making better decisions more quickly than before.  Add empathy-building questions into your decision processes and the whole system will flourish.

2.   Authenticity:

Authenticity is about presence, living in the moment with conviction & confidence and staying true to yourself.  The current situation due to COVID-19 has broken down barriers between leaders and their teams. The Zoom box has become a bit of an equaliser, and as a result, teams and leaders are developing more trust, warmth, and rapport than ever before.

Going forward, maintain this new level of authenticity.  Bring your messy problems to your team.  Share what you’re struggling with.  Ask for help. Show up as your full self. When you do that, your team will too—and together, you’ll consistently generate innovative, creative solutions to intractable challenges.

The road back to the office will inevitably include course corrections, dents and wrong turns.  Hold on to the gifts of authenticity and empathy and you and your team will be better positioned to navigate it.

 

Source