Advice for small businesses

[doadeer]

I'm a small business owner. I work in marketing and I'm a shareholder in my family fitness business. We've had to dramatically change our offering as our number of customers are declining.

These are scary times for small businesses - I thought perhaps this could be a thread to share advice from business who are trying to take their offering online or looking at how to stay in business.

Anyone welcome

Create and sell vouchers and merch. Really easy adaptation

Sites like selz.com are free and you can create instant digital downloads with serial numbers - upload a pdf of company artwork with the value of the voucher on it and you have instant payment and that person can download the voucher and print and use it another time. Create as many as you like with as many differing face values as you like.

Merch - sites like threadless. Company artwork, free, no outlay, just a small cut of the sale value. Then people can support you without you have to do anything.

and please, please, stop the social media begging posts for people to come to your establishments. It's heartbreaking and that makes it irresponsible - playing on peoples heartstrings to guilt them into making an unnecessary trip into town is NOT ON when government advice is to avoid this. By all means stay open but stop begging/guilting people to come.

Please adapt and change with the above methods. This is going to be here for months. You need to act now to stay afloat.

oh and obviously advertise and promo the heck out of your vouchers. It's so easy you could have that up and running in under an hour. use canva for quick and decent enough artwork.

What do you suggest for a small cafe? Hair dressers? Nurseries?

Cafes can do vouchers and merch - hairdressers can do both too, then use the guilting heartstrings 'support local businesses' posts as much as they like to sell these things just stop encouraging people into town

Nurseries, no idea but they seem to be staying open and are important for folk to get to work so it's not the same as a non essential trip for a coffee and a haircut and some preserved lemons from the deli

Temporarily turn your business into a shop supplying goods from wholesale places, and promote food bank donations or something.

Pubs as temporary shops would be quite nice fancy a gin while you browse?

I own a small dog boarding kennels.
We have had a couple of cancellations, I expect more as time goes on. I think people are sitting on thier holiday as long as possible before cancelling.
We will survive but we will have a tough year.

I am looking at applying the grant mentioned in the budget last week.

Any advice for the self employed? My partner is a cameraman and is facing so many job cancellations

@netstaller

Could he perhaps do some training? Offer photography classes over Skype? People will be getting bored in the house

@jazzycat
Could cafes make food for people to freeze? Big demand for tasty homemade style food

Vouchers wouldn't really work for my business because we already do loyalty cards which people have half used. I've developed this online platform where they sign up for videos a bit like Netflix. Feeling hopeful it will be popular