I don't think any businesses had contingency plans for covid-19 type scenarios.
I do. Thank you Google for the years and years of algorithm changes that taught me these particular business lessons! So, I wanted to chime in on this because it is something that has come up a lot around the table at my company lately. To be open, we have benefited greatly in traffic from this. That being said, when this all started, we had to have many "what if" discussions. And I have to say that our asses were covered because of lessons I learned from Panda and Penguin.
Lesson #1 Create a 6 month "stretch" plan - My site was hit 2X by Panda. Fortunately, I dodged the initial wave after Panda was released and the 2 other times I was hit, I knew exactly what I did to trip Panda. It took around 6 months to recover from each. So after that, I created a 6 month "stretch" plan. I am in a publishing niche. We publish multiple articles a day. As part of our model now, we have articles written for our full schedule at least 1 month out. To be honest, most of the time we are 3 months out. Meaning that when you visit my site and read a "brand new" article, we actually had it uploaded and scheduled 1-3 months earlier. Why do we do this? Because of the 6 month stretch plan. If we were to get hit by an algo change (or an utterly out of the blue pandemic), we can reschedule everything on the calendar, reduce publishing frequency and look like we are still alive even though we had to stop all production. The lesson was to create a plan that covers a reasonable amount of time to recover from a catastrophic business event.
Lesson #2 Diversify, diversify, diversify - I have to admit... We were not as on point on this as I would have liked. I have been trying to be more diversified for 10 years now. It is just really hard to break the Google habit. We had actually had some really great plans this year to diversify revenue streams and if we had them in place when this hit (instead of still being in the planning stage), we would have made a killing during this. As it is, we are hoping to be able to take advantage of the traffic we will see later. But this whole situation has shown us that we can no longer push off diversification. If you are telling people that 70+% of your income/traffic is coming from one source, you need to fix that.
Lesson #3 Be nimble, know how to pivot - Frankly, you don't need a pandemic to benefit from this one. In the city I live in, I have been proud at how brick and mortar businesses around me have been able to adopt a business mindset that is just standard in my world. I have also been incredibly shocked at how many in my city refuse to even try to adapt. I don't know why I am shocked though because I saw the exact same mindset in the online world after Panda and Penguin. The ones that will adapt will most likely survive. The ones that do not, probably not.
In the world of websites, if you have any mindset other than being open to how to pivot your marketing quickly, you are dead. It has been that way for as long as I have been in the business (and I once sat on Matt Cutts' lap in a cab on the way to a party at a PubCon conference and that is how long I have been in the business. LOL). It is unimaginable to me that you would cling to a business model that doesn't work. And yet, I see it both in the online and offline world ALL THE TIME. This idea that the business model you had should work no matter what happens. Nope, that is not true. Be nimble and embrace the pivot.
Lesson #4 Have backup funding sources set up now- Well, I suppose that would have been 6 months ago now. I have to say that due to the seasonal nature of my niche, feast and famine is just a way of life (quite literally you could say). For many, many years I have been keenly aware of setting up access to cash while things are flush so that I can have access to it when it is not. I learned that because of Google algorithm updates, not because I expected a pandemic to ever happen. Not that I have needed to touch it, but I have a line of credit that would allow me to pay ALL of my employees for 3 months without any income. Combine this with the stretch plan, we could actually survive 1 year without ANY income. Google's updates taught me that we needed to do that. I did not end up needing it with COVID-19, but if I had needed it, I would have been just fine.
I have spent most of my life as a business owner doing business online planning on how to deal with Google making a
tiny change to their code which would then have the potential to destroy my company. Over the years, I watched dozens of other business owners, who frankly were larger than me, be obliterated because they failed to make these kinds of plans.
The COVID-19 situation is just another Florida/Panda/Penguin update. There are important lessons during this time that can help your company not only survive this, but any other catastrophic event in the future, be it from a disease or a line of code being changed at Googleplex or whatever else the world throws at you.
