BUILDING RESILIENCE
Recently, a client, I’ll call him Nick, told us that he had gone from a staff of 9 to a staff of a 2, himself and his daughter. He was distraught that he had to lay off his staff and didn't have any idea where to start rebuilding his business.
“We were like a family here.” He said. Not to mention that each member of the staff had a specialty area that they handled for their clients, who are mostly small business owners. We had everything a business owner would need, under one roof and we had a really successful business.”
We've heard this and similar stories from so many of our clients. Demand for services has started coming back but in many cases, like Nick’s, incoming revenue is at a standstill, rehiring is not in the budget and outstanding bills for legal services rendered are not being collected.
Clients, like Nick, are not alone.
A recent study of small businesses and business owners found that the 3 leading causes of business distress are:
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Loss of revenue stemmed from reduction in demand for services, unmanageable accounts receivable and inability to conduct usual marketing activities such as in-person networking.
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factors rendering work more difficult included loss of access to mail and files, working without separation from family, and internet connections and software at home that was not equal to the level of at the office.
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factors impeding client services included the inability to be immediately and personal present to conduct business and loss of vital team members to properly service clients.
Respondents to the survey did not believe that the "return to normal" would return their businesses to normal due to loss of clients, revenue and staff to perform work.
Among the biggest concerns expressed was the need to hire staff on the heels of significant financial depletion and a client base still experiencing financial difficulties.
"Our office was forced to give up our space because we couldn't afford the rent during the pandemic. Now we are a virtual business. There are a lot of challenges to overcome. We really need to rewire our whole business model."
FINDING SOLUTIONS
The watch word for 2020/21 has been resilience. Developing resilience for yourself and for your business is key to surviving and possibly even thriving. Business owners who have developed and exercised their resilience muscles may have an easier time:
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Tolerate change, stress, uncertainty and other types of adversity more effectively than low-resilience lawyers do. They develop healthy coping strategies which are more likely to mitigate the impact of stress and adversity.
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Believing that they can produce results in their lives. And they are more likely to believe that problems can be solved as a result of their own efforts. These beliefs, in turn, buffer against developing a “giving up” mentality and learned helplessness.
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Staying motivated to achieve in many different areas of their lives and are flexible in their ability to adapt to challenges, adversity, and changing life circumstances.
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Promoting the development and maintenance of high-quality relationships, and they draw upon these connections when they need help coping with stressful life events.
With the ability to tolerate change, stress and adversity comes the ability to start seeing solutions in a crisis. We’ve heard from some of our most resilient clients that they’ve taken steps, like these, to help the businesses survive over the past 18 months and to maintain their businesses for the foreseeable future.
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Changes in Expectations: A number of our clients have told us about adjustments they have made in their expectations for their business, their employees and themselves. Working from home brings a lot of challenges. Mix in kids home from school, episodes of exposure, unexpected quarantines and constant changes in how the courts are working and we may not be as productive as we’d like to be. Having reasonable expectations of how things are going to go, how people are going to perform and what roadblocks might pop up along the way, is the key to surviving during a crisis.
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Becoming Solution Based: For many clients getting past the problems and looking for solutions has been vital to our continued existence. “Regrouping took a while. “We had to find ways that we could be most helpful to our clients and discover what clients really need from us during the pandemic? What was the best way to reach out?” said one client. These were the questions that many businesses were asking themselves.
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Re-evaluating: Many businesses have shifted gears, some have even found new ways of developing business.
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Looking for the Silver Lining: I've heard business owners tell me they never would have found new ways to do business and different income streams without the pandemic.
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Look for the Things You Can Control: There is a lot in life that we can't control, but we can keep learning, keep growing, take steps to improve ourselves and our businesses. What can you control today?
