Problem: How can small businesses change/adapt their business models to the new normal? Company: Anonymous Posted On: MindSumo

1. Small Businesses in COVID
Ways of surviving in the new normal

2. Upon performing market study, we can list down the most
popular small businesses existing in the market

3. Popular Small Businesses in the market
Following are the popular genres in which small businesses exist:
1. Health Consultant
2. Application Developer
3. Digital Marketing
4. Teaching
5. Delivery Service
6. Family Bakery
7. Graphic Designer
8. Food Delivery
9. Fitness
10. Affiliate Marketing

4. Let’s select one genre out of the list i.e. Teaching

5. Teaching
In the pre-COVID times, people used to prefer offline coaching and
training programs for personal skill development purposes. This
allowed the trainees to get more insights about the subject matter
along with detailed feedback upon their practice assignments.
Teaching can be bifurcated into 2 major categories, namely:
1. Personal (i.e. Coaching)
2. Professional (i.e. Training)
So, small businesses have to innovate in this regard and the very first
step would be to adapt to an online platform.

6. But, let’s discuss how can these businesses adapt
to an online platform…

7. Personal: Online Coaching
Personal coaching is aimed at providing coaching to any person for
his/her skill development.
Following are the innovative strategies to allure more crowd in this
domain:
1. Providing free online workshops: This would target the college
going students who are forced to study online in their semesters.
Workshops like these will not only make them aware of the
company presence, but will also help the small business owners
to fetch their information and create a systematic database for
their future references.

8. Personal: Online Coaching continued…
2. Student loyalty programme: The small business owner can introduce
a student loyalty program for the existing student crowd which used
to take offline courses previously. E.g. Special Discounts.
3. Set up an online payment mode: Setting up an online payment mode
is extremely easy yet important. This would allow the users to pay
without any hassle.
4. Digitalize the course content: This is utterly vital as students now
cannot own the physical books or sheets of assignments. So, making
PDF copies of all the resources available will be very useful.
5. Campus ambassador programme: The small business owner can hire
some campus ambassadors (college students from various colleges)
whose responsibility will be to gather crowd from their respective
colleges

9. Professional: Online Training
Professional training is aimed at targeting a group of people who work
in a same organisation. Companies hire professional trainers for the
skill development of their existing employees.
Following are the innovative strategies which the business owner can
follow:
1. Corporate tie-ups: Corporate tie-ups are the ways in which the
big companies and organisations can support such small
businesses by hiring them as their professional trainer.
2. Make a website: Online presence is something which matters
the most in running an online business. This will make people
aware of the company and the range of courses it has to offer. It
makes easy for the corporate as well to select from the range of
courses.

10. Professional: Online Training continued…
3. Hire some professional trainers: A professional trainer imprints a
good impact over the corporate. Unlike the previous times, now the
small business owner can hire some online trainers by incurring
lesser costs as he/she will not have to pay for the trainer
commutation expenses etc.
4. Offer schemes and bulk discounts: Corporates also consider
spending money with caution and so the decision makers of the
training committee can be drawn by offering bulk discounts on the
purchase of training packages.
5. Offer early bird offers and freebies to corporate employees: After
performing a proper training in the corporate organisation, special
offers like these will allure the employees working in that company
towards the personal coaching and skill development courses.

11. Technology utilization
Following are the top 5 technologies that can be utilized by the small
business owners which are quite inexpensive:
1. Online training platform: Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft
Teams
2. Online payment portal: PayPal, Amazon Pay or Google Pay
3. Website designing and development: WordPress or Wix
4. Email marketing: Mailchimp
5. Social media marketing: WhatsApp, Facebook or Google
Analytics
6. Online tests: Kahoot
7. Online surveys: SurveyMonkey
8. Assignment Submissions: GitHub
9. Managing the staff of trainers: Jira or Slack
10. Mobile application development: Android Studio using Flutter

12. It should always be remembered that innovation
only comes with the lack of resources.
So,
Stay creative!