What are you or other business owners in your community doing to adapt, innovate, and recover from the effects of the pandemic?

I have had to adapt from my classroom happiness to a virtual presence. Big change but I am working on it. I must admit I DO NOT miss the traveling from class to class. The positive is I seem to now be able to touch the lives of more students. "The quality of your life will be determined by the quality of your contribution. When you work to improve the lives of others your life improves automatically." - Kurek Ashley

We are going to each customer and talking to them. I found out that 60% of my customers didnt even know all about our business and the additional services we offered and now we are gaining sales with existing customers just by calling and asking questions.

At the beginning of the shut-in period from the pandemic, our parent company, Best Version Media, designed an online remote-guided review we can present to our prospective sponsors of our magazine we share online while we talk on the telephone. We normally prefer face-to-face meetings, but the pandemic forces us all to adapt with Zoom meetings, Facetime, What'sAp and various other ways using technology to reach our markets. We care about our sponsor's health and well being as we also care about our reader's safety. We are all in this together. We bring neighbors together with the magazine they receive in the mail, at no charge. We give our sponsors a platform to tell their stories and get to know their local communities. 

Trying to keep people from fixating on it...As long as the masks, partial closings, and meaningless mandates exist, recovery will be impossible! Let's talk about something else!

Using Zoom, posts of Alignable, knocking on more doors and making appointments when I can. Just going after business harder than ever since it is hard to get into places or even talk. I wish people would a least be professional and return calls or emails. We are all just trying to survive during these crazy times. 

Expand your sphere of influence. Expand your promotional & marketing activities. Make known your good works and, above all, do not go into agreement with the merchants of chaos in the media.

I think adapting is the key word here. When Covid19 happened every business had to adapt in some way. People found out that it is possible to still have meetings, to still shop at your favorite stores, to still get your favorite meal from your favorite restaurant. Good communication from businesses on social media helped get the word out for how we could still do business with them. I think the businesses that struggled the most are the ones that had a hard time figuring out what changes to make and how to communicate that with their customer base.

I publish a magazine and run a digital marketing agency. The actual work has always been online so that hasn't changed. I have offered free extras and extra attention as the pandemic began. However, if a business is going out of business or about to, all the extras in the world may not change their cash flow and keep them as a client. New sales have been tough because the types of businesses I serve are in-person service businesses that really struggling. It has been a matter of working a lot longer hours and trying to be creative. I guess the best I can say is that we are still here and still in business.

During the pandemic people have lost thier jobs and money is tight, but there are still divorces still needing mediation, small claims law suits, CPS cases pending and Human Resource problems happening.  We are giving a 20% or more discount, pro bono to some, to those that are affected.  The courts are backed up and need help in relieving the volumes of cases that can be handled each day!  I'm also apart of a group called Helping Hands.  We are weekend warriors, and some extend past the weekend, to help those that have been hit by the latest hurricanes that have happened.  Last weekend we were in Beaumont helping to remove trees and clean up other problems that Hurricane Laura left behind.

I'm ignoring it. The virus has only been seen in about 3% of the population and of that small number, a small percentage have had negative consequences, i.e., become seriously sick or died. This has not been worth killing business in Texas or in the country. 

Other than that, I avoid people who are obviously sick and if anyone is not feeling well then I send them home to recover. So far, nobody here has tested positive.