We may have recovered our ability to treat and provide care for people with active COVID-19, but our supply chain and economy have some long-term recovering to do. Clearly, we are feeling the impact of China’s slow ability to immunize its citizens and reopen its factories and economy. And we are seeing the crisis of the war in our economy with gas price gouging.

For families and for businesses, decisions are being made about how best to navigate the financial uncertainty that supply chain shortages, rising prices for consumer goods and rising gas prices has caused.

Now and the Foreseeable Future

The next few months will require some thoughtful introspection about how you want to step forward. It is time, yet again, for business managers to become creative and to boldly test business and delivery models. And it is important to explore your customer base to understand what expectations.

Once that model is designed and tested, it will be critical to make certain that your communications makes clear how your clients should expect to interact. Are there some systems that will be remote only while others require a more traditional experience? Can someone just bounce back and forth between your remote and on ground services? Will you incentivize one system over the other. What are your contingency plans for supply chain shortages?

How much will staff need to be cross trained to work in each environment? Is the goal to coax customers back to the old normal and gradually eliminate the pandemic business model? IF you are now able to have your on ground business back, are there things you have learned from your pandemic experience that can make that product better?

No matter how you end up defining your  business model, making sure that your website and online communications are ready  is the work that should be done now and through the first half of 2023.