We talk a lot about personal financial advice but the truth is that business and professional advice often factors into personal finance. Especially given that we’re in the middle of a pandemic that is dramatically hurting the economy and eviscerating small businesses around the country, it’s important to consider how freelance contractors, entrepreneurs, and small business owners can keep their financial houses in order during this unprecedented environment.

Maybe you’re trying to reset or put your business on pause until the economy reopens. Perhaps your business went under and you’re considering your next steps. Or maybe you want to persevere and open a new business.

Regardless of your situation, there are a few time-tested ways to get yourself back on track as a business owner weathering tough years.

Remain educated on your supply chains

The supply chain refers to raw material planning, purchasing, inbound logistics, and manufacturing. It is the strategic lifeblood of a company. Unfortunately, global supply chains in many different industries have been severely tested and damaged during the pandemic.

Without sound financial planning, production lead time management, risk assessment, and operational efficiency, your business will not survive long. This means you need to get a hang, first and foremost, of how best to maintain your business’ cashflow. For instance, by using tools that provide you with the company credit rating of any potential supplier, you can make informed decisions on who to partner with based on their legitimacy and the speed in which they will pay for any outstanding invoices. This can be a step in the right direction to ensure that your business’ cashflow remains healthy and you do not find yourself without adequate funds midway through the month. 

Also, look into demand forecasting, which includes both qualitative and quantitative analysis of your most critical business assets. This method allows you to effectively plan and streamline your activities by assessing emerging technologies and product lifecycles, as well as thoroughly understanding your own specific financial data like sales revenue and website analytics.

If this sounds complex, don’t get overwhelmed. Once you absorb your own numbers and data, you will learn to love it. But in the meantime, it’s important to start getting a handle on how supply chains can make or break a small business.

Don’t stretch yourself too thin

Many small business owners make the mistake of trying to diversify and expand too quickly. While having multiple revenue streams and market opportunities is a good thing, if you try to stretch your business into uncharted waters too quickly you might just sink.

Make sure you’ve mastered one product or service first and are generating consistent revenue and operational efficiency on it before moving on to others. And make sure you have thoroughly situated yourself in one market before trying to branch off and tap into others.

Customers these days have many, many options to choose from on just about everything – quantity, therefore, is less important than quality in this kind of business environment. Build a loyal following in one niche market before outspending yourself on moonshot ideas that haven’t been fully thought through and analyzed.

The time will come for diversification and expansion, but first you have to be smart.

Invest strongly in your online brand presence

These days, online activity is the most important part of growing a business. Ecommerce sales have transcended brick-and-mortar revenue and without a strong brand presence online, you will be completely covered up by the bigger companies.

The days when you could survive without a highly functional, user-friendly website and social media marketing are long over. Companies don’t last long without a robust brand presence and right now brands are built and maintained online.

Your best investments for this purpose will be: hiring a developer to build you an incredibly responsive, well-designed website; putting together a stellar social media team on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.; and outsourcing the assistance of a search engine optimization (SEO) agency to make sure you rank for certain keywords on search engine page results.

If this sounds like a lot, again, don’t stress. A single business owner can not do all this stuff alone. You have to assemble a team that can manage it so that you can focus on raising and streamlining your capital, loans, partnerships, investors, supply chain, and logistics.

However, you do need to be able to clearly articulate to your team what your brand stands for and who you’re trying to reach. This requires you doing your due diligence and research.

Running a business is one of the hardest things to do, especially during a pandemic and economic recession. But if you build strategically from the ground up and lay a solid foundation, you can flourish. And there’s no greater feeling than earning a living from your own business success.

Don’t think of yourself as an amateur just because your business is small. You are still a professional. Don’t let anyone tell you anything different. You should also ignore anyone who tells you that you are an amateur because you use consumer products and services for work. They don’t know what they’re talking about. If what you are using gets the job done, then it is plenty good enough. And if it costs hundreds less than the professional equivalent, that makes you all the smarter for using the consumer gear.

Consumer gear has come a long way in the past decade. A typical consumer PC runs circles around the typical business computer found in office cubicles worldwide. The typical consumer smartphone is faster, more capable and just as secure as anything you will get from the office. The internet in your home runs many times faster than the one in most offices.

That said, there comes a point when consumer technology meets its match and you have to get something more robust. It often comes down to a single function. It just happens to be one your business can’t do without. Here is how to tell when it is time to upgrade to a business product:

A Production Printer

If your printing needs are modest, you don’t need anything fancy. That said, you will want a good printer, not so much for the print quality, but for the way it uses ink and toner. Cheap printers are almost never worth it because to replace the ink cartridges, you would be financially better off just buying a whole new printer. As the price of the printer goes up, the ink replacement cost tends to go down. Try to find a balance.

However, as your business grows, you will need to move up to a good production printer. If printing is a key aspect of your deliverables, you have a law firm, a doctor’s office, you run a private school, you have a small book publishing operation, or anything requiring a lot of painstaking print work, then you will need a production printer.

A Business Phone

How does your phone service compare to others? When it comes to your business phone, that might be the wrong question. It is a perfectly fine question if all you are looking for is cheap rates. But when the bulk of your business is done over the phone, you are going to have to think about more than the monthly payment. It might even that you are running a healthcare business, have asked for feedback like doctor reviews by patients, and the issue of being able to get through on the phone has been brought up by multiple people, so you need to think about ways that you can improve this so more can access your service when they are in need.

If you are highly mobile, your plan is going to have to cover a lot of territory. If you make a lot of international calls, a typical plan won’t do. If you have multiple people in your company with similar mobile needs, you are going to have to get a plan specifically geared toward business. If your business involves a lot of call center work, you will need more than just a service, you are going to need some hardware for all that call routing. Will you have a decision tree? If yes, press 1, then ditch your consumer smartphones for a more appropriate telecommunications service for businesses.

A Paid Service for Meetings

According to the experts, Zoom is, by far, the best choice. It has a consumer component, but was built for professional video conferencing. You have already outgrown consumer services whether or not you realize it.

You might be losing sales to the competition for no better reason than that they looked professional on the video conference and you didn’t. That garbage webcam on your cheap laptop is not good enough. Your $20 microphone is not good enough. And the free service you are using for chat is not good enough. Don’t wait until you grow to upgrade. Do it now so that you will be able to grow.

There is no fixed rule that says you have to move to professional gear. But there comes a point when your consumer gear becomes more of a hindrance than a help. In the case of production printers, telecommunications, and video conferencing, there is no substitute for the better gear. You will know it when you need it.