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In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, illness isn’t the only threat facing many businesses. Cyber threats and scammers are on the rise in the midst of the pandemic, as well. Your emails could pose a source of danger for your business and your employees–but with the right training and the right responses, you can decrease the odds that you will face severe consequences from a cyber attack in the midst of an already difficult time. Keep your business safe by following these key steps.
Verify sender information in email addresses to see that it’s accurate. Beware of misspellings or letter substitutions in email addresses, particularly organization names. It’s easy to skim across the top of an email address and assume that it’s correct, but before assuming that an email comes from exactly who it says it does. PayPal, Amazon, Apple, and other businesses you already have accounts with are popular facades for scammers to hide behind–so make sure you check those emails carefully.
Be suspicious of an email that asks for personal information. The businesses you work with on a regular basis already have access to your login credentials, your financial information, and any sensitive information they need to maintain your account. Avoid simply replying directly to any email asking for that information, especially if it comes from a source that shouldn’t need that information.
Be careful of unsolicited attachments or links. If you don’t know who a link or attachment comes from, don’t open it! This includes files that come through popular sharing sites like Dropbox and Google Drive. Avoid opening files from unfamiliar senders–and if you don’t recognize the attachment that you’re supposed to be receiving, don’t open it!
Be wary if an email contains characteristics that send up red flags. Do you know how to identify potential scam emails? Make sure you’re familiar with these characteristics, which should cause you to reevaluate who an email came from and whether you should take it seriously.
Always check directly with an organization if you have questions. Most companies have customer support lines in place that will deal with any queries you have. While it may take longer to get a response during this difficult time, you should be able to get through to the company directly to answer any questions you have about your emails–and to report a spoof if necessary. Do not send your query to the address on the email; rather, contact customer support directly.
Make sure your business is fully protected during this difficult period by training your entire staff about how to handle potential threats and scammers. Some of them may try to exploit COVID-19 directly, citing changes in policies. Others may simply try to take advantage of higher stress and anxiety levels during this time. By preparing yourself, however, you can protect your business and your private information, keeping yourself safer. Want to learn more ways to protect your business, including insurance policies that can help keep you operational even in times of disaster? Contact us today.
State by state, industry by industry, American businesses are being allowed to reopen. As the country’s patchwork of federal, state, and civic stay-at-home orders are lifted, business owners are faced with tough calculations. They know that reopening is overwhelmingly unpopular, with large numbers of consumers telling pollsters that they intend to avoid shops and in-person services regardless of legal restrictions. On the other hand, many are counting on the government to step in with financial assistance during the shutdown. Will that assistance dry up if they choose to remain closed when no law requires it?
But the biggest question looming in every employer’s mind is, “How can I keep my employees safe?” This is not just a moral question, but also a financial one. Skilled employees becoming sick means lost revenue. It can also mean expenses. Employers in some areas are now being required to provide paid sick leave, and disruption in the schedule can also leave them on the hook for overtime pay as other employees pick up the slack. Most pressingly, an employer accused of taking insufficient precautions may be vulnerable to a lawsuit.
So how can you help your employees protect themselves? By taking a page from the book of the businesses that are still open.
The CDC recommends that all employees should have their temperature checked before they recommence work. Preferably, this should be done outside the facility, so that there’s no chance of a sick employee coming into contact with their coworkers. Remember that patients can spread Covid-19 even if they show no symptoms, so simply asking employees to self-quarantine if they have come into contact with a patient is not enough. They might have become at risk without knowing. All employees’ temperatures should be checked regularly with a forehead thermometer.
Once this is done, don’t let your guard down. Provide all employees with masks and gloves, and instruct them to maintain six feet (two meters) of social distance at all times. Clean and disinfect nonporous surfaces, especially high-touch ones like doorknobs and buttons, as often as you practically can. These precautions are particularly important in customer-facing roles, but not exclusive to them. Treat each employee as if they might be an asymptomatic spreader of the virus. At first, these precautions may make you feel cold and heartless, but remember that you are ensuring your employees’ safety.
Other safety precautions may be necessary. The break room, or whatever space employees use to congregate in your workplace, should be off-limits until infection rates fall. Have strict rules against employees touching or borrowing anything that another employee has used without PPE — no sharing of headphones, no passing around of phones. If you have porous surfaces in your facility — a couch or an armchair, for instance — consider covering it with a wipeable plastic sheet. The same goes for any high-touch electronics like ATMs or credit card readers, which cannot be thoroughly cleaned with liquid disinfectants.
Lastly, to protect your employees and your business, think about what aspects of your work can be done remotely. Customers are going to avoid brick-and-mortar stores for a long time to come. If your business has a mail-order or e-commerce arm, think about diverting people and resources to it. Think about what services your customers need and how you can provide them in a socially distanced way. If not, now is the time to build one. No business is going to survive 2020 without adapting, improvising, and rethinking what their industry is and can do.
For more information about reducing risk, insuring your company, and maintaining best practices in business ownership, visit our website. For a free quote, contact us.
As the owner of a new, small business, you probably have more concerns and challenges than you have time to address. There’s everything from maintaining cash flow to hiring the right people to protecting your new company with the right kinds of business insurance.
But all those concerns won’t mean much if your business doesn’t grow—and your business won’t grow if you don’t effectively market it. Of course, the days are gone when marketing meant a blurb in the Yellow pages and the occasional ad in your hometown newspaper. The internet changed all that.
Today, 87% of consumers start their search for products and services on the internet. That means you need an effective digital marketing strategy that connects with all those searchers—and to persuades them to buy your products and services. That strategy should include everything from optimizing your website for search engines to sponsored ads, email and content marketing. It should also include a robust social media marketing strategy.
Why? The reason is simple: to showcase your business to prospective customers, you need to go where they are, and where they are is on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest.
Said differently, social media sites represent an unparalleled opportunity for your business to connect with prospective customers for your small business. To get an idea of the marketing opportunity social media sites represent, check out the metrics from HubSpot:
To begin, every business is different, with different customers, different goals and different marketing challenges. For example, if you own a B2B company, your best bet might be to focus on LinkedIn because that’s where businesses connect with each other. If you’re B2C, you might do better with Facebook and Twitter.
But there are some best practice social media marketing strategies which work the lion’s share of businesses, including the following 5:
1. Understand your audience: if you don’t know who your customers and prospective customers are, it will be a lot harder to connect with them on social media. First, you need to know which social media sites they use—although it’s true that Facebook is the preferred platform for small businesses marketers (86% of them advertise on that site), you need to know what sites your customers prefer.
2. Establish realistic goals: You need a clear sense of your social media marketing goals. For example, is your principal objective to push more traffic to your website, generate more quality leads or boost conversions? You also need to ensure your goals are specific, realistic, measurable and attainable. For example, it’s not enough to say, “we’ll increase lead generation.” You need to spell out:
3. Be active on multiple social media sites: different customers prefer different social media platforms. Having a strong Facebook page is a good start, but the more sites you leverage, the wider your reach and the greater the odds your social media campaigns will be successful.
4. Post content that resonates with your customers: you need to give prospects a good reason to follow you on Facebook and other sites. Do some homework to find out what their major concerns, questions and problems are and post content that addresses those concerns, answers those questions and solves those problems. You can also boost engagement with smart promotions, discounts and free trials.
5. Measure results: to maximize the impact of your business presence on social media, you need to know what’s working—and what isn’t. Make sure you’re using a robust analytics tool that will help you determine which content is generating the most leads, pushing the most traffic to your website and creating the largest number of conversions (one of the best is Google Analytics).
Effectively managing a startup small business or single-person LLC isn’t easy. With all the issues you tackle every day, it’s sometimes smart to get the help you need from experts who can give you the advice and guidance you need to succeed. That’s where we can help.
To learn more about the ways our business insurance and employee benefits services can help you achieve your principal goals—and take your business to the next level—contact us today.
As small businesses begin to recover from the immediate crisis, they must begin looking forward to what their “new normal” will be. Right now, the majority of small businesses are getting hammered by shock waves from the coronavirus’s impact on the global and national economy. A McKinsey Global Institute analysis, based on multiple sources, indicates that the shock to our livelihoods from the economic impact of virus-suppression efforts could be the biggest in nearly a century.
As the Washington Post comments, “As the pandemic takes hold across America, some businesses are getting crushed, like Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., which closed its doors for at least eight weeks. Others are thriving, like Amazon, which announced 100,000 new hires to help manage the rush of online orders. Still others, like Tampa’s Rooster & the Till restaurant, are adapting — in ways that, economists say, might lead to long-term shifts in how Americans spend, work and live.”
Small businesses that are looking ahead towards a post-coronavirus economy are the businesses that are working proactively to maintain strong customer relationships, adapting to the shifting tides in business practices, and making concrete, data-driven plans for the “new normal” of the future. In this article, we’ll highlight three key moves your small business should be taking now to ensure success in this changing economy.
As our population grows increasingly physically distant from one another, it is a critical time for you and your staff to be reaching out to your customer base and strengthening those relationships. At many companies, as staff moved from work to work-from-home, they experienced a significant decrease in regular workload because their normal duties were performed in the context of the workplace. This is an opportune time to assign customer caseloads, with each staff member making personal check-ins by phone or video conference.
Most ways to build and maintain customer relationships involve some form of regular communication or interaction between your business and the consumer. Some other simple communication strategies that we recommend include:
As your business moves forward, it’s also critically important that you allot some time to reflect on the past. What kind of systems did you have in place? What was working? And what wasn’t working? What kind of concrete steps can you take to plan for a rapidly-approaching “new normal”?
McKinsey agrees, “Decoding this new normal—and ensuring that the company has a strategy to navigate it—is an important part of the work… Approaches such as using a portfolio of initiatives and planning for decision-making under uncertainty can go a long way toward creating a compass for business leaders to follow.”
For your business, this may include developing a strong contingency plan in case of emergency, doing a thorough audit of your finances, or updating your technological devices and communication tools. The actual details of your plan should be extremely company-specific; what matters most is that you’re acting to advance your business even while things may seem at a virtual standstill.
It’s undeniable that many businesses practices we once relied on are going to phase out over the next few months, replaced by new and evolving business practices. McKinsey reports, “New working and shopping practices will probably become a permanent fixture of the next normal.” And as our working and shopping practices change so will our business practices. As a leader, it is best for you to accept that fact and focus on moving forward. You’ll do much more for your company and your employees by acting with humility and resilience, and looking with optimism towards the future.
At this time, you should be researching and gathering information about what the business practices of the future may involve. McKinsey predicts, “Institutions that reinvent themselves to make the most of better insight and foresight, as preferences evolve, will disproportionally succeed.”
The return to a pre-coronavirus world will take time and will require patience from small business owners. But the companies that will find success are those that are refusing to stop operations, and are instead acting and thinking flexibly about how to survive in a transformed economy. Those that are actively seeking out advice and information are those that will find a way to adapt to a “new normal.” So if you’re interested in more advice about how to thrive as a small business owner in a post-coronavirus economy, reach out to us today.
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