Covid-19 has forced children’s activity providers to think outside the box.
When the national lockdown kicked in back in March this year, many switched services online; moving face to face sessions to Zoom, changed pricing options, pushed new products, even changing business models – providers did what needed to be done at a relatively rapid rate of change.
Some achieved fantastic results and not only supplemented lost income but built a great deal of brand awareness and goodwill. However, for those same activity providers, most will agree it has been an intense period of running their business.
Aside from the ongoing stress the pandemic has brought to our daily lives, providers had to learn completely new digital skills overnight. Coupled with new guidelines being released every other week (it seems), greyer with each release and many slowly returning back to face to face activities – it’s been hectic and extremely challenging.
It stands to reason that regardless of how your business has performed over the past few months (even those who stepped back and essentially hit the pause button for a number of months) you’re likely feeling a little burnt out by it all. The constant doom and gloom and negativity of most media outlets make finding the positives in all of this understandably very difficult.
This is frustrating. If you look hard enough, there are still positives in this situation, but what we suggest activity providers focus on right now is minimalism; an active pursuit of less.
Why?
Unless you’re a machine or have been obliviously living on a beach in a far flung non-Covid affected location, your resilience stores may be low right now.
Entrepreneurial obsession with business growth at all expense is a floored tactic right now – while we fundamentally believe there are ways you can move your business forward without it actually showing ‘growth’ financially, we more importantly believe in the importance of mental health of business owners.
More and more activity providers for years have found themselves in a common trap – putting quantity over quality. With an increase in pressure to ‘grow your business’, providers take on the attitude that if they do more, their business will do well.
This simply isn’t the case.
On the contrary, increasing the number of tasks you perform won’t necessarily impact your business for the better, but rather, the opposite. Sometimes (and we’d argue particularly right now) practicing “business minimalism” is needed in order to achieve your goals.
So how can you actually achieve more by doing less?
Take a minimalist approach and choose the essentials only. Find out what we think is important right now.
Particularly if you’re a parent as well as an activity provider, you’ll still likely have a jam-packed schedule, an abundance of tasks to accomplish, and very little time to spare. Streamline wherever you can – spending your time and energy on trivial tasks, new shiny ideas or simply getting distracted is a surefire way to lose focus on the most critical elements to keeping your business afloat and maintaining your sanity.
Author Greg McKeown says:
“Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and doing only what is essential.”
For children’s activity providers, every decision you make is important – choosing what tasks to focus on can be a challenge. Not everything is of equal importance so setting out your primary goals and prioritising tasks is key.
By stripping your business tasks down to what is essential and eliminating the small tasks that distract you from your goal will help you avoid overwhelm, maintain sanity and feel positive while dealing with the ongoing Covid-19 related challenges we face.
You might just find that by doing less, you accomplish more and with some savvy decision making you’ll be in a good position to really springboard forward once the sector and consumer behaviour returns to previous levels, and dare we say; ‘normality’.
If you found this useful, you may like the tools, exclusive webinars and resources in ICAP membership.
