How to Open Your Business After COVID-19 (WITHOUT Public Backlash!)

Hey, everyone, this is Mike Andes, and you're listening to the Business Boot Camp podcast. Today. I am not having any notes. I'm just gonna talk directly to this camera, share my thoughts on something that's very important to all of us right now, and share about how your business is going to have to change after COVID 19 and this whole pandemic. Before we get into the show, though, a big thank you. Today's sponsor, which is Gusto, if you haven't already, go to gusto.combootcamp get 90 days of testing out their software completely free, and I promise you, you will not. You won't go to another service. You will not go to your accountant again. It's all very, very easy to use software, and your employees will love the access they have to the graphs, the pictorial way of seeing their paycheck split up every single paycheck. Very, very useful for them and transparent for you. Check it out. Today, go to gusto. That's G-U-S-T O.com Bootcamp now. Now, today, I'm just talking to you guys about what I'm going through, what you're going through as business owners, and what I think is going to be different about business after COVID 19. Now, just saying the word COVID 19 in the transcript of this video will probably get demonetized. So I'm just gonna say what my thoughts are. And I'm not super political. I don't really care if you're left, right, center, wherever you're at. I don't really care, and I don't really. These comments are not based upon politics at all. They're based upon business. They're based upon what is I am seeing in the marketplace, whether it be our franchisees at Augusta Lawn Care or whether it be a host of other industries that we're dealing with. As a result of COVID 19, our food company's been basically shut down and my gym has been shut down. And now we're going on seven weeks of that happening, being the gym completely shut down and we're in Washington state. We're not even close to being open. According to our governor, he wants it to be not a single case in the entire state, he says, before we open up again. I don't know the practicality of that, honestly, but anyways, that's what's happening. I guarantee we're at least four to six weeks out from being able to open, but I'm trying to do everything I can to make sure that we are going in the right Direction I've applied to be on our local task force that will help create the legislation around going back to work, what those rules need to be. And really, again, I'm not pushing for one way or the other. I want people to be healthy. But on the other hand, I want clear guidelines. And that's something that I felt was lacking in the last when they shut everyone down was like clear guidelines in terms of who does what, what the restrictions are, what the recommendations are, what are the restrictions, slash the repercussions. People don't do things. So it wasn't very clear. And so I'm really trying to help local business owners. Even in my local area that me I don't even know because a lot of people have been affected by this. A lot of people will not go back into business because of this. Especially in food, gyms, retail, like, it's just dead going to decimate people. So how is your business going to change after COVID 19? If you think that it's going to be business as usual after all of this, I'm sorry, but you are living in a fantasy. Your business is going to change. How you're going to interact with your customers must change. How you're going to market is going to change. How you are going to provide services and products to your customers is going to change. I'm going to talk a little bit about what we're doing to change at Anytime Fitness, the gym that has been closed for seven weeks and now we are hopefully gonna open in like a month or two. Who knows? Anyways, few things. Number one.

One of the things that we're doing is obviously cleanliness. Now this is the thing when it comes to opening up your business, regardless of whether or not it's legal in your state and you're allowed to open up, you might literally have repercussions socially and have social pressure and social stigma attached to you opening. If there's not clear guidelines, and this is something that I'm really p for locally with this task force is that like, look, if we do not give clear guidelines to business owners whether they can or cannot open, and there's gray areas, the ones that open are going to get wiped out because of the social stigma, people posting stuff on social media, people trying to tear them apart, saying that they're trying to kill us, that they're greedy, all the rest of it. And so there's got to be clear guidelines. If we don't want people to open up, if it's not safe, then we should make that clear. We should not just be saying, you know, this is kind of what we recommend you can or cannot open. It's really up to your judgment, like, that's not going to work. And I get why they, from a legal standpoint, they're not doing that because of lawsuits and all the rest of it. I get it. But if we're going to do this in a safe manner and we actually care about people not congregating together, and we care about the longevity of these local businesses that are afraid to open, even though they might be allowed to legally by their governor, there's just massive ramifications for small businesses, for employees, and for the local communities that are going to be impacted by these small business closures down the road. So what are some of the things we're doing, for example, at the gym? I'm just giving these examples of the changing times we are in and how you must adapt, you must change. No industry is being left out after all of this is done. And what is going to change in the marketplace and the consumer's mind? Alright, so at the gym, in the past we never did virtual training. Now we do it three times a week. We're on Zoom. You know, the trainer, maybe the trainers weren't super tech savvy. Guess what? We gotta change. You gotta adapt. You gotta figure out ways to communicate with now their trainees and the people that they are training the members on a daily basis, whether it be Facebook, social groups, whether it be through our Anytime fitness app, communicating, texting, posting pictures, workouts. And now Zoom actually doing the workouts and participating, engaging with the customer there. Now what I really want to talk about though is reopening your business. It's gonna affect you, it's gonna affect how you do business. And you gotta really protect the image of your company if you're starting to reopen right now, if you're in the states that are just opening up and there's a lot of like apprehension, there's a lot of politics coming into play of whether or not you should or should not be opening. You've got to really, this is not about whether or not you think that the virus is a flu. Regardless of whether or not you think this is just a big hoax, regardless of whether or not you think it's going to kill everybody wherever you stand. It doesn't matter when it comes to your business. You've got to make sure that you do what's right in terms of the perception of the consumer so that you do not get crucified for the social Stigma that's going to be attached to business owners that open up during a time when there's a gray area. And they are then portrayed as some, you know, greedy, wanting money, when really we're just trying to survive. We're trying to get our employees back on payroll. We're trying to get through this time. And so there's going to be a lot of questions. And so at the gym, for example, do I think that it's really important that people wash their shoes before coming to gym? Personally, I feel like I have a healthy immune system. I'm young. I'm probably not gonna be. You know, I feel like I was sick several months ago, and that might have been the coronavirus. I might have fought it off in 48 hours that I was in bed. And like, I thought, I think, you know, I'm fine. I'm gonna be fine. I'm not worried about people cleaning their shoes right now. However, there are people who are going to be more affected by this virus. They might be tuned into the news more. Their bodies and their age and their. The conditions they've gone through in their. In their body, they're going to be more susceptible to it, and they're going to be more aware of it. And if they aren't going to the gym because they feel it's unsafe, they aren't going to be happy. If we're opening it to all their friends and their friends are going and they feel like they're left out, they're going to want to put pressure against that and make us feel bad as business owners that we are opening up that place where the public can gather. And so we are doing things, number one, because we do care. We do want to stop the spread. We don't want people to get sick. Absolutely not. But secondarily is if our business is allowed to open legally, which for us is going to be a long time. But for people who are opening up right now in the gym space, you've got to protect yourself from the social stigma. The person that's walking by your windows and they take a picture and post it, because there's a group training session with 20 people getting together and they're all giving high fives. Like, that's the last thing you want on local news. And so there's a few things we're doing in terms of precautionary. And some would say I'm doing it mostly for the social stigma aspect. And then I'm saying also that I actually do care about not having someone get sick right so obviously we're cleaning the place like crazy. We're going to be much more visual about that. The cardio piece of equipment, the treadmills and the ellipticals, we're blocking off every other one. So that way we can continue to have social distancing. Because it's almost guaranteed that when we are allowed to open, that's going to be a requirement in terms of keeping social distance. We are having foot washing stations where people, when they walk in the door, there's going to be a bleach and water solution. One part, one out of 100%, 1% bleach. Basically a solution that is enough to kill this virus. 1%. And they are going to wipe down the soles of their shoes. The reason for that is because when you're in a gym, you do push ups on the floor, you touch equipment where your feet, people's feet have been. And so just washing your hands is not necessarily perfect because if someone's shoes has something contaminated on it, it's, it can touch the floor. And then if you're doing push ups or you're doing some sort of exercise, like even a mat, you might be using the mat for your hands or for your back, but if someone's feet were on it. So again, precaution. We also are getting a whole bunch of foot booties for people who might even think that's not even enough. I'm going to have booties where they can slip on booties if they want to walk around the gym with booties on. We're going to recommend that when people come to the gym that they wear booty. They're gym only shoes that they don't go out from working out in the field and in their boots, their work boots coming into the gym. We're going to require that they keep those shoes outside the gym. And if they don't have any gym only shoes, indoor shoes only, that they're going to have to work out in socks and they'll remember next time. So that's another thing we're doing. We got gloves. Now personally I'm never going to wear gloves when I work out. Like the slipperiness, the I would almost be afraid to do chin ups and pull ups with gloves on, latex gloves, but again, we're gonna have them there. We're gonna have a hand sanitizer. As soon as you walk in the door, there's gonna be like literally blocking your path. Is a dispenser with hand sanitizer. We're gonna be taking masking tape and literally putting a grid of six feet across the entire gym. I ordered 360 yards of masking tape two inches thick and we're gonna put six feet across the entire gym, a grid. So that way we tell people, look, you need to stay away one square away from everyone in this gym. Whether you're in the weight room, whether you're in the cardio, whether you're in the functional fitness. Regardless of where you're at, you've got to stay outside of someone else's box. For social distancing. We're gonna have masks available, we're gonna have cloth masks and we're gonna have regular paper disposable masks. The cloth ones are gonna be anytime fitness branded and the other ones are gonna be regular medical grade masks that they can wear and just wear one time. Again. The reason I'm doing that is cause if someone needs to work out for their social, for their mental or for their physical well being, I do not want them to not come to the gym simply due to the fact that they're afraid they're gonna spread or catch a virus. And so what can I do to make sure that I create a safe place for them to come work out and maintain a healthy lifestyle? And slash, I don't want to have new people come to the gym that want to sign up for membership and they're looking around like, oh, there's this virus that went around and here are these people like, no one's caring, no one's washing, no one's cleansing, there's no cleaning. But when they walk in and I'm like, shoes washed, gloves on, mask on, now I'll take you for a tour now, they start to see that people actually care. And there is no chance of someone trying to condemn us of just being ignorant and allowing people to gather and get sick together. That's not what we're trying to do. As a gym and a health professional, I know that for a lot of people, the gym is a place for them to let off stress. It's a place for them to gain the immunity that they need by having a healthy metabolism and a healthy immunity system. By working out, stressing their body, by physical exercise, sweating. It's incredible what it can do for your body. And one of the greatest things you can do against this virus is to have a strong immune system. Having a weakened, damaged immune system, being obese, having heart disease, having diabetes. These are the things that actually are the biggest leading factors of the death part, the fatalities is when you have that.

Pre Whatever it's called.

Precondition. Whatever it's called. Anyways. And so that's what we're trying to combat at the gym. That's what we're trying to go against is people being obese, people not being healthy, people having hypertension, people having disorders in their body that can really lead to fatality because of this virus. And so back to business. And that is we're doing all of these things, gloves and masks. So like I said, we have the cloth masks that are branded Anytime Fitness. Then we got the disposable ones. So we're doing all sorts of things. And then now, literally today, in the middle of this, when we're closed down, I am on the phone for three hours trying to get help and consultation on actually launching a virtual training platform. Like launching a virtual training. And how do we train our trainers? How do we sell virtual training where there's not an actual gym that they walk into? Cause there's gonna be people freaked out to come to our gym. Our gym is primarily made up of older individuals. The average training client is over 50 years old. That's the person who's gonna be most apprehensive to come back into a public place, especially if there's not a vaccine or drug available when this is all wrapping up in the next few weeks. And so.

How do we evolve? How do we change as business owners? Because of all that's going on, people are going to shop online more. All right? The grandma and grandpa that three months ago was saying, oh, no, I can't shop on Amazon. I just got to go to the store. Guess what? They can't. They had to figure it out. They had to get Graham, their grandson, their granddaughter, to come over, figure out how to use their phone, how to use a social media, how to buy things on Amazon and get them ordered and like, oh, wow, that wasn't so hard. Like, oh, I kind of like the fact that I have to leave the house. Guess what? Their behaviors, their buying behaviors are changing for good. They will be using Amazon, they will be learning how to use social media, they will be learning how to use their devices. And that's going to be the trend retail is. This is only going to dig a deeper grave and a deeper hole for the retail industry to try to dig out of. People are going to start to do more and more shopping online now. It's also going to lead to doing more work online. People do not need office space. People are realizing they do not need to travel across the town to meet someone. A zoom Call. Like that call I just mentioned. Today was three hours that was on a zoom call. I did three zoom calls today. Two with franchisees, one for the learning about this virtual training. And part of the virtual training part is like, do I think we're gonna, it's gonna be a huge moneymaker? Not necessarily. Do I know that that's where the market might is gonna be headed from here on out? Yes. I need to be educated. I'm not going to be caught with my pants down. And that's what's happening to a ton of people right now. Retailers, people that were like, ah, you know, we're just gonna keep focusing on our stores, we're gonna keep focusing on in person events. Well, guess what? Now it's online, now it's digital, now it's virtual. Can you pivot or have you educated yourself enough to pivot? I'm not gonna be caught. If this happens again when where we are right now, where our revenue is slashed by 95% at the gym, I'm gonna make sure that I am educated to the point where I can move all of my training clients at the gym onto a virtual training platform and still make revenue. That is how you make your business antifragile. And this is what is the best thing about this whole virus is it's teaching business owners like myself that have had really like 10 plus years of really good economic times, it's teaching us that this doesn't stay like this forever. And you've gotta be prepared for the worst. You gotta be for things that you never saw coming, the unexpected. And for viruses and for economic downturns and political events and things that are going to try to crush your business that you never saw coming. That's the positive thing that I'm taking away from this virus is that for the business community, it's going to teach us how to really get centered on making our businesses sustainable instead of just expecting that it's going to be good all the time. And so the thing is now, as you go back to business, how are you going to change? So for gusta lawn care. I have never seen print marketing do so poorly as I have in the past two months in terms of customer acquisition cost, just even picking up the phone and calling, like no interest whatsoever, like the ratios are slaughtered. Now are we in the middle of a pandemic? Do I think that's going to last indefinitely? Probably not. There's gonna always be a roi. I think though that diminishing in compared to digital because guess what, even that older Clientele that we're targeting is becoming more and more familiar with their social media. They're becoming more and more familiar with their devices. All of this is pushing them onto their phones, onto their devices. They're at home, they're communicating, they're figuring out portal on Facebook, they're figuring out how to use nextdoor, they're figuring out how to use Facebook groups, they're figuring out how to use shopping online, they're learning how to fill out their information for an estimate request form on, on a website instead of having to phone call everybody, they're getting used of videos and text messages and voice notes instead of face to face communication. How are we going to pivot? How are we going to make sure we are ready for this? This is the thing that's so important. And so for the Augusta Lawn Care, like, we are pretty ready already for this because we drive by estimates, we do a lot of video, we do a lot of voice notes to our customers. So it's, it's been a huge boom during this time for us. Like, we will probably have our best April ever at Augusta Lawn Care locally. That shop, it'll be our best April ever, hands down. I can, I already know that for a fact. And it's because we were, we weren't ready. Like, we were not. No one was planning for this, My goodness. But we were already thinking ahead of the curve in terms of, like, we don't do long emails, we do voice notes, we do drive by estimates and the client gets it within, you know, five minutes.

There's just videos. Like, we do not need the project manager or the estimator to come to the project and show the crew what to do. Make a video, store it on the cloud. And when that job comes up, they can pull it down and they know it needs to be done. You do not need to travel across town to show them a job. These are all things that we gotta be thinking about as we go through this pandemic. Do not waste a crisis. Do not waste this. And no. Is this easy? No. Is it a good thing? Absolutely not. But we've got to take away the positives from this and that is we've got to be prepared for anything in our businesses. We've got to be prepared for the worst. Like, I mean, like the gym, I did not expect. There was nothing in my mind that I could ever imagine how ever I could go from one day making plenty of money to zero, literally zero the next day at a gym. Like, I couldn't have thought of anything Besides like a nuclear event. Well, guess what? It happened that something that I couldn't think of, something that was unexpected. There was no slow decline. There was no nothing. I did a mistake to make that drop in revenue. I couldn't control it. It was unforeseen. It was unexpected. And that's what's training business owners to do is like, you got to be really trained for those moments when there is absolutely no warning. There is absolutely no nothing you can do to control this. And so how do we come back? What do we learn from this? How do we come back and make our businesses to where there isn't that social stigma and people who are looking for fault aren't going to fault you? I would go high in terms of what is the perception of your customer. If you're doing any sort of communication with customers, wear a mask, wear booties, refrain from handshaking, keep your social distance, acknowledge it, laugh about it, even if they're casual, but stay away from them. Make sure you have standards in place, like Augusta Lawn Care. We haven't had team meetings for a couple months. That's horrible. I don't like that. It's annoying. But we use video. We've had to sanitize the trucks every single morning. We're changing all sorts of things to try to adapt to it. And going forward now it's like, what do we do now that is going to change because of all this? Are we gonna do more digital media? Are we gonna focus on videos? Are we gonna actually post more on Facebook? Because now our clientele, that older individuals actually on that platform and actually consuming that content instead of just like not knowing what the news feed is. So these are things we're thinking about. These are things we gotta be thinking about as business owners. How do we open up to reduce the stigma and allow our business to get back in business and get back to work and get your employees back on staff? You've got to change. You've got to adapt. And some of it you might not believe in. You might not think this is any problem. You might have zero cases in your county. But the social stigma and the perception of the customer has to be validated here by your actions. You've got to be able to say, look, these are the things that we're doing. When customers were contacting Augusta Lawn Care about, like, hey, you know, we're kind of worried about people coming on property. We were able to send them a list of the things that we are doing, things that we are changing, how we are changing the Customer interaction, how we're changing, the interaction between our crews, how we're changing, sanitization, we are changing. And that put all of them at ease because they knew that we were addressing it and we were making sure we are managing the perception. And that's my takeaway from the day is you've got to manage the perception of your customer base as you open up and go back to business. And so at the gym, that's why I'm getting booties and washing people's the soles of their feet and wearing gloves and having sanitizer, everyone putting a grid all over and closing down certain machines to create social distancing, putting up signs in the bathroom, cleaning the place like crazy. This is what we gotta do. And if you're just opening up, this is more important than ever. Once we're past this, whether it be a month or two months or a year or two years, when we're past this, what we need to take away from this is that there is no moment in time that we as business owners can slack off and just think that the next paycheck is in the bank and, and that it's just gonna keep going the way it always has been. There's going to be black swan events, there's gonna be bad things happen, there's gonna be viruses, there's gonna be economic times, there's gonna be weather stuff happening. All this is gonna keep happening. You've gotta be ready and you've gotta be nimble and you've gotta be thinking ahead of the curve so that when those things do happen, you pivot, you change, you redirect and you actually capitalize on the opportunity. I hope something was said that helps you if you're opening up your business. If you're in that process, that gray area of like figuring out what should I be doing for to reduce that stigma as I open up my business? Post in the comments below. I love to help you. Other people would love to help you. Make sure you reach out. This is a time to reach out to community, reach out to your representatives, your congress people, ask them questions, get guidelines. What do they need you to do to stay in compliance? What can you do to go above those things and make sure your customers are safe, happy and they're not feeling like there's any sort of threat and you can actually begin to open up your, your business. I love to hear your comments below. Make sure you hit the like button on this video. It helps me so much and helps me reach other business owners like you. We'll see you next time on the Business Boot Camp podcast.