Jim Blasingame

Business futurist, award-winning author, speaker and columnist

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The New Regular: What Really Matters During a Pandemic

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This is the fifteenth edition of my New Regular series, which has the sole purpose of helping small business owners emerge into the post-pandemic economy successfully and happy. Normal is now as relevant as an employee-of-the-month parking space during the shutdown.

In any other year, my column this week would be about the national holiday which for at least 126 years has provided America’s workers with a paid day off on the first Monday of September. Also noted would be that half of those Labor Day celebrants – over 70 million – would be paid to not work by America’s 6.5 million small business employers.

But this year, in the throes of a coronavirus pandemic threatening our lives and the economic shutdown attacking our livelihoods, the Labor Day needle registers low on the concern-o-meter. Instead, my thoughts keep coming back to something emphasized earlier in this series: Perspective. Part of the New Regular is keeping what’s happening to us this year in perspective. With that in mind, I’d like to tell you a couple of stories.

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The New Regular: Your Post-Pandemic Business Plan

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This is the fourteenth edition of my New Regular series devoted to helping small business owners have the maximum opportunity to open their businesses on January 1, 2021. Normal was caught stalking Dr. Fauci and arrested for not wearing a mask. 

Every Main Street business owner had a business plan when they opened for business in January 2020, from a fancy, multi-page model, to thoughts printed on the owner’s brain. Regardless, these two operators have one thing in common: They’re both going to need a new one. A post-pandemic, New Regular business plan. Stay with me – you’ll thank me later.

Emerging out of a government-mandated shutdown, we’re finding a marketplace shrouded in a fog of uncertainty. But the good news is the fog will lift once you find answers to three questions: 

  1. What do customers want right now? 
  2. How has the competitive landscape changed? 
  3. How far out of alignment is my business from these two?

These aren’t new questions, but in the span of several weeks, the answers are. They’ve morphed from a little different to unrecognizable since February, and here’s the foggy part: they’re still changing.

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The New Regular: The Coronavirus, Inconvenient and Inevitable

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This is the thirteenth edition of my New Regular series (nope – not superstitious), which is dedicated to helping small business owners stick their finger in the eye of the coronavirus. Normal has assumed the stage name “Abnormal” and is now touring in a traveling freakshow across the Australian Outback.

When you think about it, there’s not much new about change in the past 5,000 years, just variations on old themes. Electrification is lightning in a bottle and your PC or Apple Watch are battery powered Antikythera Mechanisms (circa 2100 BCE). But there is one thing new about change: its velocity. Change is happening faster.

As analog has been supplanted by digital, we’ve witnessed an unprecedented compression of time between model generations, from hardware to software to associated behaviors and practices. And out here on Main street, that velocity – not the change – is what’s taking our breath away.  Now, let’s apply that truth to both the coronavirus pandemic and our response to it.

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The New Regular: The Small Business Standup Act

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This is the 12th edition of my New Regular series, designed to help Main Street operators restart their business into the post-pandemic economy. Normal tested positive and has been quarantined indefinitely. 

Most comedians and all entrepreneurs write their own material for when they stand up in front of their respective audiences. Other than that, what does your small business have to do with a comedy act?

It’s true that even when operating a business is fun, it usually isn’t funny (except when we laugh at ourselves). But perhaps we can learn something from the simple truths that are foundational for all good comedy. And who better to model our simple truths after than Jeff Foxworthy and his one-liners.

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The New Regular: There Will Be Many New Niches

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This is the 11th edition of my New Regular series, which is committed to helping Main Street businesses make the tenuous transition to a post-pandemic economy. Normal hasn’t been seen since corona was just a beer.

Do you like baklava – that pastry so luscious it’s served in little pieces? Who doesn’t? But what does baklava have to do with operating a business in a pandemic-induced panic? Well, as scrumptious as it is, the connection isn’t about how it tastes, but rather, how it’s made.

Cutting a baklava square in half reveals that it’s constructed of multiple layers of buttery, cinnamony, honey-drenched, walnut-laden sheets of phyllo dough baked into an elegant and rich eating experience.

Slicing into the marketplace you’ll see it looking increasingly like baklava: multiple layers of innovation-drenched effort baked into elegant choices and rich experiences. But zoom in closer. Just as each wafer-thin sheet of baked baklava breaks into more layers of cookie-inside-a-cookie, the marketplace stratifies into finer layers of even greater variations, nuances, and elegance.

Those finer layers are called niches. (My snooty friends say “neesh,” I prefer “nitch.” Tomato, to-mah-to). A niche is defined as being “perfectly suited for the person or thing in it.” And if there were ever two things perfectly suited for each other, it’s the niche and small business. It’s a beautiful thing to watch an entrepreneur discover a new niche and fill it, and later identify and fill a niche of that niche.

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The New Regular: The Power of Post-Pandemic Brainstorming

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This is the 10th edition of my New Regular series, which is committed to helping Main Street businesses make the tenuous transition to a post-pandemic economy. You can catch normal in a bit-part on the revival of PBS’s “Downton Abbey.”

Whatever your business looks like going forward, it won’t be what you used to call normal. The easy part is that, as the recovery plays out over the next year, what you’re supposed to be doing will be revealed to you by customers. The hard part will be making that transition personally and organizationally. In other words, getting out of your own way.

Since it’s likely that how you serve customers this December will be drastically different from how you did it last December, there’s no better way to “get out of your own way” than through brainstorming.  This is a leadership practice that helps shed hidebound baggage – “Well, that’s how we’ve always done it” – your business can no longer afford in the New Regular.

Brainstorming has always been powerful. But now that we’ve been keelhauled by the coronavirus shutdown, it’s essential. Plus, it’s the best way to get organizational creative juices flowing. And creativity is the mother’s milk of a powerful tool without which you cannot brainstorm: adjectives.

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