Balancing your books with simplicity amidst a global crisis.
Across the world, entrepreneurs and small business owners were thrown a giant curveball in the shape of a global pandemic. Though it may be remembered as a year of strife and struggle, the sustained efforts of individuals, small acts of kindness, and exceptional examples of leaders during this time cannot be forgotten. The year 2020 will go down as the year that businesses fought tooth and nail to survive and provide for their own, and some business owners have unflinchingly led that fight.
A silver lining in these turbulent times? Digital saw unprecedented growth. Instagram and Facebook became the new and improved product marketplaces for cloud kitchens, young entrepreneurs and small business owners, among others. “WFH” became a thing, end-year bonuses were doled out in excess, employee insurance packages got a facelift, sanitisation was trending; everything changed overnight. Transaction volumes in India grew by a mere ₹1000 crores in one year. The result, unsurprisingly, was haphazard financial management and accounting discrepancies. While some businesses were able to leap to their feet in times during the unprecedented and simultaneously urgent nature of the health crisis, many businesses had little to no policies in place to deal with the barrage of change they were expected to implement.
For many, it was a wake up call to shed those complexities and resort to simple acts. So, for the first time, businesses had to do the one thing they weren’t used to: lead by principle over HR policies. They had to trust their gut.
Ronak Rajani of Hundo Pizza is one that exemplified this. We briefly chatted with him about his business survival techniques, on which he had this to say:
“We are very clear on our ethics. Whether it’s our team, vendors and customers, we ensure that timeliness and trust building comes first. The pandemic meant further emphasizing on these ethics. Employees that required due medical or financial assistance or shelter were attended to, there were no backlogs with vendor payments, and we managed to still serve a great product to our customers.”
If anything, we learned that it’s important for small businesses to have a streamlined vision that prioritises simplicity at its core. The past year forced companies to get leaner and smarter about the way that they conducted their business operations. Fintech and e-commerce giants built sustainable products and practices that were relevant to a post-pandemic world with new and improved SAAS tools in the backend, to the point of invincibility during a crisis. The lesson? Understanding your vision and keeping it simple goes a long way in an unpredictable environment.
At Kodo, simplicity has always been key. Especially during the pandemic, where money matters have engendered its own complications, it became clear to us that in order for vision to be streamlined, your finances have to be streamlined. In other words, for your business to grow, your money must be accounted for. The businesses that succeeded were the businesses that knew their vision, saw the finish line through all the fog, and really got down to the basics of business.
In an incredibly complicated year, we’re here to make things simple for you. Understanding your finances is the first step to streamlining your vision, getting leaner, hungrier and cutting the fluff because let’s be real: what the pandemic has really taught us is that there’s no time to waste and there’s no time like the present.
