As we made clear in Part 1, two general categories of business have been hit hard by the coronavirus shutdown: services and non-essential products. Your business is likely already online to some degree — but now’s the time to go all in on e-commerce, or at least all in on social media, and reach your customers via virtual means in the electronic showroom. For physical shops that sell goods, we addressed in detail ways that you can boost sales by going online in Part 1.

But that leaves services, which is a much tougher category as some businesses, regrettably, won’t survive, and others will only scrape by with massive layoffs in the interim, and then only if they can still partially operate. However, this doesn’t mean that the owners or disenfranchised workers can’t either find alternate means of employment/self-employment or set themselves up to bounce back in the future. (We’ll address what the disenfranchised can do in Part 3.)

The services category of business includes, among other categories:

• Restaurants (which in some jurisdictions are permitted to stay open just for take-out service)
• Non-essential healthcare (cosmetic procedures, nutritionists, etc.)
• Personal services (child care, barbershops and hair salons, gyms, tattoo parlors, etc.)
• Bars and coffee shops
• Entertainment venues & galleries
• Recreational facilities

And while everything looks bleak, some of these business still have hope (as do some of the staff displaced if they take a different view on their abilities and career).

What hope? What can they do? For the answers, read the doctor‘s full article over on Spend Matters to find out!