No one could have thought they will ever face a COVID-19-like pandemic in their life. On one side we are worrying about keeping our families safe and on the other hand spinning our heads to come up with ideas to keep our business afloat. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the service business to a grinding halt.

Here are some of the resources for you to look into to minimize the impact of this crisis.

01. **Make good use of the downtime** \- No one wants to be in the situation where the business has slowed down. Take this downtime to look into your business strategies and rethink how you want to hit the road running once the situation improves, and that we do believe will happen in couple of months. You can also take online classes to learn new skills.

02. **Check your monthly subscriptions** \- Check for all the software and services you have subscriptions for and see which ones you are not using or if better and more cost-effective options are available out in the market. This is a good time to look at your business and see how you can reduce some of the expenses that you never get time to look into.

03. **Look into the new demands** \- You need to look into what the demand of today’s customers is and see what services you can offer to accommodate it. You can also evaluate if you can expand into additional services like last-mile delivery and purchase. Always keep safety and good practices in mind.

04. **Review Government aids** \- Check your local government websites to see what kind of help they are offering small businesses to weather this storm. The US Small Business Administration (SBA) is offering low-interest disaster recovery loans. Some are offering Tax deferral or giving Tax breaks.

[Small Business Guidance and Loan Resources](https://www.sba.gov/page/coronavirus-covid-19-small-business-guidance-loan-resources)

05. **Assistance offered by banks and credit card companies** \- Banks and Credit card companies have offered to help small businesses and, in some situations, even waive some of the fees. Please check with your credit card or banks on their offering. Facebook and Google are also offering help to small businesses.

[Small Business Facebook Grants Program](https://www.facebook.com/business/boost/grants)

06. **Offer Remote Services** \- Please see what kind of remote services you can offer. Some of the training and classes can be offered using video conferencing tools like Zoom, Google Hangout, and UberConference.

07. **Connect with your clients** \- You can reach out to your clients and see how they are doing, and this shows you care. This builds a stronger relationship with them. Also, this helps to understand what kind of services they are looking for and see if you can offer any of those. Your customers may be ready to help you but not sure how they can? Reach out to them and offer ways to help you. They can purchase gift cards or services to be used in the future. They can leave a positive review for your company.

08. **Review your marketing spend** \- Check what all ads you are running on social media and if that money is well spent or you need to turn them off to save money. Also look into what marketing plans can be put on hold to save money.

09. **Offer gift certificates or packages** \- You can advertise gift certificates or packages [(read how packages work in DoTimely)](/content/blog/service-packages/index.html) for your customers to purchase now that can be used later once the situation improves. This will help you to earn some money now to keep running the bare minimum costs of your business.

10. **Pay cuts and defer bonuses** \- To survive, small businesses have to see where they can reduce costs and must come up with creative ideas. Cutting pay in this difficult time is a very hard decision, but with the given situation, employees may prefer pay cuts to losing the job completely. As the spending of each employee will also go down and with some government aid, your employees might be fine with making this sacrifice.

11. **Business office space** \- With remote working increase, you might want to look into options for your rented office space. Renegotiate your rent or if possible, establish your office at home.

**_How is DoTimely helping businesses?_**

DoTimely provides businesses the tools to run their business efficiently, making management easier. We offer very affordable and feature-rich software. We want to let you know we do offer a free plan to manage your appointments and customers using the web portal or app.

As you are thinking about how to keep your business afloat, make sure your health and safety is the top priority.