7 Things Businesses must do to take care of themselves in tough times and ahead | By Sawan Kumar

If you run a small business and the last two years have left you running paycheck to paycheck, this is the small business survival strategy I wish someone had handed me when the crisis first hit. Two moves — repack your business luggage and upskill yourself — are what separate the operators who survive from the ones who quietly close shop.

Direct Answer: What Small Businesses Must Do Right Now

A small business survival strategy in tough times comes down to two non-negotiables: cut every expense that is not essential to the next 3-12 months, and force-upgrade your technology and skills so you can reach customers digitally. Most small businesses run paycheck to paycheck with only two to three months of cash buffer — so increasing cash inflow, deferring cash outflow, and going online are not optional. They are the difference between staying in business and shutting down.

Why Small Businesses Get Hit Hardest

A small business is defined by three things: a small team (often one person or a few friends), small revenue, and limited ability to stay afloat when times get tough. Larger corporations have deep pockets — they can absorb six, twelve, eighteen months of bad revenue. Small businesses typically have two to three months of runway. That is it.

This is why every shock — COVID, a tax change, a technology shift, a recession, a change in buyer behaviour — hits the small operator first and hardest. You cannot complain your way out of it. You cannot blame the government, the economy, or the virus. None of that puts money back in your account. The only thing that works is preparing your business to take the hit before the hit lands.

Step 1: Repack Your Business Luggage

Think about how you pack a suitcase when the airline gives you a 15 kg allowance. You do not throw in everything you own. You carry only the essentials, you stack them in order of priority, and you make sure nothing extra is weighing you down.

Your business needs the exact same treatment right now. Walk through every line item and ask: does this expense help me survive the next three, six, or twelve months? If the answer is no, it comes out of the suitcase.

• Recollect your revenues: what did you make last year, what will you realistically make this month, this quarter, this half-year, this full year?
• List every expense and mark which ones can be deferred. Defer everything that can be deferred.
• Minimise cash outflow ruthlessly — every rupee that leaves your account in the next 90 days needs to justify itself.
• Maximise cash inflow — pull forward any receivable you can, accelerate any sale that is three months out, add a new revenue vertical if you have the bandwidth.

The metric you are watching is net cash inflow. If that number is positive and growing month over month, you have already won half the battle.

Step 2: Stop Making Excuses About Technology

Here is the harder truth. Two or three years ago, you could get away with treating technology as something for the kids. You could say it was not for your business, that you would deal with it later, that you would hire someone if you ever really needed it. That window has closed.

COVID did not start the technology shift — it poured fuel on a fire that was already burning. Buyer behaviour has changed. The way people discover you, evaluate you, and pay you has changed. The businesses that survive are the ones that accept this and rebuild around it. The ones that do not, quietly disappear.

Having trained over 79,000 students across 74-plus courses on AI, automation, and GoHighLevel, I can tell you the operators who treat upskilling as optional are the ones who get left behind first. As a Chartered Accountant I am numbers-driven, and the numbers on this are not subtle.

Step 3: Follow Your Customers Online The Way You Used To Follow Them Offline

Before all of this, if you ran a corner shop or a consultancy, you knew your customers. You wished them on their birthdays. You greeted them by name when they walked in. You remembered their kid's name and their wedding anniversary. That relationship is still the asset — only the channel has changed.

• Build a database of every customer. Name, phone, email, birthday, last purchase.
• Send them WhatsApp greetings on birthdays and anniversaries — the same warmth, a different medium.
• Follow them on Facebook and Instagram. When you follow your customers, your customers start following you back. That is the whole game of social media.
• Message them when you have a new offer or product — but only after you have earned the right to be in their inbox.

You used to follow your customers in a non-digital way. Now you have to do the same thing in a digital way. The relationship discipline does not change. The tools do.

Step 4: Learn The Tech Yourself Before You Hire Anyone

One of the most expensive mistakes I see small business owners make is outsourcing technology before they understand it. They hire a web developer, a digital marketing agency, a social media consultant — without knowing what good looks like. Six months later they have spent money, gotten generic work, and have nothing to show for it.

No vendor knows your customer the way you do. No agency knows your brand persona the way you do. So before you make any cash outflow on technology, you have to understand the basics yourself — what a funnel is, how a CRM works, what an email sequence does, why a landing page converts. Then you can hire a professional and direct them properly.

Step 5: Prepare For The Next Crisis While You Survive This One

The mistake most small businesses make is treating each crisis as a one-time event. It is not. Another one is coming — a tax change, a technology disruption, a regional slowdown, something. Your job is not to become crisis-proof. Your job is to become strong enough to take the hit when it lands.

That means building a cash buffer that lasts more than two months. It means keeping your expenses lean even when the good times return. It means treating upskilling as a quarterly habit, not a one-time scramble.

The Bottom Line

A small business survival strategy is not complicated — it is repack your luggage to cut what does not earn its place, and upskill yourself so technology stops being someone else's problem. Start today by listing every expense in your business and marking the ones you can defer for the next 90 days. That single exercise will tell you exactly where your runway stands.