10 Biggest Challenges Faced by Small Business Owners in COVID Era

Not a single day goes by where we don't talk about COVID-19. It is on the social feeds, news and is infiltrating both professional and personal worlds. Most businesses have started work-from-home routines, altering the business's everyday business.

In addition to this, there was a massive shift in the online presence of all businesses. Amid all the chaos, there have been many businesses that climbed the ladder of success. At the same time, the challenges for a few were quite apparent, with many businesses losing revenue and laying off staff. Some even had technological issues, while others worked with limited resources. The worst cases included businesses shutting down. These were mostly small businesses.

So here are ten challenges faced by small businesses.

1. Not being able to Transition to a Digital World.

Large businesses have the means to transition to changes quickly. Whether it's offering more payment options, making new product features, or making your team more productive through a cell phone repair shop software, if you own a repair store, it's easier for them to quickly transition to the changes. Whereas small businesses don't have the means to make such rapid changes.

A crisis like this requires quick thinking. However, with such high stakes, small businesses face analysis paralysis. They are unable to decide due to overthinking. What they don’t understand is that delaying decisions only leads to more problems and required more decisions.

2. Lack of Forward Planning

With COVID prevailing in the world, it has become difficult for businesses to plan. Without knowing how long the pandemic will last and to what degree, it's almost impossible to plan what the people want, what changes should be paid, how many employees are required, etc.  Nothing can be done without knowing what the future holds.

Some businesses were on the road to success before the pandemic and successfully expanded their business. However, they had to shut down because they no longer had the means to make ends meet.

3. Closing Brick-and-Mortar

Another major issue faced by businesses is to be entirely online. Many brick-and-mortar businesses were unable to survive. Some shifted online, whereas some completely closed. Since customers don't want to spend as much as they did before COVID, keeping businesses afloat became almost impossible.

4. Lack of Work-Life-Balance

Anxiety, fear, and hopelessness, most people have been feeling this throughout the pandemic. Every person has been and is facing a lot of emotions in these ever-evolving times. And small business owners are no exception. They had additional stress to do their utmost to keep their employees and customers happy. Which had a significant impact on their work-life balance.

With work from home becoming the norm, maintaining a work-life balance essentially became difficult. Before the COVID pandemic, employees could clock in and clock out and leave their work-related problems at the office. However, as everyone is working from home, it became harder to differentiate between personal and professional life.

As a result, people quickly got burned out.

5. Increased Shipping Costs

The COVID-19 pandemic has also resulted in an increase in shipping prices due to changes in the policies. For many months some restrictions created challenges for small businesses to send products to their customers.

The increased shipping costs left a bad impact on the customers, and in return, they refrained from purchasing.

6. Lack of Creativity

There is no doubt that the best ideas come when employees sit together in group meetings. In the past few months, these group meetings have been online. And are usually interrupted by inadequate internet services or family members carrying about their daily life routine in the background.

As a result, the creative space is affective, and disturbance affects the thinking mechanism of all. Many employees shared their feedback that they don’t feel the same energy in zoom meetings that they had in group meetings.

7. Glitches in Production

Another major challenge was the issues in the production of many small businesses. The governments imposed strict lockdowns, due to which many businesses had to shut down their production houses and send their employees home.

Since they did not have any products ready, sales came to a halt, with small businesses losing a lot of revenue. Even when the government eased the lockdown, restrictions were still there on the employee capacity, and they could not resume production with full throttle.

8. Pressure to Perform

COVID-19 has also put a lot of external pressure on people. They are not only concerned about keeping their jobs now but also worry about their health. The constant fear has majorly affected the performance of people. And small business owners don't know how to address it.

On the one hand, they feel like they should talk to their employees about the drop in performance. And on the other hand, they think they can't put more pressure on their employees.

In that struggle to decide what should be done, the business has suffered.

9. Long Term VS Short Term Content

Small businesses don't know how much of their content needs to be evergreen. And how much needs to be based on COVID-19. The issue with evergreen content was that people did not find it relatable. And the COVID-themed content won't be relatable after the pandemic. So the confusion is between long-term and short-term content.

10. Keeping up with the Legislation

As the business landscape is rapidly changing, the government keeps on introducing new regulations that have had a significant effect on small businesses. To keep up with the changes, businesses must monitor the state, local, and federal news daily.

At times, businesses have had issues taking action on unofficial orders, which has had a negative impact on their businesses.

With the top 10 challenges stated and the pandemic still prevailing, businesses need to develop a strategy to deal with such challenges. If not done the right way, they will face closures of their business or loss of revenue which will eventually lead to shutting down of their business.