Bird Lovegod: Welcome to a new world

This might not have been entirely in keeping with the spirit of lockdown, or indeed the licensing regulations, and I suspect it was more for entertainment rather than enterprise, but it certainly got a lot of attention and had that been my local I might have popped over to check out the seedlings.

It’s a good analogy, because like gardeners, most business people these days are nurturing their creations, trimming, pruning, cutting back, watering them with government grants and loans and hoping they don’t end up on the compost heap. A few are instead trying to manage wild growth. But not many.

For most it’s about keeping the business alive. This is always the most important thing and greatest cause for concern for business owners, although they should probably draw a line when it comes to impacting on the health and wellbeing of the people involved.

It’s so hard to be in business right now, the rules keep changing, and the uncertainty can be paralysing. If you’re in retail what’s the point in adapting to a two-metre rule, if the rule is going to change next week, or next month?

And the two-metre rule must go for anything like viable business to return to the high streets and hospitality sectors and that includes all pubs, cafes and restaurants. For some businesses a straight hibernation period is preferable to the constant pressure of trying to meet shifting requirements of opening. Yet even that’s problematic when no-one knows when spring is coming. Are we in a commercial cold snap, or winter, or an ice age?

In some regards, very small businesses may be best positioned to survive the season, the lower the overheads, the more flexibility, the ability to test new ideas if needs be, to change opening hours to peak times, cutting every unnecessary expense, adding new product ranges, or taking some away and offering less, doing whatever can be done to maximise the efficiency of the enterprise.

Some predict direct mail is going to make a comeback, there’s more than enough digital content to deal with, and people are generally quite welcoming of interesting things coming through the letterbox.

Perhaps we’ll see an increase in magazines and product catalogues, perhaps even local businesses pooling together to create their own publications. Local is good, and if there was ever a time to support local businesses that time is now.

Will everything snap back to normal? Will the Government engineer a green technology revolution and with it millions of new jobs? It could, and perhaps they will, it’s interesting how each country is dealing with this crisis individually and on its own terms and in its own way, just as we all are as individuals and entrepreneurs.

There is a fundamental shift happening that’s for sure, it’s a deep questioning of who and what we are as a society, even our history and cultural identity is being challenged. The game’s changed, or at least one game is over and the new game is yet to fully emerge.

What are we now to be? What will the high streets become, they were struggling before, now, surely they are finished? What do we really need? More shops? Or gardens and nature spaces, indoors and out? Creating huge indoor gardens, now that would attract people, who would also shop and drink and play and purchase and socialise.

It seems we’ve pretty much broken our addiction to consumerism and consumption, so why are we even here? Who are we as individuals, as entrepreneurs, as a nation, and what is our calling? What if it was to heal, or create beauty? What then would we become?