Almost every business uses some sort of business consultant. You might get legal counsel from your outside attorney. You might get strategy advice from a consulting firm, financial advice from a CPA or CFA, or maybe you just bounce ideas off a friend you trust informally.
But with any of these consultants, you don’t make business decisions without listening to their advice. Without it, you can’t be sure you’re making the best decision for your company.
Here’s a question. During COVID-19, the worst pandemic in a century, who are you trusting for medical advice for your company? Is it someone with a medical degree who can interpret and simplify the latest medical information? Or are you leaving it to your leadership team to figure it out alone?
Throughout COVID-19, you’ve probably relied on the usual business consulting suspects for everything from PPP loans and audits, to cash-flow and tax guidance, to employee benefit and legal requirements.
But, right now, getting business advice from a physician is more important than ever.
Just like enlisting outside legal counsel to interpret and advise on legal matters, a business consultant with a medical background, i.e., a physician, has the training and education to digest the latest data shifts and provide your business with sound advice that’s easy to understand and tailored to your business.
As an executive health provider, we’ve worked hand-in-hand with companies to keep their employees, executives included, safe. And since the pandemic started, our doctors have consulted with companies big and small as their medical counsel, helping them navigate the challenges brought on by COVID-19, such as how to reduce key person risk.
So how can enlisting a physician to be your trusted, medically trained adviser help your business? Here are three ways.
1) Help implement policies to keep your workforce safe.
No matter if you are a small business owner with a handful of employees or a corporation with hundreds, your employees are the heartbeat of your company. And any of them could contract COVID-19 at any time. Their safety should be your number one priority.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, businesses have been looking for advice they can trust on myriad questions, such as:
- Does everyone need to work from home?
- How often does the office need to be cleaned?
- What cleaning methods should be used?
- Do we need to seal off the break room completely?
- Should employees close their doors, if possible?
- How can we shift not only our physical work spaces, but the flow of people in and out to be safer?
- How is our air quality? Is it filtering appropriately?
- When is it safe to bring employees back?
- Should we test employees or check temperatures when employees come back to the workplace?
Those are the just the most basic ones. And if you’re trying to guess the answers to these questions, you’re taking a risk with the safety of your employees, possibly the safety of your customers, and probably the security of your company.
Getting business consulting during COVID-19 from a physician gives you a resource to lean on for informed guidance on all these questions, and more, so you can keep your team as safe as possible. And because they are working directly with you, their advice can be tailored to your company’s specific issues.
It’s that kind of direct, informed, relevant advice that allows you to make the best decisions for your people and your company.
2) Develop plans to reduce your key person risk.
Yes, during this pandemic, the health and safety of ALL your employees should be at the top of your mind. But with any business, there are key individuals, or a key group of individuals, who are particularly important to your company’s success. These are known as key persons, and the risk to your business if any of them, or all of them, get sick with a contagious virus like COVID-19, and cannot perform at full capacity is known as key person risk. And during this pandemic, key person risk is a more immediate threat to your business operations than normal.
Most often, these key persons are your leadership team, your C-Suite. They could also be your top salespeople who generate most of the revenue, your IT team who keeps the business’s network going, or anyone else with an indispensable skill set. Your business needs these people healthy to operate efficiently.
During COVID-19, it is important to make sure they have all the tools needed to stay healthy. You need to give them the best advice possible to avoid contracting the virus and also give them the resources to be best prepared in case they do get exposed.
That’s where business consulting that includes advice from a physician comes into play. A physician becomes not only the sounding board for your company’s policies and procedures, but they become the sounding board to make sure the most important people in your company are minimizing their chances of exposure and maximizing the resiliency of their own immune systems.
In essence, using a physician as one of your COVID-19 business consultants is the best way to reduce your key person risk and keep your company operating at peak performance.
3) Provide realistic guidance on future planning
One of your primary responsibilities when leading your company is planning for both the long and short term. Planning something is almost always on your to-do list, whether it’s planning next quarter’s company-wide retreat, planning the purchase of a whole new set of laptops for your employees, or planning the entire budget for next year.
And right now, planning is practically impossible. With another COVID-19 wave expected in the fall, you’re trying to do everything you can to prepare for the next few months. And with the virus having severely impacted most of the first half of 2020, you’re also trying to figure out how to plan next year, without any idea of what next year is going to be like.
The bad news is it’s not likely to get any easier until we have a viable vaccine. The good news is you can get help. Hiring a physician for business consulting can help you plan many aspects of your business during COVID-19.
- What do your cleaning protocols need to look like exactly, both now and in six months? How often should your office be cleaned? How intense should that cleaning be? That could affect the contract you have with your vendor.
- What is the safest way to on board new employees right now? That could affect your hiring process for the next several months.
- If you have employees that are under-performing at home, how can you safely bring them back to the office and boost your productivity? Are there employees whose duties put them in high-risk situations, meaning your business needs to adjust how they work?
- Will it be safe to host your company retreat next spring or should you pull the plug? When is it safe to restart business travel?
- Once they’ve found a vaccine, what should you say to your employees about getting it?
Some of these questions have answers right now. Some of these don’t. But you should be thinking about all of them. And when it does come time to answer them, you need a business consultant you can trust to provide you with the most medically informed information possible.
Get Business Consulting During COVID-19 from a Physician at PartnerMD
As a leading concierge medicine practice with offices throughout the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic, we’ve dealt with many of the same problems your company has probably dealt with. We’re just lucky to have our own doctors available as our own medical counsel.
But we want to help your company as well.
That’s why we’re offering a free consultation with one of our doctors to get you the medically informed business consulting advice you need. We’ll set up a one-hour virtual meeting with one of our physicians, so you can get the latest guidance and talk face-to-face with a doctor about issues affecting your business. Learn more about how PartnerMD is helping businesses during COVID-19.
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