I know you didn’t make it this far, just to make it this far. You didn’t make it to the summer of 2020 to sit back and say, ‘Great, I made it through five really tough months and that should be enough.’
There is an unbelievable opportunity for entrepreneurs and business owners that have a growth mindset and a thirst to expand their operations. And there’s an unprecedented amount of talent that does not currently. have a job or a team they’re associated with. All you need to do is make them some type of offer.
You may be thinking, now may not be the best time to expand, given that there is still a lot of uncertainty. But there are ways to expand your business without risking all of your capital.
Hire Interns
We hired for summer interns for our marketing company. If you offer minimum wage in your state, you’ll be blown away at the volume of highly qualified applicants. We thought we would hire one or two, but after receiving over 100 applications in less than two days, we ended up hiring four. Here are a couple of tips for a smooth process:
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Make it a remote internship. By making the internship virtual, you won’t limit the number of applicants based on location. This brings in more highly qualified people.
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Have an onboarding process. Make sure your onboarding process is ready to go to ensure it is a productive internship for you and the intern.
Reallocate Marketing Dollars
In the past couple of months, most of us have not been marketing as usual. When this all hit quarter two, we stopped all direct mail. What we didn’t stop was the money allocated there. Now that markets are opening back up, we are going use the money allocated for April and May and dump it into June and July.
Take a look at your own market. If you pulled back on expenses, where – and when – does it make the most sense for you to spend those dollars?
Run a Virtual Contest
The third way to expand there during this time, without taking a huge amount of risk, is to run a virtual contest. If you have a project that needs to be completed, you can ask people to participate by finishing the project for some type of reward. This can be repeated for many areas of your business – marketing, administrative, or analytics.
Expansion can come in many forms. If you don’t have the capital to spend, be creative in ways to grow your business and bring in more talent.