Pivoting of Business Premises for a Post-Pandemic Breakthrough

Fundamental change of direction of a business incase it cannot meet the current needs of the market means pivoting. Following the report of first Corona virus disease case in Kenya, almost all businesses in different sectors have been affected with some worst cases leading to closure.

As negative as it is, new businesses have thrived, an example being the locally made face masks and hand washing equipment. In other cases, premises that operated specific types of businesses have pivoted and acquired new looks with new business operation. Here are a few examples;

Vision Spring is one of the providers of screening services and eyeglasses to the less privileged living on less than 4 dollars a day. The social enterprise operates in Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Kenya and Zanzibar. It has 6.5 million pairs of glasses globally produced. Following the pandemic vision springs using it's supply chains has harnessed partnership to expertise on;

1. Distribution of PPE's to health workers and hospitals.

2. Commissioning a factory of female artisans to produce cloth masks.

3. Deploying teams to provide accurate information about covid - 19, prevention and hygiene kits, information leaflets, soap and detergent to impact community.

Meanwhile, it has not shifted it's operations fully in line with the pandemic, because when all this is over Vision Spring will be back to business as usual providing screening services and glass wears.

Another case is of the 114 private schools that have been shut down after failure to meet the guidelines stated by the World Health Organization. The owners are left with two options, either give their facilities to state ownership or shift the premises for another business since the problem they were solving no longer exists. This buildings are rendered useless unless the owners completely strive to meet these guidelines which will also be difficult because they are already left behind, nobody will want to register his/her kid in a new school in the middle of a term, thus a need for a pivot.

This has led many private schools to be reformed into human residentials, and those that are nearby towns and shopping centers, have been given new looks of retail and wholesale shops.

Most businesses have been shut mostly due to failure by tenants to pay their premises rents and reduced population due the WHO hygiene guidelines that has caused them low buying rates.

One major challenge in business is the fact that one has to concede that your plan A is not the real deal and a totally new change of direction should be executed. 

Though small scale businesses that cannot afford to pile up their rent and payback when business go back to usual have been forced to shut down, there are cases where shutting down your business may bring in major losses as compared to pivoting it and using your premises to run another business.