We pivoted to serve you better in 2020. Here's hoping 2021 will be a year of recovery - GrowBiz: Advice on how to grow your business

What a year. At GrowBiz, we strive to bring you inspirational stories, smart advice and plenty of resources for growing your small business. But by mid- to late-March it was clear that we would be pivoting, just like so many of our region’s small businesses.

Instead of stories about growth strategies, we turned our focus to relief resources and reinvention strategies. We brought you resources and guidance about PPP loans, EIDLs, the Florida bridge loan program, the Main Street Lending Program and a myriad of grants and loans offered by municipalities. We tried to keep you abreast of deadlines and changes. What’s more, our experts gave you tips and tricks for securing relief.

We also covered topics like how to reinvent your business for the new normal, how to communicate with your team during these trying times, and how to adapt your marketing to the times. We posted about how to hire and manage a remote workforce, too. When the economy was beginning to reopen, we helped you with advice on safely reopening your business.

What’s more, Florida SBDC at FIU launched a Webinar education program, bringing you Webinars on everything from reinvention to HR strategies to Opportunity Zones. We covered some of them for you too, and you can access the free Webinars at anytime right here.

We brought you stories of strength and resilience, chronicling the stories of small businesses navigating the toughest challenge of their lives – survival. The stories were everywhere, and we tried to bring you a variety of them.

Perhaps as we turn the page into 2021 and access to vaccines on the near horizon, we can get back to covering those growth strategy stories sometime in the first half of the year. But until then we’re here to help. For now, you can get acquainted with some of the changes in the next round of PPP here.

As we look back on the year that will surely be the subject of many business case studies, we learned valuable lessons. Some businesses even are emerging stronger. We know the pain is not over, particularly in the hardest hit hospitality industry, but you inspired us. You took a hard look at your expenses and made the tough cuts that were needed. You added revenue streams where you could. The rapid pivots that you made to save your businesses were incredible.

Happy New Year, dear readers. Here’s to hoping we see the pandemic in the rear view mirror soon and we can all get back to the business of growing again.

We leave you with a small sampling of the 124 stories we brought you in 2020. We hope you found them helpful.

ADVICE AND STRATEGY:

CASH FLOW IS KING: BE PROACTIVE, NOT REACTIVE, TO SAVE YOUR BUSINESS

HOW TO REINVENT YOUR SMALL BUSINESS FOR THE ‘NEW NORMAL’