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Who Benefits When Weather Shuts Down A Town?

By Mark Riffey

All over the U.S., winter seems to be having a little fun with us.

While the Flathead mostly has fun with it – a lot of places are pretty well shut down by this year’s winter road conditions. Without the staff and equipment to handle serious (for their area) winter storms, many communities are left to play an economically troubling waiting game until the roads melt.

In Atlanta, the highways were strewn with abandoned cars. In Birmingham, traffic was bumper to bumper at one a.m., despite what looked like not much more than wet streets.

Having little experience with this sort of weather, no snow tires and living in a community whose plow staff and equipment are limited or non-existent for obvious reasons – people were just stuck, both at home and elsewhere.

Who benefits from that?
For one, companies who support telecommuting.

The obvious benefit is that those employees or contractors were already home (or close – like at a local coffee shop) rather than some distance away in an office park or commuter traffic.

What isn’t so obvious is the lack of strain on their families because those people are simply… home. Yet they can still work. The technology to access everything that’s needed from home has improved vastly in the last few years and it continues to improve.

Not every business can support full-time telecommuting, but almost every business has “desk jobs”, such as design, technology, administrative, sales, and customer support – all of which are telecommute-friendly.

Consider being flexible enough to suggest that staffers with “desk jobs” work from home on bad weather days or when it’s expected.

It’s a simple idea… have you tried it?

What about trust?
You might say “We can’t trust some people to do a full day’s work at home.”

There are at least two problems with that.

  • If you can’t trust them to do a full day’s work at home, what else can’t you trust them to do? And if you can make a list of such things, why are people you can’t trust working for you in the first place?
  • If they struggle to reach the office and leave early in hopes of arriving safely at home, are they doing a “full day’s work”?

Opportunity with frost on it
One thing people tend to realize when they’re stuck at home is how sensitive their lifestyle is to “being out of (whatever)”.

If you sell “whatever”, I hope you deliver it. If you don’t want to deliver it, that’s OK.

However, if they buy it often enough, be thoughtful enough to recognize how often they buy it – and remind them so they don’t run out. You don’t have to be a nag, just remind a little – and offer to deliver if you wish.

Studded Snows
While these problems don’t impact people in the North too much, “bad” weather opportunities exist in cold climates as well as warm. When it’s nasty outside – regardless of what “nasty weather” means, people tend to stick close to the business until closing time.

Where’s the opportunity in that?

Restaurants properly equipped to travel in these conditions can deliver food. Grocery and other “retail essentials” like pharmacies could do the same.

Pickups and deliveries of products and employees are an option when normal means won’t work and time is critical. How can you help your clients simply get things done?

These things are common sense, but how many times has a restaurant called your office during a blizzard and offered to bring your staff lunch?

Have you gotten an email from a local shop or auto dealer asking if anyone at your business had a car that needed attention? On a day when the roads are not so hot, they could pick up and deliver a vehicle rather than having service people sitting around waiting for service appointment no-shows.

One more thing
These opportunities aren’t always limited to your community.

The obvious way for your business to reach beyond your local community is your website. I know, it’s 2014 and maybe I shouldn’t have to mention it, but there are still a lot (yes, a lot) of businesses out there without websites.

Is there something you do that can be sold beyond your community’s borders?

Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a strategic, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site, contact him on Twitter, or email him at [email protected].