Yahoo Finance Was your business ‘punched in the face’ by Covid-19? Here’s what to do
Canva co-founder Cameron Adams will be speaking at Yahoo Finance’s All Markets Summit on 17 September about how to build a business of the future.
Thousands of businesses have been hit hard by Covid-19. And if you’re the owner of one and it feels like you’ve been punched in the face, Canva co-founder Cameron Adams says it’s time for plan B.
“I forget the old Mike Tyson quote. It’s something along the lines of, ‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face’,” Adams told Yahoo Finance.
“It’s the same thing with Covid-19 – you might have had 2020 mapped out, and your marketing channels all lined up, and several campaigns ready to go, but now you have to change your position.”
Canva, every amateur designer’s best friend, has enjoyed immense success over the last few months. It raised US$60 million from investors in June this year, doubling its market value to a whopping $8.74 billion overnight.
It also saw co-founder Melanie Perkins skyrocket to Australia’s third-wealthiest woman.
“We’ve seen a massive shift in what work means,” Adams said. “We’ve had people working from home en masse, and there’s a whole bunch of tools you need to do that effectively.”
And that’s where Canva comes into play. “Now that people need to communicate digitally more than ever, people are using Canva for presentations, social media...We’ve been really fortunate that people have taken up our platform with gusto.”
But if your business was metaphorically punched in the face by the pandemic, there are a few things you can do.
Adapt
Adams said Canva jumped on lockdown trends early, like creating Zoom backgrounds and providing their services to health organisations for free in order to help them scale their communications.
It’s this move that he believes is key to making it through a downturn.
“It’s being extremely adaptable, and really seizing opportunities as they come up,” he said. “It’s been really good to see other businesses adapt and shift what they’re doing, and changing to this new environment.”
Diversify your income streams
Canva has a print offering, creating wedding invitations, posters and flyers. But if that was their only source of revenue, they would have been struggling, Adams said.
“We saw a dip in that [the print offering] in the early days of Covid-19, but that’s just one of our revenue streams, and if it was the only one it would have been problematic,” Adams said.
“Fortunately, we’ve got SaaS [Software as a Service] software, and we have a subscription model, so we have lots of different types of revenue that we can rely on.”
Be flexible
When restaurants were forced to close down as a result of restrictions, they began to offer takeaway services.
“I think that flexibility was fantastic,” Adams said.
“They needed to do it to keep the lights on, but thinking about that into the future...how can they offer that brilliant bricks and mortar experience that we all want, but keep the diverse income stream?
“So maybe, keep that takeaway going, but offering different cooking packages – just thinking about different ways to bring in income, so that when something does happen to one of them, you have another to pull back on.”
Canva co-founder Cameron Adams will be speaking at Yahoo Finance’s All Markets Summit on 17 September about how to build a business of the future.
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