Joseph Laforte is the sales team leader at Par Funding, a leading SMB capital provider to small and medium-sized businesses. Joseph Laforte is a serial entrepreneur and noted a Small business expert.
Joseph Laforte brings a number of critical skills to the table. He has introduced new technology to struggling small businesses, aiding them in achieving top-level service and financial stability. Not only that, but he also remains familiar with community resources, enabling him to advise small businesses about how to integrate those resources to help them become more stable, consumer-focused industry players. Throughout his years with the company, he has helped generate more than $2 billion in additional profits for the companies he works with.
Thanks to Joseph Laforte’s efforts and his ability to assess and navigate risk, Par Funding has remained highly competitive in an industry where many small factoring firms are struggling. Traditional lenders might have turned away many of the opportunities that Laforte welcomed, but he saw the potential advantage within those risks and used them to help grow both his company and others. Par Funding continues, under his leadership and guidance, to see unprecedented growth.
Joseph Laforte remains very well-known for his professionalism, expertise, and leadership within the finance industry. His stellar reputation precedes him in many circles, enabling him to open doors for himself, his business, and his clients.
Success in entrepreneurship depends on a lot of things. Having excellent leadership skills, a strong drive, and a solid passion for your business industry are all unique qualities that can contribute to an entrepreneur’s success. Once you’ve become an entrepreneur, you know there is no “easy way out” of problems and situations you may incur along the way. The unprecedented times we are currently experiencing with the coronavirus is undoubtedly one of those problems that’s difficult, if not impossible, to prepare and plan for. After working with hundreds of small businesses owners, when it comes to the coronavirus, I can say that nobody was able to foresee or have a robust risk management plan for these events.
As the founder and leader of a significant SMB finance firm that invests in entrepreneurs, I have helped many businesses expand their visions and grow into larger, more successful firms. Being involved with these firms for so long, I have seen in the past how major economic disruptions have a tangible effect on businesses and leaders. However, many of those economic disruptions were far more predictable. What makes the coronavirus’s impact on businesses so unprecedented nowadays is the fact that nobody saw this coming, making this an unparalleled event. Since so few companies were able to plan for this event successfully, we can see that we all still have a lot to learn.
So, now that we are in the middle of this unprecedented event, what can businesses do to keep on handling things so that they can move forward?
Moving Forward
There are two key things that businesses can focus on when they want to move forward during these trying times:
1. Putting a Plan in Place
When it comes to putting a plan in place, your business will need to consider first the immediate short term, and then come up with long term plans as well. Depending on what your business industry is, you’ll need that quick short-term plan first. Your immediate short-term plan should focus on how to keep your business going during the coronavirus. That means adapting to the changing times and potentially offering new services.
For example, we’ve seen many significant restaurants adapt to the pandemic crisis using some out-of-the-box strategies that solve their immediate short-term goals. Many restaurants that never offered delivery services before turned some of their out-of-work servers and kitchen workers into delivery drivers. That gave these restaurants an innovative way to use their employees and keep their sales going.
We’ve also seen this development occur with some major retail stores and auto part stores. Many of these places are now offering to deliver products right to customers’ doors when they never offered such services before.
So, for your immediate short-term strategy, you may need to think outside of the box and get a bit more creative with your employees and services. The main principle is to find a way to keep your business services accessible to the public during these trying times. If you are dealing with selling any type of product, your company needs to deliver those products to homes.
What about your long-term solutions, however? After you’ve developed your short term strategy, you can combine what you are doing into a more long-term plan. For instance, many of these restaurants and retail stores will likely continue to offer delivery services even after the pandemic scare ceases. That’s because the pandemic is not only changing businesses; it’s also changing the expectations of the people that purchase things from those businesses.
2. Communicate and Be Vocal
Communication is vital when it comes to effective business practices. If your business is now adapting and offering new services because of the pandemic, make sure to vocalize that to your customers. If your customers aren’t aware that you are offering home delivery services, they may simply just stop buying from you. Keeping your customers informed during these times helps to maintain your business’s customer pool, and that’s key to surviving this pandemic.
You also need to make sure you are communicating effectively with your employees, too. That’s because as businesses are adapting, employees are being given new and different opportunities to try different job positions. These different job positions will require additional training on the part of the business, and that’s also where effective communication comes into play.
Resilience is essential to all entrepreneurs, and staying resilient now is key to surviving the pandemic. I wouldn’t trade my current situation for anything else because I’m grateful to be able to do what I love to do. However, it isn’t easy to be an entrepreneur, and that’s especially true right now. While many people feel that entrepreneurs live carefree lives, that’s not the truth. Being an entrepreneur is more like an obsession, because of everything you’ve invested in your business, like passion, time, and money. And when you work from home or your spouse or family members work with you, you rarely, if ever, leave the office–at least from a mental standpoint
Still, the key to becoming a successful entrepreneur is reliance, and with that comes an innovative thinking process. As long as you can stay creative and adaptable, your business will survive this pandemic. To read more about Joseph LaForte and his work with small business owners Follow him on twitter here.