The ultimate resilience resource, part four: community

Resilience is one of the key business buzzwords to arise from the COVID-19 pandemic, but it has always been essential to survival. Being a resilient business is about being able to adapt rapidly to changing environments. It’s having resilient systems and processes, which in turn help the business to continue operating smoothly in the face of a disruptive event.

In this four-part SmartCompany Plus series, we dive into four key pillars of resilience, including adaptability, digital agility, and people, unpacking what resilience looks like in these areas, and how they can help your business stand up to the toughest of tests.

Part four is all about community.

When growing a small-to-medium enterprise (SME), it’s natural to focus all of your energy on building up customers. However, an even better approach is to focus on building a ‘community’, which can include your current customers, along with potential customers, and other supporters who want your business to succeed. This community might exist in ‘real life’ in your local area, or digitally via your social media channels with people from all over the world. 

According to Jeffrey Bussgang and Jono Bacon, writing in the Harvard Business Review, a community can “unlock extraordinary competitive advantages and both create and support a superior business model” – powerful factors in SME resilience.

A community doesn’t just magically appear if you create a Facebook page, for example, but takes work to foster. Accenture Strategy says people want to support businesses that demonstrate a ‘higher purpose’, and make a positive impact on the environment or society, assessing what a brand says, does and stands for. 

This puts the onus on SMEs to look beyond the delivery of day-to-day products and services and to think about how to give back. Supporting a local or global cause, sharing insights for free, or innovating products and services that meet a real human need are all examples. 

By supporting others, KPMG writes that you can build loyalty and trust – which are also important to resilience. You may even find ways to grow new revenue streams, as some US-based restaurant owners did after volunteering to cook for people in need during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Australia, some inspiring SMEs are finding their purpose, giving back, and building great communities as a result. This was clear in the 2020 SmartCompany Resilience Awards, where SMEs shared how during the difficult times of COVID-19, they not only focused on their own business survival, but on how their communities were coping, and how they could help. Here are some case studies of how they went about it.

Spreading good spirit

During 2020, the owners of No.5 Restaurant & Bar in Sydney kept hearing stories of people facing uncertainty with their jobs, health, and relationships due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. They were also going through their own challenges as they adapted to new government restrictions, industry-wide staff shortages, keeping their people safe, and general uncertainty about the economy.

The team at No.5 Restaurant & Bar. Source: Supplied

“Operating a business that flourishes on private functions, big bookings, live music and events means we are just not able to create the atmosphere our guests are used to,” says co-owner Stephen Jackson. 

While focusing on keeping afloat, the team also wanted to help the people going through tough times around them. They created the ‘Pay It Forward No. 5’ campaign, with the social media hashtag #payitforwardno5.

The idea was for their followers to tag someone they knew that needed a boost. Meanwhile, the restaurant invited its customers to donate tips towards the fund. Every time the tally reached $100, they randomly selected a tagged person and offered them a free dinner-for-two worth up to $130, and a bottle of wine. Within a week of launching, the team hit its first $100 and vouchers were soon rolling out. 

Jackson says other businesses and media organisations also got behind it. 

“This helped us spread the awareness of the campaign and hyped customers up to come and try our food, and give to someone who might be doing it tough,” he says.

The team’s goal is to become a ‘hatted’ restaurant in 2021, so they’re hoping their supportive community will be there for the journey. 

Content that counts

Community is ingrained in the business model of GigSuper, a Melbourne-based company which helps self-employed people to grow their superannuation.

“Self-employment can be isolating in many ways, so building and nurturing our community has been central to our business strategy from day one,” says co-owner Peter Stanhope.

GigSuper’s Branka Misic, Peter Stanhope and Martin Batur. Source: Supplied

When COVID-19 arrived, the team decided to help its community with a content and webinar-led approach. In addition to its usual advice about managing superannuation, GigSuper covered areas such as financial wellbeing, business development, and professional development. 

“The topics were selected based on trends we noticed within our self-employed community, and we drew upon the expertise of community members, spotlighting them as subject matter experts, giving them a platform to promote their services, make new connections and broaden their audiences,” says Stanhope.

The content also addressed the mental health challenges that self-employed people could be going through during the pandemic.  

“These [pieces] received a great response – they made people feel ‘seen’,” he says. 

Stanhope says GigSuper’s online community increased during this time by nearly 60 percent, showing that giving back doesn’t go unnoticed.

Innovating thoughtfully

During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, period underwear brand Modibodi recognised that people in its community faced challenges which could make managing their periods more difficult than usual.

For example, essential healthcare workers were facing arduous shifts in hospitals on the frontline of the pandemic. Modibodi set about making a new product especially suited to these changing needs. It launched a detachable bikini-style underwear, which could be quickly changed without the need to take off scrubs.

“Despite the struggles that came with the coronavirus pandemic, the crisis allowed Modibodi to focus on its core values and connect more with customers to understand their concerns and address their needs,” says owner Kristy Chong.

Kristy Chong, Modibodi. Source: Supplied

The business also honed in on its charitable efforts, donating over 2,000 pairs of underwear to various charity organisations. It hosted free online events, such as live meditations, webinars and work-from-home playlists. 

“We’ve had to recalibrate and shift a couple of our initial timelines, but our customers and partners have been super supportive throughout this whole journey… We used first-party data to continually engage with our customers and leveraged our 100 percent brand trust to acquire new customers,” says Chong.

Creating your community

Growing a community, both in ‘real life’ and online, relies on people feeling connected to your business and valuing your brand. Three things to consider: 

Purpose first

According to Accenture Strategy, businesses that are purpose-led will naturally start to build a community of “loyal, engaged and valuable brand stakeholders”. 

For fashion brand Fella Hamilton, a key purpose is to “make a difference to the whole community not just focusing on one aspect,” says co-owner Sharon Hamilton.

“Our approach is to have touched and helped as many people as possible, through our own 50,000 active customers, or the general public.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the business created PPE for essential workers.

Virtual meetups

COVID-19 saw businesses of all types leap into running virtual meetups for their communities.

Lori Modde, who runs Lorick Management and manages the community for Outdoors NSW & ACT, did this to a great response for the outdoor industry.

“This is an initiative that I can see will continue and provide access and connectivity for the sector well into the future,” says Modde.

Human connection

While the digital world is key to community building, sometimes picking up the phone is the best thing to do.

During the pandemic, allied health business Physio Inq. recognised that many of its clients needed extra support, particularly for mental health.

“Along with introducing a telehealth option, we ran a project called ‘Connecting with Community’, where we reached out to every client, past and present, to check in with them, see how they were and let them know we were thinking about them,” says owner Jonathan Moody.

He says the effort “reaffirmed our community relationships”.

For SMEs that have a ‘higher purpose’ and give back, community support follows, which adds another pillar to resilience.

Lori Lodde sums up the resilience that a community can offer nicely: “You don’t need to know all the answers, you just need to know where to find them … I realised the power of the ‘united sector’ … their knowledge was the power at our fingertips.”

Further reading on community building

1. Community members can be powerful brand ambassadors and also a source of truth for offering honest feedback. These points are explored in more detail in this article from Forbes.

2. Trust is a key factor in a supportive community, and this KPMG report explores why and how to build it.

   “They [customers] are more questioning as to whether brands behave credibly when it comes to their environmental and social obligation,” the report says.

3. This BCG eBook outlines an interesting framework for thinking about what it calls ‘Total Societal Impact’ (TSI), which it describes as “the total benefit to society from a company’s products, services, operations, core capabilities, and activities”.