Increase your business’ chances of survival by arming yourself with the best information possible.

Are you worried about the long term health of your business?

If so, you’re not alone. As the initial shock subsides and we find the mental space to act strategically, we still find ourselves strapped with one main problem: we don’t know what will happen.

It’s hard to plan for what you don’t know

DareData, along with the rest of the business community, have now lived through the first month of lockdown in the western world. We’ve got some idea of what happens to our sales in the worst case scenario which we can and should start to leverage. However, there are still many things that we don’t know. According to many experts (see our previous post for more details), the following outcomes are being viewed as very possible, if not likely:

  • Extended current lockdown
  • Multiple lockdowns
  • Required or voluntary social distancing until therapies are developed
  • A vaccine could be years away

So what can you do?

Even if you don’t know what will happen, you can and should prepare yourself with data showing what will happen to your revenue in each of the projected cases. Armed with this data, it could help with the following:

  • Asking your government for financial help
  • Adjusting your short, medium, and long term business strategies to ensure survival

Familiarizing yourself with the expected impact on your sales under different scenarios will allow you to put informed plans in place for each one of them. This way, when one of the scenarios starts to become true, you’ve got a well-thought-out plan that can be activated, rather than having to rush the plan development and implementation all at once.

This type of stress testing is well-studied though it is not very widespread amongst small and medium size businesses.

How we can help you

Send us your sales data (sales.forecasting@daredata.engineering) and we will deliver weekly reports with forecasts adjusted for some or all the scenarios that McKinsey has developed in this excellent report. Some of these scenarios are as follows and are are done using obfuscated data from a local restaurant in Lisbon, Portugal.

All of your data will be kept anonymous, encrypted, and will not be shared with anyone who is not directly contracted by DareData. We will gladly service deletion requests immediately.

Scenario 1: Virus contained and mid to slow recovery

Public health authorities are able to contain the virus until a vaccine is out. The economic rebound will only happen in two quarters and by the end of the year economies are still struggling but picking up.

This scenario is characterized by:

  • One lockdown period of 8/10 weeks;
  • An initial drop of x percent (we get this from your data).
  • Some businesses die and ⅓ of them are replaced by new customers.
  • The economic recovery happens at a rate of 3% per month and sales pickup on Q42020.

Scenario 2: Virus contained and slow economic recovery

Public health authorities are able to contain the virus until a vaccine is out. The economic rebound will happen slowly and the economy will only pick up after Q1 2021.

This scenario is characterized by:

  • One lockdown period of 8/10 weeks;
  • An initial drop of x percent (we can get this from your data).
  • Some businesses die and 1/10 of them are replaced by new customers.
  • The economic recovery happens at a rate of 1% per month and sales pickup after Q12021.

Scenario 3: Virus not contained and slow economic recovery

Public health authorities are not able to contain the virus until a vaccine is out. The economic rebound will happen slowly and the economy will only pick up after 2021.

This scenario is characterized by:

  • Two lockdown periods of 15 weeks;
  • An initial drop of x percent (we get this from your data).
  • Some businesses die and almost none are replaced.
  • The economic recovery happens at a rate of 0.5% per month and sales pickup after 2021.

Our method

For each of these scenarios, we will use the following tool that we’ve developed along with your dataset(s) to come up with adjusted sales forecasts. We hope to be releasing a web app in the future so that people can maintain their own forecasts.

Is this really free?

We will provide your first three weekly reports for free. With this, you should derive significant value. The reports that are delivered take into account policy and scientific data as it becomes available. It is up to you to decide whether or not you will continue to need them after the first 3 weeks. Pricing will be announced soon.