While humanity and businesses reel from the first few seismic shocks of COVID-19, many of us have been forced to ‘go digital’ like never before. Why do I say ‘first few’? Because there will be more shocks to come and they’ll be bigger.

In the last two months Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos’s net worth increased by $29.9 billion. Bill Gates’s net worth increased in the same period by $11.9 billion. And Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, saw his fortunes grow by $31.4 billion.

But Colin Zheng Huang, founder of China’s second largest online marketplace (after Alibaba), Pinduoduo, gained the most in terms of net worth percentage growth. Pinduoduo’s shares have nearly doubled since March 23 making Huang $17.9 billion richer.

What is it about these companies that have made them not merely resilient in this time of crisis, but accelerated?

CHARACTERISTICS OF DIGITAL GIANTS

We can’t all achieve Amazon’s scale and Facebook’s ubiquity. But we can learn to master some of the key characteristics of these powerhouses in order to drive the success of our own businesses: 

1.  MASTER THE ART OF EXPERIMENTATION

Digital companies are constantly testing the market and their customers in precise and highly considered ways. When something works they scale it, when it doesn’t they drop it and pivot. This is what agility is really about – the ability to move quickly towards paths of greater success, learning from your mistakes and innovating continuously. Agility means flexibility, not speed.

Key Action: Read The Lean Start-up by Eric Ries

2.  CUSTOMER-CENTRICITY IS THE NAME OF THE GAME

Today’s giants don’t have a product mentality or even a multi-product point of view. They focus deeply on their customers, building treasure troves of insights about them. And they use these insights, this data, on an ongoing basis to continuously bring new products and services to market to satisfy evolving customer needs. Bezos didn’t call it Books.com after all. And Amazon.com is now the Everything Store.

Key Action: Your sales people shouldn’t be the only ones who talk to your customers. Get out there and start talking to your customers, not only about your product. Talk to them about their lives, their challenges and goals. Armed with these insights you can focus on identifying your next opportunity to serve them and grow. 

3. LEAN

In the early 1900s Henry Ford pioneered the mass production line, enabling the manufacture of complicated products at scale. These mass production techniques were then radically advanced by Toyota in Japan in the 1930s. The Toyota Production System aimed to reduce the cost of production, enhance the quality of products and increase throughput times so that the demand from customers could be met without delay.

This nearly 100-year old practice, Lean, should still be the engine of growth for most businesses today. And yet Lean is unknown to most business owners. While agile gets all the attention in terms of digital transformation, it only applies when you’re trying to produce something you’ve never produced before. That’s when you need experimentation, innovation and a diverse team of people with cross-functional skills who can bring the unknown to life. The rest of the time, when we’re making things we’ve made before, but now we want to make them faster, cheaper and with higher predictability and quality – we need to turn to, and immerse ourselves in, the world of Lean.

Key Action: Do some research on Lean, understand what is meant by ‘the 8 Wastes of Lean’ and figure out how to remove waste from your business, continuously. 

4.  USE THE TECHNOLOGY

You have to jump in. Technology literacy is no longer something you can outsource. This doesn’t mean you have to learn to become a software developer, but you do need to know how to hire one, manage one and, much more importantly, build your own imagination for what a software developer could be doing to advance your business.

Get your feet wet with social media, it’s an incredibly powerful business tool for getting your name and your products out there. But, maybe more importantly, social media is really valuable when it comes to understanding your market and your customers.

Don’t be shy to get a website, but make sure it’s not just a static brochure that never gets updated. Keep it moving, keep it fresh. Turn it into an e-commerce shop or a community for your customers to interact with, so that they can add value to each other and multiply your proposition.

If you don’t know how to build your own website or online shop, reach out to the many South African freelancers or businesses who can. This is a great time to partner, make new connections and pivot – away from doing what we did because we always did it. And away from what was into what’s next.