The corona-virus pandemic has adversely impacted commerce; and made it more difficult for vulnerable enterprises to maintain adequate levels of business. Enterprises are looking for effective ways to deal with the obstacles encountered in the midst of the pandemic-induced economic downturn. Brick and mortar retailers / restaurants are addled by arrested consumer spending and drastically-diminished productivity due to a severe dearth in retail traffic that is NOT online.
Small businesses are being hit the hardest, as their solvency is far more vulnerable than that of most large corporations. Most American businesses are dealing with supply chain disruptions due to the pandemic-induced economic downturn. The drastic reduction in revenue, with the continued cost of overhead to attend to, is leading to severe cash-flow problems. Small businesses are especially susceptible to cash-flow disruptions; and may not be able to weather the storm for more than a few weeks. Consequently, they are in desperate need of a quick capital infusion.
One of the major obstacles to the process of deploying assistance has been a lack of using online technology to solve problems. This is now changing. Take, for instance, Amazon Web Services, which is being used to help the SBA perform this vital role.
Another groundbreaking approach to shoring up faltering businesses is to apply an open-source model to crisis response. A communal (i.e. collaborative) crisis-response may be more effective than proprietary ones. This approach has been used to, say, co-develop a new product amongst companies that might be competitors in alternate contexts. If certain ventures lose a set of capabilities in a crisis, certain other ventures may tend to lose others. Consequently, there are mutually beneficial opportunities that can be orchestrated for everyone’s benefit. Sick Company is there to connect struggling businesses to sources of capital, and to ensure companies in need of certain resources have a way of finding them. The idea is to connect faltering enterprises with investors willing and able to rescue companies in distress.