What a challenging year 2020 was, some businesses were totally dominated and destroyed but yet, others were growing and flourishing.

If your business had a horrible 2020, there’s no need for 2021 to be equally as bad. The businesses which survived and thrived during the pandemic, all had these 3 things in common.

• Willingness to change

Whether you like it or not, change is inevitable and in most cases is incalculable.

If you want your business to thrive this year, then it must be willing to change. This is where some entrepreneurs get lost because they read this as ‘get rid of your business and start something new’. Don’t get rid of your business, just slightly tweak your business model.

My golden rule to effectively tweaking your business model is this, the purpose of your business shouldn’t change but the strategies used to achieve the purpose must be changed when they no longer serve your business as effectively and efficiently as they used to.

When you change your business model without using the golden rule, your business then begins to look like a chameleon that’s forever changing and it then loses its authenticity and brand identity.

• Embracing technology

We all knew that this would bite us one day, and most entrepreneurs simply ignored the call to move at least some parts of their businesses online. Then 2020 came, and like a trojan horse, it was fearless and it infiltrated the businesses which weren’t embracing technology and it destroyed them.

Uncle Bobbies Coffee & Books is a physical store in Philadephia that relies on foot traffic to make sales. When the pandemic hit, the owner moved it online where they now sell books through a service called Bookshop.

The golden rule with embracing technology is this, do it sooner rather than later. Unfortunately, it takes time to convince customers who are used to physically shopping to now shop online.

• Innovation

You should always be on the look-out for more effective and efficient ways of serving your customers, and that’s where innovation comes in.

Goat2Meeting was created by the owners of an animal sanctuary — Sweet Farm — in California when the farm’s donations were drying up due to the pandemic. Goat2Meeting is a service that allows companies to pay a fee for a goat or any animal on the farm to drop into their zoom or video meetings and to spruce things up.

Innovation and adaptation both form a double-edged sword that can slice through uncertain times.

Your business shouldn’t just adapt to the new normal way of life because many other businesses similar to yours will adapt alongside yours and the result will be a clump of businesses that seem to do the same thing.

However, when you add innovation to adaptation, you’ll then be setting your business apart from others and by standing out, your business will have a better shot at thriving.

If your business focuses on doing these 3 things this year — then no matter what comes — it will survive and will ultimately thrive.