6 Strategies for Surviving the Coming Economic Storm

If you’re like most channel pros, you’ve got your hands full these days helping clients adapt to the new world of coronavirus-related “stay at home” orders and remote work policies. 

You may have fuller pockets for the moment too, as sales of cloud-based productivity software and home office hardware skyrocket. Indeed, commercial sales of notebook PCs increased nearly 30% on a year-over-year basis just in the last week of February, according to NPD, and then spiked over 50% in the first two weeks of March. Microsoft now averages more than 44 million Teams users daily, meanwhile, and Zoom added more new users in the first three months of 2020 than in all of 2019, according to Forrester analyst Jay McBain.

Yet the unfortunate reality, warns MSP business coach Manuel Palachuk (pictured), is that the sugar rush some in IT are experiencing right now is likely to come to a crashing end soon, as businesses with all the work-from-home gear they need stop buying more and the COVID-19 pandemic pushes the economy into a recession of unknown severity and duration.

“We certainly have an economic downturn right now,” says Palachuk, who hosted a webinar today on surviving that downturn. “It will likely turn into a crisis. I’m not an economist, but we can all see this, that right now we’re in an economic downturn.”

Palachuk, moreover, has been through this before. During the Great Recession a decade ago, he helped guide a managed services business through dark times to restored prosperity. Now he wants today’s MSPs to employ the lessons he learned back then as an action plan for surviving a new economic storm.

“The ultimate goal is to withstand the drawdowns and make it through this,” he says. Here are six specific ways he advises channel pros to do it.