IND 
UAE 
When you are working on your dream plan, and suddenly time stops, what can be done? That’s the situation we were in, last year of rigorous planning, demos, POCs, product launch, onboarding of clients, partnership with Banks and ERP solutions, and with COVID-19 we were asked to stay put [ofcourse for our own safety]. But the dream cannot be parked, that too when it involves the lifeline of the economy – SMEs, you need to keep fuelling the engine to keep it warm so that when the economy opens up, we can strike back with full force, and that’s what we did in these last 50 days. Our post of today, narrates our lockdown story, our endeavor to keep business as usual. A quick chat with our Founder – Vishal Gupta and Head of Sales – Ashish Mahal.
The Business as usual @Hylobiz?
Hylobiz is a little over year-young start-up addressing key pain points of SMEs that are Receivables and Payables digitization, connecting the SME’s existing tools/systems with their preferred banking partner seamlessly.
During the lockdown phase, our mantra was – Stay lean, Stay focussed, and spend our energy on forward-looking goals says, Vishal Gupta. Regular review of priorities and weekly deep dive on the deliverables has always been the mode of execution and we stayed with the same. We shuffled our priorities to make our product redefine its user experience, which otherwise you do not get to do with the ongoing sales/rollout pressures. Tweaking the sales approach Ashish says – Under lockdown, our sales pitch focuses on being contactless with “Digital Payment Collections” and also offering it at cost-effective pricing, not to load the SMEs with unwanted pressure of new expense.
The Reaction of SMEs to Covid-19? Concerns?
While people have their dreams to work upon, some people work for survival, with lockdown and COVID-19, fear pushed many SMEs to the edge. The reaction from the community was very predictable – uncertainty and fear of economic meltdown, accepting working from home as the new normal, and enabling digital channels were the challenges faced by the MSME sector says, Ashish Mahal.
To add to this, Vishal quotes – Most of the B2B firms had to take a dip into their cash reserves, with the whole value chain from manufacturing to consumption coming to halt during the lockdown. During the lockdown, the SMEs and businesses were obviously under the pressure of losing revenues and long-haul to build a regular run rate of business post-COVID markets opening up.
We can help you to boost your business efficiency during these tough times. Contact us here to know more about it.
Adapting the new normal – Work from home?
Nobody was prepared for an “emergency” like this. There is always a backup plan or contingency plan to keep business as usual but with the global pandemic, all planning was falling apart. But as it is said your “intend” always pay-off and that helped us in continuing with our business.
Thanks to Lakshmi Thampi, our co-founder, whose effort to support “Back to work moms” seeded the work from the home idea in our work culture long ago.
As Vishal quotes – We take it with a lot of pride that all her team members have had challenges to finding the right opportunities while they could only work from home with their current arrangements. The whole of 6 members team has always been working from home at different locations in India, Australia, and the US. Our product and delivery teams also have flexible hours and use the WFH option freely. Actually speaking there wasn’t really much to tweak or adapt for us.
However, there is always a scope for improvement, so as the team provided their feedback, they were struggling with the reviews, follow-ups, and communication as is expected in any startup. We have started efforts to adopt to Agile model, with more structured planning, follow-ups, and communication intact in our daily work-life.
But switching to work from home with members around, how to manage your productivity? – Ashish who is working from UAE offers a quick hack – I realized that the best approach would be to work around the various distraction at home and block your time for work through the 12 hours of the day rather than restricting it to 8 hours. Moreover, tools such as Slack and Asana helped in collaboration and task management with the team.
If you are looking to join our awesome team, look out for our open position or contact us now.
Impact of Covid-19 on Hylobiz? Predictions Post-COVID?
All businesses and especially SMEs with limited reserves are in “playing safe” mode during the Covid-19 business crisis. They are very sensitive to building any cost on their operations unless a process obviously cut their operation cost or helps them to grow their business. In such a scenario Would Hylobiz be impacted?
Vishal sees this as a silver lining to the business, he says – Hylobiz is built to bring efficiencies, cut costs and at the same time bring the SMEs faster access to working capital and overall will create a big impact to help the businesses revive faster by adopting hylobiz. In fact, to showcase our “efficient system”, Ashish Head of Sales mentions how he has re-strategized the sales strategy, the team has started a campaign to offer free usage of the platform for a month to the ‘warm’ leads.
If any of the B2B’s, SMEs, and enterprises looking to explore our product – please contact us here.
Talking about how the market would shape up Post-COVID or what would be the recovery mode for businesses – Ashish says – Over the next quarter, we expect a very positive impact on the business due to the COVID-19. Companies have been forced to work from home and this will be the new normal, which means digital solutions would be required to mitigate the impact of physical collection/ work. Hylobiz is in the middle of this very interesting journey and expects to see a surge in business over the next 3-4 months.
If you are keen to explore the possibility of providing new heights to your business, we can surely help. Contact us here.