Operation Recovery: TRSA Launches Sector-Based Task Forces
Members are invited to join TRSA task forces that will create industrywide resources to support linen, uniform and facility services operators in returning to their previous revenue levels. This will aid them in developing strategies specific to the industry’s four all-encompassing customer market classifications: food and beverage (F&B), healthcare, hospitality and industrial.
Defining “industrial” as all other types of businesses or government/nonprofit activities besides the other three, this classification covers the entire economic spectrum and therefore every industry customer and prospect.
These market-specific Business Resilience Task Forces will envision scenarios such as:
- Bars and restaurant dining rooms reopening
- Postponed elective hospital and outpatient procedures resuming
- Hotels returning to previous occupancy levels
- Rehiring in transportation and retail trade
Most TRSA guidance regarding the crisis has been dedicated to preserving operations with an eye toward operators later reaching 100% of the revenue level achieved prior to the start of losing business as a result of COVID-19. This will bring that longer-term goal into focus by considering operators’ options for:
- Financing, with added emphasis on building equity, beyond seeking relief from loans and insurance
- Marketing/sales/service, exploring and pursuing new product and market opportunities, beyond checking in with closed customers and recovering dispersed inventory
- Human resources, rehiring and managing individuals at new-normal employment levels, beyond reducing and checking in with furloughed employees
- Production, reviving idled equipment and efficiently ramping up to full capacity, beyond partial operation and physical plant preservation such as deep cleaning
Task forces will fuel development of Business Strategies content in TRSA’s Coronavirus Resource Center, currently consisting largely of links to articles dedicated to the four market classifications from TRSA and their business media. Also included are links to standards and applications for Hygienically Clean certifications for each market (Food Safety, Food Service, Healthcare, Hospitality), as earning these is an increase in value for linen and uniform services serving these markets in the hyper-hygiene-conscious COVID-19-afflicted economy.
Highlighted in the Business Strategies section is a McKinsey & Co. (international business consultant) paper, “Five strategies for industrial and automotive companies,” describing a “journey that begins with resolve and ends with fundamental reform” that advanced industries including linen, uniform and facility services must take to rebound from the pandemic.
McKinsey points out that surviving and emerging stronger at the far end of the crisis “will require thinking beyond the next fiscal quarter.” The journey consists of five stages:
- Address the immediate challenges that COVID-19 represents to a company’s workforce, customers, and business partners.
- Address near-term cash-management challenges and broader resiliency issues during virus-related shutdowns and economic knock-on effects.
- Create detailed plan to return business to scale quickly, as COVID-19 situation evolves and knock-on effects become clearer.
- Reimagine the next normal: what a discontinuous shift looks like and implications for how institutions should reinvent themselves.
- Be clear about how regulatory and competitive environments in industry may shift.
The McKinsey document will guide the task forces in developing information-sharing, professional and education resources. Contact Ken Koepper, 540.613.5110