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Many established businesses have a reasonably well-defined target market and brand, but can’t decide what their other priorities are. No company can stay in business without reasonably good sales, marketing, products, customer service, etc. Tesla went from a wannabe niche car company to the most valuable car company in the world (by stock market capitalization) in less than a decade because they excelled at one thing: innovation. General Motors, on the other hand, used to be the most valuable car company in the world, but now has a market capitalization of under $60 Billion.

Do some market research, and make sure it is relevant to your particular business, not just some generic business, an extremely broad industry, or across a much larger geographic area than where your business will actually operate. If you want to grow slowly and don’t want to lose control of your business, then selling your products to Walmart is probably not a good idea. Just because everyone else is using Facebook, that doesn’t mean it is necessarily a good fit for your business. But don’t kid yourself by thinking you can write a business plan when you start the business and never change after that.

If people aren’t going to work, restaurants are closed, major public events are canceled, and large businesses are cutting back on services and hiring, there will definitely be consequences. Politicians will pay endless lip service to how much they care about small businesses, but in the end, they will leave the vast majority of small businesses to their own devices. But if the restaurant can generate enough revenue to cover the fixed expenses, it may be possible to spread the remaining work out over a larger number of people working part-time, so more people get to keep their jobs and fewer people are laid off. If you decide you need to lay off employees, or worse, shut your business down, be sure to treat your employees and contractors with the respect and compassion you would expect to receive if you were in their shoes.

Until recently, most climate scientists thought the effects of climate change were at least decades away, which gave us plenty of time to change our land use, energy, transportation, construction and agricultural policies to reduce and/or mitigate the effects. The United States has long been considered a stable bulwark for democracy around the world, but historians, sociologists and others have been raising the alarms about rising autocracy, restrictions on privacy, voting rights violations, and many other issues for the past decade. They will likely experience growing food and water shortages (due to climate change and environmental degradation) over the next 30 years, leading to large waves of human migrations and more political instability. More recently, Corona virus, which started in a food market in Wuhan, China, has been spreading rapidly, and caused stock market gyrations and supply chain disruptions around the world.