FOX59 Post COVID Winners and Losers

Marc Freedman on FOX59 about Business Winners & Losers in Post-COVID World.

Jessica Hayes: The pandemic has changed a lot of the ways the entire world functions businesses have had to adjust how they operate, to keep customers safe. Now, with vaccines and tried many businesses are preparing for life, post pandemic with the changes businesses have made to survive could have a lasting impact especially on other industries, who will need to adjust again in a post pandemic world lot going on to talk more about that. I’m joined now by certified expense reduction consultant Marc Freedman, good morning to you. Thanks for joining us. First I want to talk about digital meetings and appointments that we’ve seen so much of in 2020, and the changes that brought.

Marc Freedman: Yeah, so we’ve all been Zoomified. Yeah, I think that’s now a verb.

Jessica: It’s a thing!

Marc: And I think what you’re going to see is a dramatic decrease in face to face meaning for many many businesses businesses now realize that they can actually do business without having to be in person and of course that’s going to have a lot more dramatic effects.

Jessica: Let’s talk about some of the other consequences of so much work from home that trend that we’ve seen as well.

Marc: Yeah, so the first issue there is many businesses, we’re not really set up to work from home. And with all the different hats, we have the cybersecurity issues that we have. You really need to make sure that you’ve got a VPN connection that secure that can’t be penetrated and actually is actually used forced to be used by employees when they log into your, your main employment headquarters servers, some important that you have to take that step.

Jessica: Let’s move now to the commercial real estate industry you expect this to dramatically shift inventory as well.

Marc: Yeah, I think, inventory will be dramatically affected as you mentioned, and the reason being is with everybody being able to now, what they call hotel, meaning you don’t necessarily need a dedicated office you need just a space to come to the office, many offices were actually already doing this, but now because his business are growing and they’re adding employees to their to their payrolls, they actually don’t need to increase their footprint. So there’s going to be a lot of excess space and meaning it’s probably going to take about four or five years for all that to be eaten up so to speak now we’re seeing so many of these effects that are lasting and affecting other industries.

Jessica: Lastly, let’s talk about a decrease in business travel, what does that mean and again that you know that trickle down effect there as well.

Marc: Right, so every time there’s an issue that affects a segment of the market. It certainly is trickle down, it’s trickled down to the fact that if people are not traveling you have fewer seats needed on airlines fewer seats needed on trains and fewer fewer seats needed anywhere on any kind of public transportation. And so the revenue decreases, are going to be kind of astronomical to all these different industries. And people are gonna have to try and figure out ways other than ticket sales to, to be able to maintain what they’ve developed and in addition to that, it’s going to be some time before we even get back to any kind of levels, we’ll probably be about, maybe three four or five years. One thing that we’re probably going to see is a pop when this pandemic is over. It will be a lot of leisure travel.

Jessica: Everybody needs to get out. Yeah, people have been waiting a longtime for that Marc Freedman, thank you for joining us this morning a lot of really important topics that a lot of people are talking about. Happy New Year to you.

Marc: Thank you.

Jessica: All right, if you want to read more about business post pandemic you can visit our website Fox59.com click on the story, we’ve linked to you to Mark’s website there.