How regional businesses can build a Plan B while Plan A still pays the bills
By Emma Coochin — 2026-05-17
This article first appeared in the May 2026 CCBG Telegraph.
Walk down any regional main street with your eyes open and you can read the health of the local economy in about ten minutes. After years of reading those streets, the past few have been hard to watch.
The telltale signs are easy to spot. Which shops are lit. Which ones are papered over. Which ones look tired but are still open. Which ones have a new sign out the front, and which ones have a "for sale or lease" notice in the window. A town's story is on its main street footpath in plain sight, if you walk slowly enough to see it.
And the conversations I keep having in those towns often follow the same script. The fuel has gone up again. The caravans are not coming through like they used to. "What can you do," somebody says. There is a full stop after it, not a question mark.
That full stop is what I want to talk about.
A pattern I keep noticing across every industry
I have worked across a lot of industries in a nearly twenty year career. Fashion when the online giants turned up. Fintech, when the banks finally woke up. Government through election cycles. Small regional operators through droughts, cattle prices, and tourist seasons that never showed.
Every one of those industries has had its moment of reckoning, and in every one of them, the businesses that came through tended to share one trait: timing. They started building the next version of their business while the current version was still paying the bills. The ones that did not make it usually were not lazier or less resourceful. They were just caught without runway when the shift arrived, and there was not enough time left to find their footing.
That is not a personal failing. It is a timing problem, and timing problems are solvable.
Plan B is a timing problem, not a technology problem
If you only take one thing from this article, take this: Plan B is not something you build when Plan A stops working. Plan B is something you build while Plan A is still working, so that when the wheel turns, and the wheel always turns, you have already got somewhere to be.
That is it. That is the whole idea.
The regional businesses that weather the next fuel hike, tourism downturn, or mining shift will mostly have one thing in common: they started preparing before they had to. The caravans being quiet is not really the problem. The problem is whether there is something else in place to carry some weight while you wait for them to come back.
The thing nobody seems to be saying
The business owners I talk to are not lazy, and they are not short sighted. They are tired. They have built something by hand, often across generations, and the idea of adding "learn online marketing" or "figure out a new revenue stream" to an already full plate is genuinely overwhelming. That is a completely reasonable response to an unreasonable amount of pressure.
But here is the thing I keep coming back to: the cost of catching up later is almost always higher than the cost of starting now, even if starting now means starting small. You do not need to understand everything. You do not need to overhaul anything. You need to understand one thing, then another, then another. The gap between where most businesses are and where they need to be is smaller than it looks, and the first step is usually the one that matters most.
Five practical moves any regional business can make this month
Here are five practical moves you can make in the next four weeks that cost either nothing or next to nothing, and that start building your Plan B before you need it.
1. Google yourself the way a new customer would
Type your business name into Google. Look at what actually comes up. Is your website on the first page? Is there a Google Business Profile attached to your business? If so, is it filled out properly, with correct hours, photos from this decade, and recent reviews? Is there information contradicting itself somewhere, like an old phone number or an address you moved out of three years ago?
If there is no Google Business Profile, set one up. If there is one but you have never claimed it, claim it. Both jobs are free and take about twenty minutes. Go to google.com/business to do either. Fix whatever else you find. That afternoon might be the highest return work you do all year. If your website is letting you down, our website development team can help.
2. Start an email list today
You do not own your Facebook followers. You do not own your Instagram audience. You do not own the customer base on Shopify, Booking.com, or whatever platform currently sends you work. You only own the email addresses you have collected yourself. When something shifts, and it always does eventually, the only people you can still directly reach are the ones on your list.
Start with a paper signup sheet at the counter if you have to, and type them into a spreadsheet at the end of each week. If you want something a bit more automated, use a Google Form or a tool like MailerLite, which lets you build a free signup form or landing page and manage your list by connecting it to your website. It is free until you have more than 500 subscribers, which is plenty of runway to get started. You can sign up at mailerlite.com. Either way, start collecting. Every week you do not is a week of customers walking out the door without you knowing who they were.
3. Learn one tool properly, or pick a tool that fills a gap
There are two ways to run this play. The first is to pick one tool you are struggling to use, whether it is your point of sale system, your booking software, or your accounting software, and learn it. Every tool you do not use efficiently is leaking money, time, or both. Deep knowledge of one good tool will outperform surface knowledge of five, every time.
The second is to identify a specific gap in your business, Google tools that solve it, and learn one of those. If the bottleneck is admin and paperwork, have a look at something like Claude Cowork, which lets non technical people automate file and task work on their own computer without needing to hire a developer. If the bottleneck is social content, there are schedulers. If it is bookkeeping, there are tools, or ask around for recommendations and hire a bookkeeper. Whatever the gap is, there is almost certainly a tool or conversation you can have that solves it, and the person who discovers it first has the advantage. If you want help working out where to start, our automation services are built for exactly this.
4. Test a second revenue channel while the first one still works
If you run a shop, put a handful of products online and see what happens. If your products are already online, test different advertising options to see how you can expand your reach. If you are a tradie, write three short posts on socials over the course of a week about the common problems you solve, and see which one gets the most engagement or makes the phone ring. If you are stuck for ideas on where to start when thinking about other revenue channels, ask your customers for feedback on whatever product or service you offer. You will be surprised by how many pivotal ideas can come from seeing your business through a customer's lens. The point is not to replace what you are doing. The point is to find out whether a Plan B would actually hold your weight before the day you have to rely on it.
5. Find someone who has already pivoted, and shout them a coffee
There is nearly always someone in town, or the next town over, who has already changed the shape of their business and survived it. These changes do not need to be huge, but enough to have caught your attention. They launched a new online store. They added a new service line. They moved part of the business online. Your local business peers who have done the hard yards and weathered the ups and downs know things no webinar can teach. They know what it feels like to be terrified and doing it anyway. They know which bits are a waste of money and which bits pay back tenfold. The cost of a flat white will buy you more advice than most consultants can sell you. If you struggle to find local business inspiration, cast your net wider and look into businesses you aspire to be like, no matter how big they are, to learn their story and how they achieved their success. The people and businesses who have come before you and succeeded are proof that it can be done, and they are your blueprint for the way forward.
The willingness to start is the whole game
None of this requires a degree in computer science or a budget you do not have. It just requires starting somewhere, even if that somewhere is fifteen minutes of research on a Tuesday afternoon.
The businesses that come through the next downturn will not necessarily be the biggest or the best resourced. They will be the ones that started topping up before the warning light came on. Your business is still standing. That means you have still got fuel in the tank. Use it while you have got it. And if you want a hand mapping out what your next chapter could look like, get in touch. It is what we do.