There are many articles about business strategies on coping with the COVID-19 pandemic published in various journals, magazines, newspapers, and so forth. However, limited literature offers strategies utilising the Business Model Canvas (BMC) as a response to the pandemic condition. The BMC, or the Canvas, is developed by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur1 . But why BMC? It enables us to analyse both the revenue (i.e. front-end elements) and the cost sections of the Canvas (i.e. back-end elements), as well as to understand how they may relate to and support each other to achieve our objectives. Additionally, the Canvas also opens opportunities for benchmarking against the best practice.
This article discusses how we can employ BMC to identify and develop a few possible activities or schemes for the F&B industry during this diffi cult year, in particular, the restaurant and café businesses. We will find propositions for both the front-end and the back-end elements of BMC for restaurants and cafés, right from the customer segments to the cost structure elements. In other words, we will examine not only the concerns with the shrinking revenue but also the issues with managing the cost incurred at the back-end part of your BMC.
The activities identified and proposed may not necessarily arise from benchmarking against companies in the same industry, but may also be derived from different industries as we can benchmark regardless of the industry .. We have observed that this practice has been and a hospital in Singapore further developed its patient care officers’ communication and customer handling skills by sending them to courses conducted by Singapore Airlines . Also NBC, a US television network, adopted GE’s way to turn around its business, while GE itself adopted Motorola’s Six Sigma .
