A Micro-Business Turnaround Model for Surviving the Covid-19 Crisis Through Enacted Sensemaking

This study provides an insight into UK micro-businesses’ strategic management during the Covid-19 pandemic. By drawing upon enacted sensemaking and turnaround theories it reveals the micro-business’ survival strategies in a crisis context and proposes a model for a micro-business turnaround. The micro- businesses’ turnaround strategies were captured from 17 semi-structured interviews. The findings show that micro-firms can survive a crisis if they turn the business around through either ‘dangerous action’ or ‘safe inaction’ using retrenchment and recovery strategies. The enacted turnaround through ‘dangerous action’ is more beneficial as it leads to a more intense learning, a better understanding of a crisis, reconfiguration of existing capabilities and business growth. This contextual research contributes to the entrepreneurship and strategic management literatures with a micro-business’ turnaround model suitable for surviving a crisis. It extends the application of a turnaround strategy beyond organisational contexts and beyond gradually occurring decline scenarios. The turnaround model is suited for healthy firms that require prompt strategic decisions to avoid failure and exit in the exogenous shock scenarios and significantly shortens the timescale of turnaround implementation.