Day: June 5, 2020

How To Ensure Your Business Opens and Stays Open

wayne June 5, 2020


7 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.


The continued spread of COVID-19 has frustrated many business owners and investors by preventing them from selling to customers as they normally would. Unfortunately, it’s becoming increasingly clear that social distancing measures aren’t likely to abate anytime soon, particularly since a lackluster government response has exacerbated the virus-related issues. Business owners everywhere are therefore being compelled to ensure the continuity of their commercial enterprise during the lockdown, but this is easier said than done.

Ensuring your business remains open is going to be difficult, but not impossible. From focusing on the health and hygiene of your operation to pivoting to digital mediums, here’s how to ensure business continuity during the coronavirus lockdown. 

Are you essential? 

If you’re an essential business that society desperately needs to remain open, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to ensure the continuity of your business during this lockdown, even if it’s created serious challenges to how you would normally operate. Even non-essential businesses can survive this difficult period if they play their cards right, though that will involve special challenges that essential businesses and their owners need not worry about.

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Slack’s great earnings aren’t good enough for Wall Street

wayne June 5, 2020

This is the web version of Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the top tech news. To get it delivered daily to your in-box, sign up here.

Think of the market these days as a perpetual confusion machine. Much has been made of the dichotomy between robust valuations for stocks and the sorry state of the world.

For further confirmation, check out the reaction to the earnings report Slack released Thursday for its quarter that ended in April. The messaging company is much in the news, what with office workers having been sent home. Its stock price has been on a tear, as has its business, which has notably been pitted against a product from Microsoft called Teams. (A digression on stock tickers: TEAM is the ticker for a different collaboration-software company called Atlassian; Slack’s ticker is WORK; Zoom’s ticker isn’t ZOOM, but rather ZM; Salesforce’s symbol, CRM, for customer relationship software, must have seemed really clever years ago.)

As for Slack, it added 12,000 new paid customers, a big number. It lost money, as fast-growing tech companies are wont to do, but it added cash quarter over quarter, a good thing. It grew revenue 50% to just over …

Net-zero by 2050: Diageo, H&M and Rolls-Royce join drive to avert climate catastrophe

wayne June 5, 2020

While the coronavirus lockdowns temporarily improved air quality in many places, the measures weren’t enough to stop May being the warmest on record. The climate crisis—unlike the economic one—has not taken a significant pause.

So, on World Environment Day, the timing is good for the launch of a new United Nations-backed campaign called Race to Zero, comprising a coalition of big businesses, investors, academics, cities, states and regions that have committed to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Some companies, such as Nestlé and Unilever, had already signed up to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and its goal of limiting global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (it’s already up around 1.2 degrees, and the 1.5-degree limit is looking very optimistic.) New participants announced Friday include the likes of booze giant Diageo, fashion firms H&M and Inditex, software developer Adobe, and plane-engine-maker Rolls-Royce.

“The world on the other side of this pandemic will need the power that we generate to fuel economic recovery,” said Rolls-Royce CEO Warren East in a statement. “I absolutely believe the call for that power to be more sustainable and net zero will be stronger than ever. Few …

Where things stand on extending the weekly $600 Federal unemployment bonus past July

wayne June 5, 2020

A staggering 42.6 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits since the shutdowns started. Right now those out-of-work Americans on state unemployment rolls are receiving an additional $600 per week in unemployment insurance (UI)—regardless of their previous income—on top of their state benefits.

The extra $600 per week in UI was included in the March stimulus bill as a financial cushion for those who lost their jobs, with payments going through July 31. But an extension of the benefit past July is looking less likely.

Democrats in the House included an extension of the benefits through January 2021 in the $3 trillion relief packaged they approved in May. However, Senate Republicans oppose the bill and the measure. Many on the political left see extending the unemployment bonus as critical to keeping families and the economy stable through the pandemic. Meanwhile, many business leaders and conservative representatives claim these generous benefits disincentivize workers from returning to work, and could gum up the recovery.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina tried to hold up the bill in March because of the UI benefits, and he said in April that it would get extended “over our dead bodies.” Meanwhile Republican Senator Rob Portman of …