If there is one thing we know about the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s that it will end. Not today, certainly, and not even in the next few months (and perhaps more importantly, not all at once — say, on a particular Tuesday afternoon — but over a period of weeks and months, as vaccination becomes more widespread and infection rates decrease and restrictions are gradually eased). Nonetheless, eventually there will come a time when we look up and realize that the coronavirus is mostly behind us, and find ourselves in a strange new world that awkwardly combines the new and the old.

Now is the time to start planning for that new world.

Despite decades of warnings from public health experts, we all more or less stumbled into this pandemic; we do not need to stumble out. You can begin preparing your exit now, and you can start helping your clients prepare as well, working out plans and contingency plans and what-if scenarios to begin answering just some of these questions:

• Your firm: How will you replace the pandemic-related work you’ve done over the past year? Which of the accommodations that you made to the coronavirus will you maintain? Which will you deepen? Do you still need an office, paper files, face-to-face meetings? Do you want to return to doing the same kind of work you did before March 2020, in the same way, with the same clients?
• Your staff: How will you reopen your offices? Do you need all your employees back in person? Can you expand your hiring pool to encompass the entire country? What resources and processes will you need to make that work? If there are new service areas or industries you want to explore, will you need employees with different skills to staff them? Where will you find those people?
• Your clients: To start, they need to ask all these same questions about their businesses and their employees. Then, how radically is their particular industry changing because of the pandemic? What new threats and opportunities await them? What do they need to do to get ahead of their competition, and how can they do this at a time when capital may be hard to find?

These questions are just the start, and in many cases they’ll only lead to more questions, requiring research, market data, analysis, consultation, client interviews and so on. Now is the time to begin seeking all that information and starting all of those processes.

To be sure, you won’t necessarily be able to set definitive plans. Just as we can’t say exactly when the coronavirus will be behind us, we can’t say exactly what shape it will leave us in. Many hallmarks of the pandemic may well linger, such as lesser degrees of mask use and certain forms of social distancing, for instance, and a greater comfort with remote work and Zoom meetings, while other elements of the post-pandemic world will be brand-new, and some defy prediction. Take the state of the economy: Who knows whether we’ll exit the pandemic into a bust enervated by a year or more of recession, or into a boom of pent-up demand?

But the uncertain nature of the post-pandemic world only makes it all the more important to start planning now, so that once you begin to have a clearer idea of what it’s going to look like, you’ll be ready to act, without having to rely on the sort of ad hoc responses with which we all scraped through 2020.

We stumbled into the pandemic, yes — but that doesn’t mean we can’t march boldly out of it.