Regardless of whether you think there’s going to be a recession, and the news media are doing their best, at least in the USA, to talk businesses into thinking recession.
So, we are going to give you some tips for coping, other than selling your business and repairing to Monte Carlo, Belize or the Caymans.
- Push product and service improvements. We know this sounds counterintuitive, but it goes against what your competition is probably doing. Good luck finding a bank to finance these, unless you already have strong banking relationships.
- Take a look to see if you are using all the marketing tools available to you. Websites, in our humble opinion, are generally still lacking. Customer test them
- Reinforce to all your people, whether they’re customer facing or not, that they’ve got to be customer oriented and friendly. This doesn’t mean that the customer is always right, but that the customer always gets a hearing.
- Take a look at process improvements. There are companies out there that will take a look at how your company does things for free, if you engage them to fix things, but your organization might be resistant. Talk to your key people about who you’re using and why.
- Go into new territories….use Google to enhance local searches.
- Add respresentatives. If they’re good, you can get them for commission only. They should rep complimentary lines.
- If you do all of these improvements, you should at least double your growth rate!
30 Responses to Coping with the ‘Recession’