The recession is here, and we’ll all be affected there’s little doubt of that. But what we do have some control over, is HOW much we’ll be affected. Here are 5 steps to help small and medium sized businesses protect what’s theirs.
Right now times are tough, and in the next 18 months they are going to get even tougher. Accept this reality now and decide how you can work with it. Determine yourself and your employees to succeed despite the challenges and find the opportunities.
Making adjustments when you are forced to can be difficult mentally and emotionally, but planning sufficiently and making changes to your business in a proactive manner, now, makes you feel empowered not trapped. Plan now for the lean times ahead, and run your business like every rand needs to be an investment into a sustainable future. Changing how you do business doesn’t constitute failure, it means survival. It could be small, like more efficient processes; automation; outsourcing non core functions – or it could be large, like re-evaluating the business that you’re in. The case study on Kodak is interesting night reading. It’s an old case study, but the lesson is a good one.
Your customers don’t always know the full value of your offering and how you are a critical part of their value chain (be it the intellectual property you’ve attained over the years, the critical relationships you’ve built, the money you’ve saved them/the revenue you’ve helped them generate etc.) and it is up to you to communicate it to them – albeit in a manner that raises the relationship, not an aggressive one that detracts. This way, they’ll realise the importance of having you, versus somebody else, on their team when the going gets tough.
Think ahead to what your industry and your client’s industry will be/is going through and think about how you do what you do might need to change. Anticipate changes is buying behaviour/order quantities/staff retrenchments and so on, and be ahead of the curve. When you are in the middle of it, it’s too late. Scenario planning is a great way to do this. And by scenario planning, I mean getting the brains trust in a room over a large pot of coffee and talk about the issues from a 360 degree perspective and plan potential outcomes and how the business must align. Nothing fancy.
Customer is King. And when times are good, sometimes we forget that. But, when you work as a partner with your customer to do what you can to make them successful/meet their needs, the relationship becomes priceless – recession or not.