Ways to help your Business Survive an Economic Slowdown
Have a Plan: A Business plan is essential at this point of time. Knowing how you’re going to reach your goals while tackling the necessary hurdles along the way should be clearly defined. Set your targets in the business plan for income and expenses. You also need to calculate your sales and percentage of business down due to the economic slump.
Communicate with Employees: Employees will generally want to assist the business in hard times so communicating with them the various obstacles the business is likely to face is important. If you reward your employees well when the business is profitable they are more likely to stick with the business during difficult times.
Review Cost heads in the Organization: Review the key cost heads in the business, check where the costs can be postponed without affecting the business drastically. Take an unbiased call if after the review there are some costs which need re-thinking. The challenge is to get the people associated with these costs to see the larger motive behind any reduction of budgets/costs.
Increase Advertising: Use the advertising methods that have worked for you in the past. This will ensure that you will receive an adequate return on your advertising investment.
Focus on Customers: During an economic slowdown, you need to concentrate on current customers, not just new ones. Study your customer’s needs and requirements, the more you know, the higher your chances of keeping them as customers.
Focus on providing better-quality customer service. Keeping your existing customers is a vital goal during an economic slowdown.
Start Networking: By networking your business has a better chance of enduring the economic slowdown. Reach out to your existing customers, that way you are reminding them about the products and services that your business offers with the possibility of getting new customers.
Generate New Business Concepts: Coming up with new ideas/concepts that your business can utilize once the market begins to regain momentum does not involve a huge financial investment all it requires is a couple of brainstorming sessions with your team. Planning ahead will be very advantageous to your business.
Offer your staff additional training: During this time offer your staff extra training this will help them pick up on important new skills whilst sharpening their existing ones.