Article: Surviving and Thriving during Tough Times Part 2 - Business Practicality 101

Posted by Laddie Blaskowski on Nov 11, 2008

Everyone knows that a lot of people these days are feeling stretched financially, and this is often especially true of business owners. Certain factors are out of your control, such as world economic conditions, or events unfolding in our national political arena. But you do have control of many things affecting your business and your decisions can often determine the “health” and success of your business when times are hard.

In our last article, we discussed psychological strategies for making your business stronger in difficult economic times. Today we’re going to discuss some of the practical things you can do so that your business can continue to perform well. I teach a program to business owners called “A Four-part Plan to Survive – and Maybe Thrive – During Tough Times,” and like to use the following acronym: DEEP

• Dissect Your Business

• Evaluate Each Part

• Establish Your Priorities

• Produce Results

1. Dissect your business. To gain a clearer understanding of how your business is operating and what changes might need to be made, start by dissecting it. Regardless of the size of your business, it has a number of parts that make up the whole. By looking at each part as an individual unit, you can determine whether that part is operating as efficiently and profitably as possible. One of my favorite sayings is, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!” This is particularly applicable when analyzing your business.

When you start listing the various components of your company, you might be surprised at its complexity. Include things like marketing, customer service, employees, technology, finance, operations and production, space considerations, and any other parts of your business that come to mind.

2. Evaluate each part. For each area you list, grade the performance of that area. Is it operating at top efficiency and productivity? Does it help generate income or is it a drain on the company’s finances? Be brutally honest with yourself when doing your evaluation and try to look at the business as if you were an objective party unaffiliated with the company. As much as you are able to do so, it’s crucial that you not allow your emotions to rule your evaluation. Remember, you are trying to survive tough times and need to be as objective as possible.

3. Establish your priorities. Your evaluation may have uncovered a number of areas needing improvement, but time and other resources make it impossible to change everything at once. Make decisions on which areas are the most crucial to the success of the company and consider how soon changes need to be made. This will help you determine the priority of your action steps, and where you need to focus your resources of time, money, creativity, team efforts, etc.

4. Produce results. Create an action plan for moving forward and don’t be vague when developing the plan. List tasks that need to be completed, dates by which they should be completed, and who will be responsible for doing them. Review this plan daily and follow up with people to be sure that things are being done.

We touched on this issue in our last article, but sometimes difficult decisions need to be made. Your evaluation may reveal that people, vendors or even departments need to be changed, renegotiated or cut. These decisions can be painful, particularly when they involve the loss of jobs. It’s important to remember that if the company fails, then everyone will lose their jobs and by cutting personnel you may be able to save the business. When these difficult decisions must be made, you simply have to move on and work on strengthening the business going forward.

Finally, if you find yourself struggling, here are some practical strategies to help:

1. Conserve cash. (Prioritize)
2. Negotiate. (Ask! Ask! Ask!)
3. Maintain relationships.
4. Open, honest communication.
5. Complete an expense shakedown.
6. Be creative.
7. Sell only profitable work.
8. Barter for things you need now.
9. Develop you plan and work it.
10. Get help from someone who knows how to play the game.
11. Don’t waste time.
12. Take care of yourself.

Business is really all about change. Technology changes, products change, people change, and economics change. The more we can adapt our businesses to the changes we face, the better equipped we will be to survive – and possibly thrive – during tough times.

BusinessTruth®: The only constant in business is change, so embrace it.