Herman School of Business
Survival Secrets...
OK, so the economy stinks and people have no money and things don’t look like they are going to turn around for awhile…so how do you make your business survive until things get better.
Survival secret number one…save your customers and value them like never before. If you own a restaurant, a dry cleaners, a gift shop or anything that relies on those customers to keep you going…start a “frequent customer program” of some sort. Why advertise for new customers in a time when ads are not delivering the desired return? Start giving your customers a “fourth one free” of whatever you sell if they buy three times in the calendar month. Your rent is the same, your overhead for labor is the same, and you are sitting there in an otherwise empty business that drives you crazy. It encourages your customers to come in that third time each month to buy something…knowing that they can come back a fourth time free. It must all happen in the same calendar month…no carry-overs.
In a restaurant this will only cost you the food on the plate…but it will save your staff because even with a free meal your servers can get tips…and it helps keep people coming into the place. Ever eat in a restaurant that is almost empty…you start asking yourself why you are the only one there.
Survival secret number two. With the slowdown do your housekeeping. When you are busy the mundane tasks get pushed aside and those things like painting, polishing floors, cleaning the files up, updating mailing lists, and other deferred maintenance issues pile up. Now you have the time to freshen up the place so when customers do come in the place looks brighter, cleaner. Or your mail lists are finally cleaned out of wasted mailings. Your office “stuff” can now occupy your time and you can find ways to be on top of the data that drives decisions. You can not offer the excuse that time doesn’t permit you to understand the numbers…where did your last twenty customers come from? Now you have the time to find out and then you can focus a new effort in that direction to find new customers.
And now a third survival secret. Be brutally honest with yourself. Is this the time you should plan your exit? Don’t just run away because times are tough. Really look at your books and records and see what you need to do to not only break even in the next twelve months…what do you need to do to make let’s say…thirty thousand bucks in profit. If the last twelve months say nothing you do would make that possible…then maybe it’s time to say goodbye because you could go work somewhere and make the thirty thousand dollars without the headache of owning the business.
If you want to survive…try these three methods and let me know where you are.
- Posted: 11 September 2008
- Comments: 0
- Category: Running a business
add a comment