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Are We Cooking Our Own Goose?
continued . . .
Did we learn anything from the dot.com failures of late 2000, spilling over into
2001, as many companies in the technology industry as well as other industries
experienced lowered revenues, plummeting stock values and began laying off
staff, cutting back on advertising and slashing budgets?
It’s time to take a step back, a deep breath, analyze our current business
environment and make some strategic decisions before we all get caught up in a
business recession that just might be largely of our own making.
Here are some thought-provoking, yet fairly basic questions we should ask
ourselves as business owners and managers:
-
Has
my business been physically affected by the September 11 attack on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon? If so, to what extent has it been impacted
and how can I minimize the result of that impact?
-
What
can I do to tactically reposition my products or services in a way that
meets the needs of the current business environment?
-
In
mining my own client/customer database, which are my most likely targets for
business right now? Does it make sense to concentrate on these prospects
with communication and appropriate sales pitches?
-
How
can I make the best use of my current staffing to bring in the most
profitable business right now? What are some of the strengths that can be
capitalized upon?
-
What
am I currently spending my marketing budget on and where – what
distribution channels, types of media buys, etc.?
-
How
can I extract the most targeted results and value from my marketing
expenditures?
-
Is
there another company offering complementary products or services that I can
partner with for marketing purposes to make my promotional dollars go
further?
-
When
was the last time I reviewed my advertising or public relations agency
expenditures and/or contract? Is
it time to renegotiate to receive more value for my expenditures?
If these questions
can be answered and appropriate actions taken, there will be no need to grapple
with the following premise:
If we all keep telling
ourselves that the economy is in recession, cut back on our staffing and
spending on production and promotion, we are also reducing our ability to
produce goods or deliver services and our ability to tell people what it is
that we do or produce.
That is the essence of the downward revenue spiral and a great example
of the path to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Don’t let this happen. It’s the smaller companies, the privately held
organizations without massive corporate management staff and thousands of
shareholders that can survive and succeed in this environment. They are in the
best position to respond quickly to changing business trends and actually
prosper in a down-turned market.
So win. It’s much more fun than losing!
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