Whenever your recession (and your customers’) started and regardless of whether your business is a leading or lagging indicator of a recession, it doesn’t matter when you’re in the middle of one. For many of us coping with this recession has been a lot like going through the four phases of loss namely denial, anger, self pity and acceptance. In this era, many of us are moving into acceptance of our new reality and are ready to take steps to make the best of our gifts and blessings. The more we reflect on the last few decades, the more we realize how much better and smarter we could have been when times were easier and now know that getting ever better and smarter is the difference between success and failure. In our recession there seems to be a fine line between success and failure. Success may be defined as not failing. And failure can come from simply or deviating from success. As we consider our circumstances and recognize that our business lives must go on, what can we do to grow and save our businesses during these times?

In this article, I will lay out three areas you need to triage, four areas where you should respond and three strategies on how to profit during these times.

Three Areas You Need To Triage.
Triage, when ER doctors and nurses determine who lives, who dies and who will be healed later, is exactly the right approach to take in your business as do in their jobs. Instead of patients you will be triaging your customers, projects and cash.

1. Triage your customer relationships.
   • It’s going to be critical to decide which customers you can keep, which ones you need to renegotiate terms with.
   • Fire your unprofitable or difficult customers now and use great discretion in choosing the prospects to pursue. Someone else may have fired them first.
   • Most companies start first by providing extra value and service to their incumbent customers. During these times, their loyalty and fear of switching will keep them close to you if you stay close to them.
2. Reevaluate ongoing projects.
   • Take a hard look at what you’re working on. Kill any project with an unclear payback or one, which will consume more resources than will plausibly make in the next 36 months.
   • Restructure any project that’s critical but has no clear payback, accountabilities or resources.
   • Prioritize and focus on completing any project with the ability to enhance revenue, reduce costs or protect wealth.
3. Manage your cash.
   • With liquidity likely to be scarce at best, hoard what you have. Use cash as a reward for vendors, employees and others who are sacrificing for you or your goals.
   • Use your cash or lack of it as a weapon in dealing with companies and customers who rely on you and previously expected you to finance receivables.

Four areas where you should respond.
Once you have triaged your customers, projects and cash, look to four areas where you can respond to your new reality. These are:

1. Price for profit and to avoid loss.
   • Price your products and services in terms of the value they not only provide to your customers but how they help your customer’s customers profit. Learn where and how your products make others money and align your pricing with theirs.
   • Where you must make sizable investments in raw materials, ensure your pricing terms allow you to recoup your investment as soon as you’ve made it.
   • Reward your customer’s liquidity with favorable pricing. Those who can pay you up front deserve discounts.
   • Finally, use your pricing to protect yourself from those who exploit you. Immediately raise prices on customers who pay slowly. Create collection terms for poor payment just as you would offer good terms for fast payment.
2. Manage your credit furiously.
   • Do what you can to get more credit. If you can open a second line or other source of credit, do so even at a price you would not normally pay, especially if these are from confidential or “angel” sources.
   • Use your credit prudently. Don’t assume you need to finance everything yourself. Get creative and aggressive in what you ask others to carry and fund.
   • Thirdly, use other people’s money wherever possible. Many aggressive sellers and bargain hunters may have credit you can use in the course of doing business with them.
3. Lead decisively.
   • Show your confidence in all you say and do. While you may not feel it, your optimism, confidence and conviction will be a beacon of hope for those who are more scared than you are.
   • Motivate your vendors, staff and customers to stay committed, keep their promises and take the same risks you are in an anticipation of better times and the promise of deferred rewards.
   • When times are tough, show your stoicism in the face of bad news and inevitable hiccups.
   • Demonstrate balance in your short-term pursuit of survival and your long-term perspective for better times and deferred rewards.
4. Reinforce your Best and Highest Use®.
   • Ensure that you and your company are focused on what you like doing, you are good at doing and your marketplace values you for doing.
   • Bring as much value and enthusiasm to getting better and doing better at what you focus on.
   • Take heart in knowing you are very good at what you do and this is a true advantage in these times where impostors are exposed, pretenders prove incapable and amateurs just give up.

Three strategies on how to profit.
After you have triaged your business and responded in four areas, turn your focus to new strategies to profit now and over time:

1. Take market share.
   • Understand switching costs for the prospects you are trying to close. Make it easy for them to move their business to you and your superior value.
   • Buy up your rivals for pennies on the dollar. Many companies today do not have enough sales to cover their overhead. Better yet, just buy the companies’ customers without the overhead of their failed companies.
   • Grow your share of your existing customers. If you are trusted and invaluable, then ask for more of their business. Be quick to respond if another supplier stumbles, or is on the ropes.
2. Sell new value.
   • Instead of selling just your product or service, take responsibility for your customer’s success and outcomes. Offer to warranty or insure that their success will come from your product or service.
   • Recast your value proposition if your customers’ needs are changing. If so, rethink how you get paid, how you package your services and how you price your products.
   • Realize you are going to work harder, spend more time, and possibly get paid less for serving the same customers. Consider it an investment in the future.
3. Invest for the recovery.
   • Now is a great time for buying services and raw materials at a discount. If you can, invest now at a fraction of what it may cost to buy what you need when the economy picks up.
   • With sales down, you probably can find extra time to work on the future. Take advantage of not being busy and get busy building your next success.
   • Finally, as you come out of denial and self pity, push yourself into actions that will ensure your success and preserve your survival. Work harder and more decisively while your competitors are whining and paralyzed.

Our next year will continue to be hard as credit remains tight, new sectors of the economy are impacted, and the country adjusts to our new reality. You can grow your business during this recession if you triage, respond and develop strategies to profit. As the small guys in a world of goliaths, the recovery is largely in our hands as it always has been and will surely be again.

Need assistance growing your business during recession or difficult economic times. Contact Andy Birol below for more help.

No simpler words have ever hurt an owner more. Despite all your messaging, marketing, selling, and posturing, you learn it’s all for naught when:

• At a networking event, you overhear a colleague refer an ideal prospect to a competitor of yours. When you ask your colleague why he referred your competitor and not you, he says, “I didn’t know you did that.”
• Worse, even, you learn your customer just suggested his friend call an unqualified competitor instead of automatically pushing the work your way. And, when confronted, your client says, “You do that? I had no idea!”
• Your own employee hears and ignores your client drop multiple buying signals. As gently as you can, you point this out and your employee responds, “Oh that’s right, I guess we do that.”

This is painful for three reasons:

1. Your marketing and sales messaging is ineffective
2. You have no idea how much business you are losing every day
3. Your colleagues, customers and employees feel sheepish for not knowing better

But what can and should you do? Keep refining and simplifying your message. Look at it through the eyes of your colleagues, clients and staff. Have you really made it simple?

Who do you refer and why is it easy to refer those you can? Make it as easy for your supporters as you want them to do unto you. Are you able to refer your closest clients and colleagues to their prospects? Where you have done so, isn’t it because your clients and colleagues:

1. Communicate a clear, current and simple grasp of how their best and highest use is purchased and referred
2. Know how their message is understood and repeated by others
3. Track how and who is referring them and conversely who and how they are referring others

Hearing the damning words, “I didn’t know you do that,” is most painful when your own customers or clients are hiring others to do work you could be doing. Ask yourself, “Do you have a 100% share of your customer’s business?”

If not, then start uncovering and gaining these opportunities so your clients will see, first-hand, what you do!

While downturns come and go, it can be hard to ignore a recession when the media puts in your face every day. So beyond living in complete denial, what’s a business owner to do? Why not recognize opportunities that recession can bring to your business?

Here are a few points to ponder:

• Despite everyone preaching to the contrary, demand for most products does not disappear or decline more than 10%. Demand simply morphs and transforms. Take a good look at what your customers are doing to cut back and recognize the choices they’re making and how you can exploit them.
  
  
• Identify what your customers want vs. what they need, as these change during a recession. Strangely, some wants actually grow during a recession as people compensate for sacrifice in the strangest ways.
  
  
• Fully understand the money vs. time paradigm. Your customers will always have more of one than the other, so figure out how you can exploit this.
  
  
• If business is slow, now’s the time to rebuild or extend your Best and Highest Use. It’s a great time to start initiatives and build for sunny days.
  
  
• Despite the credit crunch, money is much less expensive to borrow in a recession as the Federal Reserve Bank cuts interest rates. Hunt around, as money is there to borrow, and when you find it, it can be a bargain. Also negotiate aggressively with your service and resource providers. Many are much more flexible than you might expect.
  
  
• Find the underserved and neglected in your marketplace. There are many folks and businesses that are not being adequately provided because their suppliers have abandoned them for greener markets. How can you step in?
  
  
• Seek out and walk with winners. In any recession, there are many folks who actually do better. Find them, serve them and grow with them.
  
  

There is an old saying, “Things are never as good as you think they are or as bad as you think they are.” A recession is precisely so. Dont ignore it rather exploit it just as you would a growing economy. Doing so during a recession is a true test of your business mettle.

Rise up and seize it.

In the middle of winter, Valentines Day prompts us to reopen our hearts to those we love. While pledging our love can be easiest in a new relationship, rekindling the burning embers in an old relationship can be harder or even worse , ignored. It is no surprise that lack of passion and communication is the number one cause of divorce.

Beyond your spouse, children and parents, isn’t your business the next “love” in your life? You have built, managed and protected it, but are you as passionate about it as when you started? What should you do to express or restore your love?

Here are three great steps to show your business your “love”:

1. Interview your clients and customers and to confirm what you think they love about your business. This is your firm’s Best and Highest Use and you can read more of this here
2. Then invest in providing them with more of your BHU at higher margins
3. Refresh and refocus your message, positioning, sales and marketing to tell more customers and prospects why they should love your BHU

Here are three steps to fall back in love with your business

1. Ask yourself what is your Best and Highest Use and is it still aligned with that of your business’ and what your business needs, you can link here for some help
2. If your BHU is still aligned with your business’ BHU, then stay in your business and work on fixing it quickly. Here is some help to do this
3. If your BHU is not aligned with your business, it is time to reconsider your future in or without your business. Here is a process to help you “know when to hold them and know when to fold them”.

Love is said to be the more important emotion, connection and driver of behavior for the human race. To not be in love with your business is crippling to your well being as well as that of your customers, employees and vendors who take their cues from you. So, if you are in love with your business, use this Valentine’s Day to show it the same love you do for that special someone or make the commitment to fall back in love with your business or move on and find your passion building and running something else.

Recently, Kathryn Landers of Felber & Felber Marketing interviewed me on public relations and how knowledge businesses can best plan, use and profit from PR

Andy, how do you define public relations?

To me, PR is the promotion of one’s expertise and value through non-advertising traditional and electronic media and editorial outlets.  When your “smarts” are independently and objectively published by third parties, so your audiences can read and see your value endorsed by others; that is effective PR.  The best PR usually includes examples of how your clients have benefited from your value.

Andy, how do you look at PR?

I think of PR as falling into three categories: Reactive, Active and Proactive

• Reactive PR consists of responding to preexisting stories and inquiries from reporters who need experts.  Websites like www.prleads.com and responding to other’s blogs is a very low-commitment way to demonstrate your expertise
• Active PR is using the wire services like www.prnewswire.com or www.expertclick.com  to circulate press releases on your firm’s progress or value.  They work best when there is a direct “hook” between your news, a current trend/event and your unique spin on it.
• Proactive PR involves creating both the content and the venue to broadcast it.  Your own blog is a great way to start as I have on www.birolsblog.com. Traditional, Internet and satellite media tours, speaking at trade shows and press conferences and “dog and pony” all work if you have the right story to tell.

Andy, what advice would you give to a business owner just beginning to use PR??

• First determine your firm’s Best and Highest Use. 
• Second, define who is your target audience, and third what information they will value.
• Then determine which media and editorial resources they watch and read.

The final step is to continuously create valuable, unique information that provokes your target audience to contact you for more.  So you need to become disciplined and regularly:

• Develop content in the form of articles, write papers and ideas
• Create and use case studies, results statements, testimonials showing how others have benefited through content
• Any time you can involve your clients in the PR effort it is much better.  Reporters, and conferences just love it when a client stands beside you and talks about your value and how it helped them

What do you think of business owners hiring  PR firms?

Writing and self promotion doesn’t come naturally to many owners so there is a trade off of doing it yourself or hiring specialists like my firm of Felber & Felber Marketing.

• In my case, I develop the content myself. 
• Together we decide how much reactive, active, proactive PR I need to get my messages seen and heard. 
• Finally, I turn over the execution of proactive, active, reactive PR to Felber & Felber Marketing to efficiently deliver my message to the media. 
How each business owner should implement their PR is a function of their Best and Highest Use, time, budget and personal preferences

Conclusion
PR is the most efficient marketing any business can do.  When established third parties are publishing your expertise you earn a great payback on your investment of time and money. Start with your inherent value and figure out who needs learn about it and where they are.  Then go tell the world.  You will be glad you did!

After surviving and succeeding in relative anonymity for years in business, isn’t it remarkable how much attention you get from people who now confront you with black and white decisions you are told you just have to make?

In charity and volunteerism:

If you are told, “To be respected in your community you better give both your money and your time to visible causes,”  I suggest you remember to that you must continue to do well before devoting yourself to doing good. 

In politics:

When you’re baited with, “You must be a Republican, because Democrats will just tax and spend” or “You have to vote Democrat because Republicans are for NAFTA and against immigration!” Consider that since elections, issues and platforms come and go, and aren’t you really independent?

In loyalty to town, association, or team:

As you are admonished with, “Can you believe that LeBron James would root for the Yankees?” or “Our industry practices require that…” and “If you don’t say nice things about your town, don’t say anything,” remember that although groupthink mostly creates fond memories of great moments, it rarely to leads your success.

As an independent, committed owner, you grew your business by staying true to your best and highest use and making grey decisions to serve your clients, employees, and vendors in a very uncertain world.  Your flexibility and tenacity will always be keys to your success.  And your commitment and independence are your most valuable strengths.   When you are told you must make a choice from their options, reject their dogma, go with your gut and create your own choice. If confronted with black and white, remember what they tell you on the plane, “When the mask appears, place yours on first and then help the person next to you!”  Until Willie Nelson stages a benefit concert to save the small business, your best assets are your own strength of commitment and power of independence.  Invest these wisely!

 What do you think?

If your company’s Best and Highest Use is what you and your people like doing, are good at doing and have been valued by your market for doing, how does this relate to sales and marketing?  Let me explain as follows: 

Sales is agreeing with qualified buyers exactly how you will exchange your BHU for their money.

Marketing is the creation of demand among buyers within your target market for your Best and Highest Use by determining the Five P’s:

     “P” 1. Your target market niche and their buying and your selling process    
     “P” 2. Your product or service line
     “P” 3. Your pricing plan
     “P” 4. Your sales, distribution, and fulfillment plan
     “P” 5. Your promotional plan to build “AIDA”
         Attention
         Interest
         Desire and
         Action

Do you agree?  Isn’t it that simple?  Do you have questions about Best and Highest Use?  If I don’t answer them here Please ask me now and I will answer you right back