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As the economy is still in a lot of uncertainty, instead of tossing the towel over a small business, especially if you’re in services, you can instead extend the same principles that environmentalists recommend – Reduce, Reuse, Recycle – on what you offer to customers and keep dollars moving.
The reduction strategy does not only apply to the office products used or the space occupied; you also need to consider how to limit what you offer without distracting yourself from your value proposition. This means you never lower the price, but instead look for ways to cut what you do so customers can continue to buy from you, leaving your value proposition intact.
For example, depending on the work at hand, instead of covering the entire project from soup to nuts, you can do front-end planning while they provide the manpower and room to get the job done. Or they collect information and then you go to the back room to do an analysis and make recommendations. The beauty of downsizing is that you still leave the higher value tasks performed out of your entire offering. This doesn’t mean you can’t run entire projects if clients still have budgets; of course you can! But for those customers who are restricting themselves, you can accommodate the funds available. As they say, no one is ever remembered for their prices, but they are for their value.
This leads to the second part of the formula, Re-use. In this case, while you can still make good use of your paperclips, it also means looking beyond your four walls for ways that can help your customers. One form of ‘reuse’ is hiring people to work that your customers would otherwise have to fire. Perhaps the client has always wanted to conduct a large nationwide survey, but never had a budget? Or maybe they want to work on business development, but have not taken to the streets? Instead of paying much higher costs, which include margins, to an outside company like yours, you can instead act as an internal team leader and put your surplus people and expertise to work. In this way, your client will see you as an even more irreplaceable person for his business, while the client teams you manage will do their job.
Even if you already process waste paper and other items in your office, you also need to look at how to recycle past work that you have done for clients. While any such initiatives must avoid betraying customer confidentiality, especially if you have signed contracts for this purpose, by using generic parts of the customer’s existing work, perhaps even from previous work for several customers, and finding ways to process them as products that you can sell, you will achieve two goals. Firstly, you will generate some income and secondly, you will find another way to introduce potential customers to your services. You may want to issue a series of reports or your first X-year survey of a market where you do a lot of work; if you’ve done such work in the last 12 to 24 months for large corporate clients, finding ways to recycle this information for small businesses will put you in a segment of the market that you don’t normally serve.
While no one likes a shaky economy, using 3 Rs to your advantage, you’ll be better able to weather storms and prepare for your fourth R – Recovery – when it does!
Copyright notice Deborah C. Sawyer
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Source by Deborah Sawyer