How To Survive & Thrive in Uncertain Times

Running a business can often feel like you are teetering between extreme success and extreme failure, especially when the wind gets knocked out of your sails. Although things may feel that way, reality is rarely so black and white.

Now it’s time to adjust your sails. As always, we need to be strategic to protect our businesses. We can easily do this with the Survive, Adapt, Thrive model.

How to Survive

The main indicator of a business’ success is how much revenue they are making.

In order for your business to survive, you need to work smarter, not harder.

Think about adopting a system to present fee options and value fairly to clients, don’t think of it as charging your clients unfairly, you’re giving them a price that matches the exemplary quality of your service.

You cannot stay a float by charging the bare minimum, for someone to receive your top level service, and have your business succeed, you need to charge fairly.

How to Adapt

Once we have our cash situation in a comfortable place then it’s time to adapt our business model.

If you’re in a mindset of fear, you will want to cut absolutely every cost out of your budget, and your fear will rationalize every single part of it. Fear will tell you to build a shelter, hide in it, and make sure you stay in there until the sun comes out again.

Investments will always be strategic, they are multipliers, they create a return for your business, whether it’s through leads, return or deals. The return could even be an investment of goodwill to support your community. The key to cutting costs and low returning investments is clarity.

How to Thrive

Now that you have stopped your business from missing out on opportunities, and adjusted your expenses it’s time to thrive.

This is still a good time to do virtual walkthroughs of listings or online zoom calls with potential clients.

When you utilize technology for even the most interpersonal aspects of your business you may find that you can get more done virtually, and remotely.

Another way to get your business on it’s way to thrive mode is creating a success map.

Take time to think about where you want to head in your business. What is the end goal? What are you working towards? What does my business look like in 6 months, 1 year, or even 5 years?

After you map out your goals then you can work back and give yourself some benchmarks to accomplish.

In tough times it is clear that the business who survive go into offense or defence, the key here is getting clear and strategic. The businesses that go under are the ones who freeze into non-action.

SOURCE: Kathleen Black Coaching & Consulting Inc. 905-725-6224 / Toll Free 1-844-866-5222