How to Keep Business Success in Times of Global Economic Recession

As small to large companies are coping with our slumping global economic condition, I believe this is just the right time that we share each other’s ideas and strengths. For me, when things get worst and there are no other solutions we can find in our brain banks, we need to go back to what are basic and fundamentals. I believe that the following basic solutions will make it through the road of business success despite of any unfavorable and negative economic forces.

1. Have no fear. The first thing we should do is to eliminate our fear with this negative economic phenomenon. In this battle of financial crisis, the first thing that we need to conquer is our own fear. Besides, so much fear will just eat your time and energy into nothing – what a waste! Isn’t it?

2. Plan for the worst scenarios. We need to somehow become futurist this time. Most of our world’s multi-billion entrepreneurs hire futurists to determine their future and assure everything will be under control when future worst case scenarios happen. Of course, knowledge is power, and therefore knowledge of the future is power on the future. To ensure that our business will stay standing in any worst circumstances, we should plan and establish our solutions to our problems in the future.

3. Innovate. Simply speaking, we need to evolve as the world evolves. The “what’s new” consumer attitude will always be permanent. So if we want our companies to have permanent success, we need to change appropriately according to the demands and requirements of consumers.

4. Be flexible. The economic recession is a down turning economic environment. Speaking of environment, we need to have the ability to adapt in any kind of economic environment (whether it is a falling or a rising economic atmosphere). That’s why flexibility is more an attribute of experienced business owners than neophyte entrepreneurs. But for those neophytes I mentioned, you should not be worried, wisdom is not only acquired through experience, it can also be acquired greatly through reflection – just go back to basic and fundamentals.

5. Optimize. This means achieving productivity. My idea is like when we are making a web page for our website. Why do we need to upload a 2mb image in our web page if we can optimize it to become 10kb image with same quality but with a lighter and smaller file size? A 2mb image in our webpage can make our website load slower. While an optimized 10kb image can obviously make our website load faster.

In our businesses, we should eliminate extra cost that can be eliminated without sacrificing the quality of our products or services. The challenge here is to cut the cost without cutting the qualities. Why can’t we cut the clothing uniform allowance of our employees and implement liberty in what to wear? Customers do not consume our employees’ uniform. What I mean is that uniforms don’t form part of our products that the costumers consume. We need to carefully think of cutting the cost of our products and at the same time cutting the extra price that customers pay to us without cutting the quality of our offered products.

6. Be resourceful. We need to make our very best efforts to determine all our available resources. It’s cost cutting time, so we need to find that internal assets and resources that we don’t fully utilize. This is also to avoid acquiring redundant resources and spending unwisely. You have an idle building? Then lease it to earn rental income to cover its depreciation expense. You can also use that idle building as a warehouse or an operating premise to contribute to your operating revenue. Do you need to spread the word about your product? Why don’t you use your employees, families and friends? They are your hidden resources. Why not ask them to spread the good words about your product. You are planning to hire a marketing team to investigate your market but you don’t have enough budget? Why don’t make a costumers’ comments and suggestion sheet or box? Your customers are your best marketing analyst – it is because they are simply the market.

7. Track, review, analyze and act. This is just a matter of having a direction, constant knowledge of that direction, analyzing that direction and going on that direction. Simply, we need to have a direction so we will not be lost on the road to economic success. Studying how we run in our past, how we fall and how we rise in the past will help us to do the right things in our next runs. Know thyself – we can gain success for ourselves if we know ourselves better. We must also know our limitations, so that we don’t need to dream for a higher return in which we don’t have enough resources to pursue it. In other words we should do what is realistic.

8. Maintain quality and excellence. Having global economic recession doest mean we need to cut our cost and even cut the qualities and excellence of our products and services. No way! Financial crisis is more on the monetary aspect of economics. The qualities of our products and services are absolutely beyond it. Besides, whether consumers are suffering from financial crisis, they will still tend to buy the products that have more quality rather than impractically buy waste-like low quality products. Lastly, reputation is made over years and even decades, while an economic recession may only last for a few years.

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