Many of our clients currently find the going tough, although I happy to report that they are surviving better than the average micro business out there. You may ask why is that? Answer: “Business Bootstrapping!”
Here are a couple of techniques on how to use business bootstrapping to survive a recession:
1. Cutting Overheads – is all about lowering your monthly financial outlay, just to keep your business ticking over. Keeping this amount as low as possible will dramatically enhance your survival chances. Here are a few questions to ask yourself:
How much do you pay to your accountants for bookkeeping services, would it be better to find cheaper bookkeeping services?
Do you really need someone full time to answer your phone, or would an outsourced service do?
How many non-core activities do you perform in house which could be outsourced?
Do you really need your own servers and all the associated cost or could you move your IT to the cloud?
Are the Yellow Pages really bringing you customers anymore?
2. Helping instead of Selling – Selling is an expensive exercise, finding ways of using customers as sales-agents (word-of-mouth) is by far the cheapest and best way to find new clients.
Consider this, someone calls you after a client referred him/her to you. No more selling needed – your caller has already identified you as someone who can help solve the problem they have. In this situation selling is a step back from getting an order, helping is the way to move forward.
3. Online Marketing – as under 2. use online marketing to find new clients you can “help”. Online marketing, like social networking is nothing else but word-of-mouth online. Anyone contacting from these sources is looking for help. Anyone can do it, best of all it’s free – if you don’t know how, get training.
Depending on your business choose at least two of the following social networks:
Twitter – B2B and B2C
Facebook – more B2C
LinkedIn – B2B
As you can see saving money and time are essential recession survival techniques, followed by using free marketing and sales opportunities to find new clients and lastly only spend money to get new business.
