How Your Business Can Survive an Economic Downturn?

1. How Your Business Can Survive an Economic Downturn?

2. Plan For Economic Downturn During times of economic hardship, businesses can suffer from a decline in consumer confidence and decreased sales. Small businesses can be particularly vulnerable during challenging economic times. If you have been running your business or franchise for a while, you know that ups and downs are a part of business. Market conditions can change, outside events can affect demand, and sometimes growth stalls simply due to the economic climate. As a serious business owner, having a plan of action during times of economic uncertainty is vital.

3. Protect Your Cash Flow Cashflow is the lifeblood of all businesses and comes from sources like payments form customers, receipt of a loan, monetary infusion from an investor, or interest on savings or investments. Money must continue inflowing and outflowing for optimum business health, with the obvious goal being that you bring in more income than you must spend on expenses. So, how to protect cashflow? Let’s find out several ways to protect cashflow

4. Several ways to protect cashflow: 1. Know your expenses: Keep a detailed record of your expenses and assess what can be temporarily be done without, this ensures that expenses are kept to a minimum while maximizing the chances of your cashflow being intact. 2. Bundle products and services: Even though discounting is not always recommended, adding value is. By creating bundles of products or services, businesses can inject tremendous amount of perceived and tangible value into their offerings for very little cost. 3. Cloud accounting software: With a good cloud accounting tool, you can easily keep track of your expenses, you can keep a close eye on your inventory (what has sold and what has not) and all your transactions. You also can know exactly how much cash you have, as well as who needs to pay you.

5. Win the Competition’s Customers As a business owner, you must continue to expand your customer/client base if your business is going to prosper in tough times. Offer something more or different than what the other guy does. Research your competition and see what you can do to entice their customers into becoming your customers.

6. Make the Most of Current Customers Current customers can be considered loyal customers in some respects and can give you many more sales opportunities. As a business owner, you cannot afford to ignore the potential benefits of shifting your sales focus to include established customers if you want your business to survive challenging economic times. The key here is excellent customer service. Ensure that your customers and clients love what you do or sell and keep them happy. Which means that the customer is always right. Identify their needs, then meet them. You want to retain their business at all costs.

7. Don’t Cut Back on Marketing Many businesses make the mistake of cutting their marketing budget to the bone in times of economic uncertainty, or even eliminating it entirely, but this is exactly when your business needs marketing the most. Consumers are restless. They are always looking to make changes in their buying decisions. Help them find your products and services and to choose them rather than others by getting your name out there. Marketing can be a powerful force multiplier.

8. Rework Your Story and Services While economic downturns are mostly about money and margins, they are also about narratives. “Growth”, “branding, “prestige”, the words clients love in bull markets give way to words like “ROI” and “savings” in bear markets. A key strategy for you, the business owner, is to rework the narrative around your services. Do not tell clients about growth and brand equity. Instead, tell them about savings, better ROI, and getting more from less effort. For example, if you are selling web design services, you might have two different narratives for different economic situations: Growth narrative: Best-in-class, bespoke design services for clients who want nothing but the best Savings narrative: Low-cost design services for clients who want more from less

9. Clean Up Internally Businesses can pack on a lot of fat during growth phases. You might hire personnel you do not really need, buy software that remains underutilized, and adopt inefficient practices. An economic downturn is the right time to clean up internally and cut down on costs. This can be tough, especially if you have to let people go. Salaries are one of the biggest expenses for every business. Cutting down on this can be the easiest way to keep your business afloat. The first thing you need to know is how well you are currently using your resources.

10. Conclusion Surviving and even thriving during challenging economic times is about making tough decisions and judicious cutbacks. As a business owner, you need to go all out to save your best clients. At the same time, you need to realign your practices and make better use of resources. At the end of the day, sustaining a business involves building industry-beating expertise, attracting strong clients, and adopting better software ad business practices.

11. About FranFlight We are passionate about helping franchises grow. Our system is an all- in-one business management software that is built and dedicated for the franchising industry. Instead of providing you with only one business program, we incorporate state of the art software, a beautiful uniquely designed website, and professional internet marketing services. Phone: 1(866) 312-0055 Website: https://franflight.com/