The other 3Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle): more business tips for tough times

With the economy still experiencing a lot of uncertainty, instead of throwing in the towel on your small business, especially if you’re in services, you can extend the same principles that environmentalists recommend (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle) to what you offer customers. And keep the dollars coming in

The downsizing strategy doesn’t just apply to the office products you use or the amount of space you take up; You should also see how to reduce what you offer without detracting from your value proposition. That means never cutting your price, but looking for ways to divide what you do, so customers can still buy from you without modifying your value proposition.

For example, depending on the work you do, instead of covering the entire project from the soup to the nuts, you can do the initial planning while they provide the labor and facilities to execute the tasks. Or, they collect the information and then you go to the back-end to do the analysis and provide the recommendations. The beauty of the reduction is that it still leaves you performing the highest perceived value tasks outside of your overall offering. It doesn’t mean you can’t do complete projects if clients still have the budgets; of course he can! But for those clients who are cutting back, you can tailor the funds available. As they say, no one is remembered for their prices, but they are remembered for their value.

This leads to the second part of the formula, reuse. In this case, while you can keep putting your paper clips to good use over and over again, it also means looking beyond your four walls for ways that can help your clients. One form of “reuse” is to put people to work that your clients might otherwise have to fire. Perhaps a client has always wanted to conduct a major nationwide survey, but never had the budget? Or do you want to do business development work but don’t have your feet on the street? Rather than paying much higher costs, including profit margins, to an outside company like yours, they instead have you act as manager of an internal team and put surplus staff plus their expertise to work. This way, your client will see you as even more essential to their business, while the client teams you manage will get the job done.

Even if you are already recycling waste paper and other items in the office, you should also consider how to recycle the old work you have done for clients. While these initiatives should avoid betraying client confidentiality, especially if you have signed agreements to that effect, taking generic parts of existing client work, perhaps even previous work for multiple clients, and finding ways to recycle them as products you can sell. . , you will meet two objectives. One is that you will generate some income and two, you will have found another way to present your services to potential clients. You may want to publish a series of reports or your First Annual X Survey on a market you do a lot of work in; If you’ve done this type of work in the past 12 to 24 months for large corporate clients, finding ways to recycle this information for small businesses will allow you to learn about a segment of the market that you don’t normally serve.

While no one likes a shaky economy, by using the 3 Rs to your advantage, you will be better able to weather storms and position yourself for the 4th R: Recovery – when that happens!
Copyright Deborah C. Sawyer