I think we've all heard enough bad news to last us few months to last us several lifetimes! Our mantra for clients is "get over it" - cut your losses when where you can and focus on
basic building blocks to grow your business. Here are some fundamentals we recommend to any company that wants to survive and grow in this chaotic market: 1) Practice maniacal focus! Who is your customer, how do you reach them with your advertising, partners, channels and/or OEMs? If you can't readily identify these benchmarks, then you may need to take a hard look at look at your business structure, personnel, costs of good/services, etc. and rework your model.
2)Outsource and build virtuosity into your company. We tell clients to minimize fixed costs like feudal barons of old – they kept a core group of fighters to man garrison walls and hired (outsourced!) conscripts when baron from next door came calling at castle gates with a legion of longbows behind him to exact tribute. Marketing, finance, HR, IT infrastructure, even product development or manufacturing can be easily outsourced to specialists who have levels of proficiency that you might not be able to afford if you tried to hire them full time.
3)Flex and tier your pricing creatively to minimize barriers to entry. If chaos is order of day (and we think it is) then make sure your pricing is tiered or structured so your clients can afford to try out your products and services – and be flexible in your negotiations and look for creative ways to bring new customers aboard.
4)Make your suppliers real business partners! Fed Ex and UPS are setting up shop in their customer's shipping docks to save valuable time and money and become active business partners. You may not have clout of a Fortune 1K company/behemoth to leverage Fed Ex but you can ask your suppliers to extend terms, work with you on just in time delivery schedules or get creative with pricing, joint promotions, etc.
5)Ensure your marketing fundamentals are up to snuff! We see so many sloppy web sites that do not address basic fundamentals of good site design, menus, UI, etc., brochures that are out of date, power point presentations that are barely legible, etc. – basic marketing principals should be addressed; i.e. integrate your color scheme and logo across all marcom materials (digital and traditional), reinforce your branding and positioning with clearly worded value propositions ("we save you X by doing Y") and ensure your logo and tagline look professional and are used properly.
