Small Business is not for the Faint Hearted
Everywhere you look lately the talk is about recession. Interest rates are going up, spending is going down and there’s gloom and doom breaking out all over. So what does a small business do in a situation like this?
Do you batten the hatches, shorten the sail and try to ride out the storm? Or is it time for striking a valiant pose, clenching your pipe between your teeth and declaring that it’s “full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes!”?
Well small business in definitely not for the faint hearted and while everyone else is running for cover now is the time to be out there telling the world that your open and ready for business. Now is the time to increase your marketing, now’s the time to tackle new projects and do what others are either too short-sighted or too scared to do.
And if you think that’s nothing but rhetoric on our part then let me outline what we’ve done in the last couple of weeks.
- that we’ve just taken on a new writer to work in a very specialised area so that Toni gets some extra time to work on other things
- we’re in the process of expanding our web design business into an area that few web designers are prepared to tackle
- we’re about to launch several online stores that are targeting a growing trend in shopping here in Australia and
- we’re revamping another little store that we built as a training exercise several years ago and were suprised to find that we’d stumbled on an interesting sales niche.
At the same time we’ve still got more work coming in than most other web designers in this town and we’re working on increasing that too.
Are we insane? No, it might look like we’re striking a valiant pose and daring fate but we’re not. Some of these projects are things that we’ve been sitting on for a year or more and now, even though the economic climage might be a little bleak, the time is right to launch them and take advantage of the fact that most competitors are trying to weather the storm by cutting back on their marketing.
As for striking a valiant pose … well it’s 30C (86F) outside and I’m sitting here in a pair of old shorts. It’s not a very pretty sight let alone a valiant one 
(Stop laughing Bronwyn - one of our daughters regularly reads this to see what her old fogies are up to)
So Toni’s and my challenge to you is to think of these rough economic times as a time to grow your business instead of cutting back on it. Certainly, there are things that you should cut back on at this time but promoting and growing your business aren’t among them.
