I meet a lot of local business people in the course of my work and I always ask: how’s the economy affecting your organisation and what are you doing about it?
Obviously it’s a topic on everyone’s mind at the moment so most have evolved their thinking to a small number of survival strategies, and there seems to be a number of completely differing approaches being adopted.
Most commonly, the response falls into the category of “we’re just battening down the hatches, we’ll layoff some more staff if we have to and in the meantime cut all discretionary expenditure to the bone … and just try and ride it out”.
Perhaps the second most popular response is along the lines of: “We’re watching developments here and if things get as bad as they appear in the media overseas we will look at shutting up shop or at least severely downsizing”.
The least common response is interestingly the one most modern marketing strategists would strongly advocate, viz: “We’re actually stepping up our promotional efforts and trimming our costs and prices … when we finally get through this situation we want to be in better shape with increased market share!”
Which reminds me of an old but very apt story a marketing colleague once told me. It went along the lines of: “Imagine you are sitting in the back seat of a driverless car travelling at 50mph (I told you it was an old story), heading straight for the edge of a steep cliff … do you sit back and hope the car will run out of petrol, or miraculously change direction by itself … or do you reach over and grab the steering wheel and try and save yourself?”
The not so subtle moral of this story is that you as owner /manager are ultimately responsible for the future of your business and while there may be some comfort in knowing that almost everyone is experiencing similar ‘pain’ the fact is that you are the person required to make choices that are in the best long term interests of all stakeholders.
Bottom line: If you don’t make the hard decisions yourself, in this financial climate, someone else will do it for you - and you can be sure your interests will definitely take a back seat! | 
