With the economy still going through a lot of uncertainty, instead of throwing in the towel on your small business, especially if it involves services, you can extend the same principles that environmentalists recommend: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, to what you offer to customers. and keep the dollars rolling.

The downsizing strategy doesn’t just apply to the office products you use or how much space it takes up; You also need to see how to reduce what you offer without taking away from your value proposition. That means never lowering your price, but finding ways to split up what you make, so customers can still buy from you without touching your value proposition.

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

This leads to the second part of the formula, Reuse. In this case, while you can put your paper clips to good use over and over again, it also means looking outside your four walls for ways that can help your customers. One way to “reuse” is to put people to work that your customers would otherwise have to lay off. Perhaps a client has always wanted to run a large nationwide survey, but never had the budget? Or do you want to do some business development work but didn’t have your feet on the street? Instead of paying the much higher costs, including margins, to an outside company like yours, they make you act as a manager for an internal team and put their surplus staff plus your expertise to work. This way, your client will see you as even more indispensable to their business, while the client teams you manage will do the work.

Even if you’re already recycling waste paper and other items around the office, you should also look at how to recycle past work you’ve done for clients. While such initiatives should avoid betraying client confidentiality, especially if you have entered into agreements to that effect, by taking the generic parts of the client’s existing work, perhaps even previous work for various 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 second, you will have found another way to present your services to potential clients. You may want to submit a series of reports or your First Annual X Survey on a market you do a lot of work in; If you’ve done that work in the last 12-24 months for large corporate clients, finding ways to recycle this information for small businesses will introduce you to a market segment you wouldn’t normally serve.

While no one likes a shaky economy, by using the 3 R’s to your advantage, you’ll be better able to weather the storms and position yourself for the fourth R, recovery, when that happens!
Copyright Deborah C. Sawyer