Many companies are bracing for a potential economic downturn. As a business consultant in Ventura County, how can you strategize to grow your small business by helping your clients survive and thrive during the recession if it occurs?
Here are 6 practical suggestions to help you build a recession-proof small business consulting firm.
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Provide Your Clients with Innovative Growth Solutions
As your clients are staring at a recession, be the creative expert they can count on when it comes to exploiting growth opportunities. You can identify struggling companies your clients can benefit from acquiring during the tough economic times. Similarly, analyze some of your struggling clients’ marketing performance, look at the data, and suggest an innovative way to make the most of their campaigns.
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Provide Ideas to Streamline Clients’ Operations
There are always aspects of business management or operations that your clients can refine to avoid sinking amid a collapsing economy. Reach out to the small business owners that consult you and mention that you can help them optimize certain areas that may not be as efficient as required to survive. Without being salesman-like or pushy, hear them out and provide personalized, relevant solutions to boost productivity, streamline the supply chain, and so on.
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Adapt Your Solutions to Realities of the Marketplace
To succeed in an economic downturn as a business consultant in Ventura County, you may need to refine your current offerings or create new ones altogether. For instance, when the pandemic made it unsafe to engage clients in-person, some innovative consultants launched remote, virtual engagements to generate more leads. From online video conferencing to webinars–you can utilize these speaking forums to help clients with profit- or performance-enhancing strategies.
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Grow with a Closely-Knit Community
You’re establishing a permanent source of new and repeat business in creating your community of clients, colleagues or partners. If possible, you should have it ready and growing before recession time, such as by writing blog articles, hosting webinars or posting on LinkedIn. The business owners you’re constantly engaging in the community won’t be too quick to drop your consultation services when the tough times arrive.
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Increase Your Brand Exposure with Leveraged Distribution
Leveraged distribution here means identifying and showcasing your expertise on multiple strategic online forums, communities and other media platforms whose audiences are your potential clients. These can be article directories, sites that accept guest podcasts or webinar co-hosting platforms. As a business consultant in Ventura County, that’s strategizing to thrive when others fail; you need maximum brand exposure to increase lead generation.
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Optimize Your Budget
To conserve cash and increase profits, check your bank statements or credit card bills for unnecessary expenditures. Cut on spending with no meaningful return on investment and allocate more resources to high ROI items like marketing, learning resources or business consulting.
Remember that markets and economies always recover- from the Great Depression of the 1930s to the 2008 housing market bubble burst, no recession is too great to prevent recovery. When many retailers collapsed during the 2008 recession, Amazon survived by moving into new markets (it launched Kindle 2). With a similar mindset and intelligent strategy, you can survive the potential downturn by innovating to solve your struggling client’s specific needs.
Are you a business consultant in Ventura County who needs learning resources to help grow your firm? If so, contact us today at Economic Development Collaborative!
