During tough and challenging business times your main goal
becomes survival….staying alive! At this time there are three key
areas of your business that you must examine and focus on in order
to ensure your survival. These areas are:
- Make core competency your Brand
- Business Processes
- Marketing-go to Market Strategy…not just selling
Your core competency must be your brand and can be defined in
the following areas. Intangibles… what are you known for? I hope
one intangible is being known as an ethical business. Do your
customers trust you and is your word your bond? What are you known
for? On-time delivery or low cost, high quality? What do you and
your customers get as their return on investing with you?
Another key to survival is to make sure that you have all your
critical business processes defined and documented. You need to
ensure that your business data is secure and that you are managing
the knowledge that defines your business. The key processes that
must be defined and documented are proposal management, contract
management, and financial management. These three all have
important elements of data that must be created, tracked and
maintained to ensure that you are ready for opportunities that come
your way.
During these tough times do you need to re-examine your go-to
Market Strategy? How you have positioned your firm in the
marketplace can be referred to as your go to market strategy. Are
you a Sub or a prime contractor to the government? Do you have key
customers you have served that no longer seem to hold potential?
Have you teamed with a partner who seems to have changed direction
and no longer includes you in their strategy? These may all be
signs that you need to step back and re-examine how you survive and
thrive in this economy. Your examination and the plan developed
from that review should result in a strategy that allows you to
turn around the circumstances and sue your strengths to re-position
your small business for survival and possible even growth you had
not considered in the past. In many instances this forced
examination will result in a new beginning with surprisingly good
results!
This is part of a presentation I made at the Virginia Beach
Minority Business Council "Connect and Grow Your Business"
conference and Expo. To learn more go to the link below.
http://govtips.biz/media/22803/vambc%20presentation.pdf