Growing your business in a recession
The sun is shining and the birds are singing this morning. The daffodils are poking out of the ground. Soon the grass will be growing, which is why I was working on my lawnmower last night getting it ready. All in all, spring is here.
Nature doesn’t know we are in a recession.
It just keeps doing what it always does. No matter how much we worry about money, the news, and everything else in the world, nature just keeps coming back.
Now I’m not saying we shouldn’t address money concerns, the news, and everything else. (Especially how we treat mother earth, we can’t expect nature to keep coming back if we abuse it.) What I am saying is that all the worry about money is man made.
Yes, recession is a man-made invention.
It’s not something natural. It isn’t ordained by God. It isn’t something that pops out of the ground like seven year locusts. There isn’t a literal vacuum anywhere that created the recession. It’s what we believe that creates it.
So is it real? Of course it is, just like anything else that we create and believe in, it is real. Money itself is a man-made invention. The need for money, and the lust for money, has influenced how people behave probably more than any other thing, or at least any other man-made thing.
So what’s my point? I am thinking that since the recession is simply a man-made thought – it’s how we think of the economy that creates a recession – that as individuals, we should be able to think about the recession from our own point of view.
Most business people think of a recession strategy as cutting back, laying off people, spending less, and ultimately doing less. Which means you sell less, which means you make less money, which then means you need to cut back more, lay off more people, continue to decrease spending, and ultimately do even less. You can see how this creates a downward spiral.
So what if our strategy is to think differently about the recession? What if we look at the recession like we would any other business situation and try to find opportunities? If we get to decide how we think about everything else, why don’t we decide to think about the recession differently?
What can we do to spend less, but make more? Are our costs going down? Can we take that savings and apply it somewhere to increase profits? How are needs different today than yesterday and can we fill a void? Or do the people that buy from us need our product or service regardless of whether there is a recession or not? If so, is there any reason we can’t expand in a recession?
I’ve read where Warren Buffett’s strategy for buying stock is to buy when nobody else wants it. Mr. Buffett still buys smart, he knows the difference between buying something because it is cheap and buying something because it is a good value. I would suggest that the same philosophy can be used in business in a recession. Maybe the best time to expand is when no one else is expanding. Maybe the best time to be aggressive is when your competitors are being timid. Maybe the recession is an opportunity, you just have to figure it out. (But isn’t that true with all business situations?)
Maybe it is more natural to just keep growing.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 at 6:11 am and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.