Slow Business? Here’s What To Do
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Last week, I talked about the dreaded summer sales slump and I got some questions about what sorts of things can you do to improve your business when your business is slow. Whether your business is slow in the summer, in the winter, or just at arbitrary times, here are some ideas of ways that you can work on your business when you have that extra bandwidth.
First of all, updating any processes or procedures, anything that you’re doing that hasn’t been written down, documenting it, and some things that might need improvement. This is a great time to do it. Things like customer or employee onboarding. What are the things that you want to do when you have a new customer? Have a new employee? I’m a big fan of checklists for things like this. Another area where I feel that business owners could use some improvement is accounts payable follow-up. What’s your process for that? How often, and what methods? When do you escalate things? And the third thing in this area is your social media or marketing, content creation, calendaring, and posting. There are lots of tools that can help you with this. So this is a great time to experiment with some of these things.
The next area is new systems or equipment. I recently had a slow patch and I implemented a new CRM system, which is something that I think a lot of companies could benefit from. I’m also, not surprisingly, in favor of making sure your accounting software is up to date and you’re using it frequently and correctly. You may also have other tools or classes or things that you bought that you haven’t started to use yet. This is a great time to start experimenting with those.
Other strategic initiatives that you might want to consider, are new products or services that you want to launch. There’s probably some groundwork that you need to do to get that going. Customer interviews are a great place to learn and also connect with your customers.
Fourth, this is a great time to invest in professional development for you or your team. Again, you may have classes that you’ve purchased that you haven’t finished or you might be interested in my Fiscal Fitness Boot Camp gives you a great financial foundation.
And finally, if your business has some downtime, this is a great time for you to take some downtime too and rest and recuperate and recharge. This is Judi Otton with GrowthCast and I’ll be back next week with a brand new Fiscal Fitness Tip of the Week.