Taking Advantage of Opportunities in a Bear Economy

For entrepreneurs, the de-leveraging that continues in the financial markets means a weaker economy for 2009. The good news is that when it comes to decision making and execution, crisis forces us to eliminate waste and focus on what is truly important.

The following is a list of ten sizable opportunities that come from a bear economy:

1. The opportunity to weed out mediocre employees from your organization. When examining your employee base make cuts with surgical precision within functions and departments not an axe, but only cut once, and cut deeper than you think.
   
2. There is an opportunity for negotiating on everything from prices and contract lengths, to flexible payment terms. Try bartering as well.
   
3. Use this opportunity to reinforce your brand attributers, vision, mission, and corporate objectives. Over-communicate with everyone from suppliers to employees as well as investors, partners and particularly customers.
   
4. Use this opportunity to train everyone in your organization from the receptionist to the board room on how-to sell. Be sure to make it easy for employees to introduce sales opportunities and generate referrals. Incentives and rewards will help.
   
5. Teach employees to treat cash as precious: stretch your resources and dollars with social media programs, re-focus on referrals and networking, turn every staff member into a marketer, eliminate internal non-revenue producing functions, and/or evaluate 3^rd party outsourcing providers.
   
6. Recruit more than your fair share of star performers. Start by comparing the talent at your competitors or substitutes against your own.
   
7. In years of economic slowdowns top performing companies streamline operations, reduce costs and increase efficiencies. You now have a reason (“excuse”) with employees and partners and thus an opportunity for performance improvement initiatives so ACT NOW.
   
8. Invest in ways to and extend your capabilities through corporate acquisitions.
   
9. Expand your distribution with partnering and by forming strategic alliances. Look for cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.
   
10. And one final item to be thankful for in a bear economy: less holiday work parties.

In a tough economic climate, the strong will become stronger (at least in terms of market position) as the weak struggle.  Competitors and substitutes that squander precious capital have little margin for error and can be purchased at discount prices.  Others will fail altogether.  For top performing companies, a sluggish economy might be the recipe for long-term success.

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