By MARK RIFFEY for the Flathead Beacon Newspaper
Business is not easy and we (business owners) make it harder by making what will later seem like silly mistakes. Hopefully, we learn lessons from those mistakes, much less a bit more often.
That isn’t necessarily the hard part.
Sometimes, business gets tougher because we get the wrong kind of help. The kind of help I’m speaking of includes things that your clientele and staff might do or say, things that get published in the news, or even changes to regulations that don’t affect your business directly, but affect how your clients run theirs.
One of your jobs as owner is to anticipate and build defenses against situations that could threaten or even destroy your business. You should anticipate these things, defuse them, prepare for them, and work around them.
Anticipating these situations is what allows you the time to defuse, prepare for and work around them – that’s really what defending your business is all about. Most of these situations will present themselves whether you like it or not. The secret is being prepared for them in advance.
Clients and ProspectsMost client and prospect related situations can be avoided with proper sales and service training. A number of these will come to you in the form of sales objections, misinformation, price shopping and other things that your marketing is designed to deal with.
Reacting to these situations in the moment will often produce a solution that hasn’t been well thought out – and usually hits profit first, while setting precedent you don’t want to set. Anticipating and training for these things will prevent the need to react rashly in most cases.
Media, Industry and GurusIt’s easy to place the blame on the media – particularly today when some news outlets act more like news creators and take part in less than authentic clickbait campaigns to get your attention.
Media includes far more than the local or even national papers. It includes the trade organizations and industry groups that affect your market, and the “guru” types who command attention of your market.
The key is to be monitoring everything you can that relates to your business, your clients, your clients’ business and any external entities that affect them. There are plenty of automated tools out there to make this easy.
Monitoring isn’t enough. You have to lead the market by taking a position on what’s going on. Some will follow, some will not.
Regulatory ChangesThere are a couple of angles to consider.
One is for the business that simplifies the act of dealing with government agencies of any kind, at any level. These businesses also live and die by the frequency and volume of changes in those regulations. It can be a bit of a roller coaster ride.
Ideally, you need to make sure that these regs aren’t the sole reason your clients do business with you. If your model is designed and totally depends on the ability to help those who need to work within the regs and nothing else, you’re at risk. Rather than depend on a single revenue stream, use the knowledge you’ve gained about these client and their business to find ways to help them in addition to the ways you help them deal with regulatory challenges.
Another angle is all about staying on top of the changes that affect your clients and leading them in the direction that keeps them out of harm’s way. Any efforts you make to combat these issues are a different, and perhaps simultaneous, path while the rest of your efforts are still at work.
EquityOne particularly strong way to defend your business is to build equity into your business model.
You might think that you can’t do this because you don’t deal in real estate or stock, but that just isn’t so. If your business model allows you to know that you have sales booked for the next 30, 60 or 90 days (if not beyond) – that’s the sort of equity I’m speaking of.
Having those sales booked in advance, regardless of how you’ve done so, gives you the flexibility and freedom to make better decisions when defending your business, because you aren’t thinking about how you’ll make payroll next week when making those decisions.
Defending your business is one of a business owners’ strategic responsibilities. What are you doing to defend yours?
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