The Teckki Says

Sometimes you get more than a morning jolt when you stop by the coffee shop, although I drink decaf. I did get more than the high octane shot most of you get, and I want to share it with you. A friend stopped by my table, and we talked, among other things, about marketing.

My questions started on the topic of surviving the current recession, knowing that this friend had been through several. He’s been in business over twenty five years, so he's seen downturns in a number of flavors. The jury appears to be in, and the verdict looks like he will survive this one also.

Many of you have heard these before. However, in a downturn, the panic button gets pushed more often, so it's nice to be reminded. Here are the five tidbits I gathered from our conversation:

(1). Contact your customers. Look particularly at those customers you acquired from the last recession until just before this one. If you've been in business for less than five years, this will be everyone you’ve done business with. Rekindle and/or reinforce those relationships

(2). Find out what works. This is easy because right now, almost nothing seems like it does. All editorializing aside, someone is still buying from you, or contributing to your cause. What works with your marketing right now? What types of mail or samples gets kept, what gets thrown in the garbage? Now is the time to ask.

(3). Redeploy your workforce. You will find out just how good your hires are in this climate. If there is less work, there is more time to do other things, like calling current customers, or making sales calls. This is the time to make your organization more customer–focused by perhaps engaging with customers personally.

(4). Set your limits. Not every business survives a downturn, and yours may be one that doesn't. Know this beforehand, so you are not losing the business, your house and personal possessions, your family and everything else because you think the last quarter in the slot machine is going to hit big. For instance, you may have to adjust customer payment patterns, just know what your limits are there, too.

(5). Cut strategically. No where does the reflexive budget cut ax wield so recklessly in many companies as in downturns. All of those "25% cuts across the board" mandates may sound good at department meetings, but if your heart, brain, legs and arms are the heads of those departments, mandates like this will get you one dead person. I like the way my friend phrased this – first make the personal cut, then make the personnel cut.

One of my favorites is to get out of the office. Isolation only solves one problem I know of, and that is to focus on a problem where you need to cut out interruptions and clutter. Holding your face in your hands, while lamenting a poor economy, is not that kind of problem. Besides, you never know who you will see in a coffee shop. It might be someone who could give you five great marketing ideas!

Yes!

You should advertise in a recession.

I know that this is one of the first items to go during a recession. It should actually be one of the last. I know the logic – in a recession, customers aren't buying as much, so why advertise more than you have to?
One answer to that is the other guy’s customers.

You have competition in good times. In bad times, two things are happening. First, someone is going out of business. This is not the case of vultures circling a dead carcass. Some firms will lose customers at a rate that is unsustainable for the business they have built. They will starve at the level they are at. Additionally, they may not be able to downsize fast enough before they starve to death, or figure that if they can't eat at the level they’re used to eating at, then they won't eat at all. This doesn't bode well for the customers left behind. Advertising makes you a potential suitor.

Another reason is that in every recession, organizations make decisions regarding current services and products they use. In many cases, they use less products or different services. In other cases, they change suppliers. Again, you can be the beneficiary.

These things are happening to you and your customers as well. You have to decide how you are going to resize your organization, and if you don't do it well, your suppliers lose a customer. Customers are also deciding whether you are going to be their supplier going forward. This is where you increase your customer service efforts, but that is another article. However, you can do your best and still lose. It won't be your fault, but it will be your problem. You'll have to replace a customer with another customer, and in recessions, they are not sitting on shelves waiting for you to pull out on a rainy day. You're going to need to advertise.

In good times, some of us are too busy to advertise. In recessions, we've got more time than we need to advertise. By then, we do it as a matter of survival. Or, we cut it, hoping to pick it back up during an upswing. If you take that approach, consider something you may have never thought of during your good times.

Organizations go out of business in peak periods, too.

It happens every recession. Organizations flatten, and staff find themselves doing more than they are used to doing. Some of if comes from necessity, where the person who used to perform those activities is gone and not coming back. Some of it comes from fear - it you don't do it, you may be next on the chopping block. Organizations go through this purge every recession, and with it comes the opportunity to do some tasks in house that was farmed out in order to save money.

I am often reminded of this when I build makeshift photography equipment versus buying the real thing. This is almost always driven by cost. Pro photo equipment is EXPENSIVE! Stands, lighting, backgrounds, etc, needed to take ONE set of pictures can be a huge undertaking, and you don't get to charge it all back to the client.

Hardware stores are a treasure trove for this type of makeshift equipment, and there are so many DIY (do it yourself) websites that almost any inhibition you have is overcome. In the end, you can have equipment that effectively operates like pro equipment, with professional results.

What I have ended up with is a collection of pipes, poles, clamps, tools, odds and ends that in some cases has cost me more than a portion of the pro equipment I could have purchased. The advantage is that I can do much more with the hardware because it is general purpose, and much more versatile. The downside is that I have to create what I want from scratch, and I find it difficult to establish a work flow with these items so that I might save another precious asset - time.

In contrast, the expensive equipment that I drool, agonize over, and in some cases, finally buy, works right out of the box, and VERY QUICKLY. Often, it became the CHEAPER option, because it increased efficiency, productivity and decreased time on a project. Another benefit was that I could take it to a client's office. Try doing that with makeshift equipment - it makes you look much so unprofessional.

I tell this story to give pause the next time you need to cut. Too many people look at dollars only, and make no mistake, dollars need to be looked at. However, one important thing that needs to be looked at is the overall effect on your organization and what you are trying to achieve, as well as the image you are trying to project. This is not a recession-only exercise. It is continual value analysis.

Your paying clients will never fully value your products and services if they think they can replicate them. This is true even if they don't have the time to do it themselves. They pay you for what they need, but CAN'T do. If I don't have time to wash my car (and I don't), I may pay to have it washed. However, if I pay to have my car washed, and people are always complimenting me on how nice it looks, and I could never get to look that way by doing it myself, I'm going to pay to have it done more often. The contrast has to be that great. It isn't the wash, but the compliments I'm paying for.

When trimming your organization, always remember what people are paying for. If you cut that, you may just be cutting the heart out of it.

I was recently invited to an "opportunity" event that someone felt that would be profitable to me. Of course, details would be forthcoming, and I really needed to see the presentation to get the full story. After 10 years of business, I know of no other situation that presents itself like this like a Network Level Marketing (NLM) scheme. What I am surprised about is the source - a fellow business owner. As a matter of fact over the years, a number of business owners have approached me about various "opportunities".

Why?

I can only speculate, but I can see why this appeals to those that are employed. The thought of being your own boss, more free time, and financial prosperity are bandied about like summer rain on a hot day. It's easy to see why this appeals to someone who works 40+ hours a week and takes orders from someone that they aren't crazy about. But these aforementioned perks are some of the reasons why we started our businesses. What we found is that you work 70+ hours a week, and take orders from a bunch of people that you may not be crazy about - and these are OUR employees! Maybe after having two turns at the prosperity/freedom/more time wheel, we are open to trying something else.

But is this it?

I imagine that things could be better for many businesses and organizations – financial conditions are not great, work is too hard, and the headaches of running an organization seem to last forever. However, I am missing what the allure is for people who give and have given up a lot in pursuing their dream, in the hopes that they can make some quick money.
I have two main problems with NLM. The first one is that some of the "successful" speakers presenting still have their day jobs. My question is that if this stuff is so good, why do you still have a job? I would not quit tomorrow if I started making, let’s say, $20,000 or more a month, but all of my clients would be put on notice that my days as their vendor are numbered, and sooner rather than later. I really love what I do, but at that level of big bucks, especially relatively hassle-free, that these presenters are fantasizing about, I could quickly find some new brides to fill my days.

The next issue I have is that it involves sales. You would think I would not or should not have a problem with this, and I don't for MY business. I have a HUGE issue with developing a market for an unrelated product line, and spending time selling something to someone that they probably have never heard of. Been there, done that, and actually, still there and doing that with the stuff I know. As we have built our organizations, I'm wondering if some of us have forgotten what that was like.

An interesting note is that my colleagues don't feel that they are going to start totally at the bottom. They're business people, and they've gotten good at getting other people to work for them. Their objective seems to be geared to get you, and to get you to get people to help them move up the ladder. I see no enthusiasm in their eyes when it comes to selling the actual product or service. In this respect, business people involved in NLM schemes remain true to their nature.

We've all had it tough. Let's face it, that's what recessions do; they make business or running your organization much harder, sometimes impossible. They even cloud our dreams. However, whether you are working for someone, or for many some ones are working for you, I believe you can more often than not do better for yourself. Recessions can be times to try something different, sometimes by choice, sometimes not, or sometimes by opportunity. I would argue that there is no better time to assess and possibly reinvent yourself or what you do, because fewer people are buying what sold so well yesterday.

There is an abundance of opportunities out there. I just don't believe that NLM is one of them.