We hope you know what we’re talking about here. Sometimes your business is just going to need a little bit of a pick me up. Something to lean on in times of trouble, so a crutch as it were. When a business starts to wobble a little bit, it can just send pure panic through the whole company.
Whether the whole company is you, or whether you have a couple of people working for you is by the way. If your business needs a crutch, no matter how many people you have working for you, then we’re here to help.
You’ll often find however, that for most businesses, this time of year is the busiest time of year. Rather than needing a crush, they need a push through the winter rush to make sure they can meet all the sales targets, and actually deliver products and services on time. You’ll often find that the feeling of needing a crutch is going to come within the next month or so.
As soon as the new year hits and people realise how much they spent over the Christmas period, they’re not going to be splashing the cash so easily. So, this crutch offer is one for the future, but the period of time when you’re going to need one really isn’t far away, so have a read on to find out more.
Lean On Your Employees
Employees are the biggest asset to a company that we feel just gets taken for granted so often. The employees should be considered to be the heart and sole of the company, rather than just the people who are doing the jobs that nobody higher up wants to do anymore.
Is that the case for a lot of companies? It most definitely is.
So, rather than being like that, if you are, think about leaning on your employees. Because they’re the crutch that you’re going to need before any of the down time even starts happening. They’re a pre crutch if you will.
Over the Christmas period you’re going to be faced with a rush of traffic from your customers that we just know you’re not going to have prepared for. Some company owners just ignore completely the busiest time of year, and then are more than confused when things start hotting up so much so that the business can’t cope.
So, to ensure this most definitely isn’t going to be you, lean on your employees and make sure that moral is at the absolute highest at the moment. You have to make sure your employees are super keen to work, and that they have the enthusiasm for your company to push themselves to do more. If you feel like a few of your employees aren’t like this, or perhaps you just want to give one big extra push, then we thinking opening up your pocket is going to help. If they all have a bonus to earn if they meet the targets you want them to meet, they’re obviously going to power through the working day to get the extra money.
It’s the most expensive time of year, so there won’t be one employee you have that won’t be looking for some extra cash.
Have Some Down Time
Once all of the Christmas and new year rush is over, because we hope that you’ve planned major sales for both to draw customers in, you’ll notice that everything just sort of drops to the floor. The orders drop, the number of customers walking through the door stops, and you can generally feel like you’re paying yourself and your employees more than you’re actually making.
So, rather than struggling through this time and losing out on money, why not think about actually having some down time. It could only be super temporary, maybe only a month or so. You could direct your employees to agency work with the promise of their role being open when they got back.
Your business will spend pretty much nothing, and you can relax for a couple of weeks until you can get back on your feet financially. If you don’t like the idea of this, we would at least push as hard as possible to ensure all staff are working hard, orders are coming in, and you’re doing everything you can to promote your business.
Better Your Business
Sometimes the best crutch for your business is itself. Sometimes all you need to do is better your business, and you won’t feel like you need that crutch so badly.
We bet that all you’re thinking is that we’re making this sound more simpler than we are, which we actually are. There should be a fair few areas to your business at the minute, and learning how to change each one to better your business is going to be hard. It starts with identifying problems.
You have to look at each area and think about what you think might be slowing it down, how that could be stopped, and how it will change the area. You can even get things like machine learning to help you in some areas. It’s a computer based software that learns from itself, and can give you invaluable information towards things like sales and predicted sales trends. There’s similarly deep learning that some companies use as well.
Machine learning and deep learning are rather similar, so it would be up to you as to what you chose. If you think you’re going to struggle with this, then the best people to talk to are actually your employees. You’ll often find they have a better understanding than you do because they’re working with the issue every day. They can give you invaluable feedback, and actually working alongside them to solve problems that might have been slowing them down can be seen as a little employee/employer bonding session. If you show your employees that you care, you’re instantly bettering your business.
Once you start working through the problems one by one, you should start to notice that running your business becomes that little bit easier.
Don’t Hide Behind Competitors
You most definitely shouldn’t be hiding behind your competitors. You should actually be using them as your next crutch.
Sometimes you’re going to go through times where your business just hits a bit of a stand still, like after the new year, and you’re not sure which way to turn. You know you need a new direction to keep customers coming back, but you’re not sure what. In comes your competitor crutch.
Sometimes analysing what the people who are doing on better than you are doing, and then applying it to your business is all you need to do. Of course we’re not saying to directly copy, but you should definitely think about how to change certain elements of your business to replicate others. If they’re doing well at it, there’s no reason why your business can’t either.
Cut Back On Your Financial Spending
This might be a hard pill for some of you to swallow, especially those who like pocketing a lot of the money that the business makes. If you’re going to go through a period of time where your money is going to take a hit directly, you need to think about the cutbacks you could do.
The first cutbacks would come to the business spending. We know that you’ll have many different areas where money is flying out of your account. You might have business subscriptions, you might be paying for employee benefits etc.
If you can cut back on all of the things that you don’t necessarily need to spend the most money on, such as yourself, then it will ease the strain financially, and not push you towards the route of business loans. Money is the biggest problem for so many companies out there, so just don’t let one of them be yours.
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