Our Recession Plan
Yesterday the recession was made official. Turns out we’ve been in one since December of 2007, but it’s only just now we have the data to make that known. Not that we didn’t know it’s been bad. But we can safely assume, as bad as it’s been, that it’ll get worse. So what’re we going to do? Well, in the case of my business we’re going to change little and keep doing what we do best. It’s my hope that, because of the nature of our business and how we run it, we’ll survive and possibly even do well, during this downturn.
Hard Work and Smart Decision Making
The last few months have been good to Blue Flavor. We’ve had some great clients and been able to do a lot of good work. It wasn’t that way all year. We really struggled over the summer; the loss of a partner, a change-over in our sales process, some recovery from a few bad decisions, a few costly break-ins, and a few deadbeat clients brought us to the brink a few different times. But somehow, with a bit of luck and a lot of hard work we were able to turn it around and things have been good, despite poor economic conditions, since. What’s more, I think we’ve learned from those trials and they’ve prepared us for things to get worse. So, our plan:
- Keep the focus on what we do well. Information Architecture and Design, Front-end Development, User-Experience consulting.
- Keep our costs low. This is something we’ve always done. We’re running fairly lean and have been.
- Provide more value to our clients. Over the last year we’ve adjusted how we estimate and take on projects. I’ve always thought we were of great value and brought good ROI to our projects, but now I feel we can do even more. This should help us stay competitive and maybe even grab some opportunities from larger agencies.
- Refine our process. In order to ensure we’re giving our clients the most we can we’re taking steps to further refine our processes to make sure we get the most out of our time and efforts.
We’re holding steady with what’s been working the last few months. It’s my hope that we can weather the storm and at the same time be able to leverage our solid foundation to help other businesses out there who might be struggling. I really believe in the value of the work we do and think there will be opportunity for us to shine in the next year or so. With a little luck and some hard work, we might even come out a little bit ahead of where we are now.
The Bottom Line
In many ways I think we’re lucky. We’ve had significant hurdles to overcome in the past, and we’ve done that. As well, on a practical level, we don’t rely on credit and we are able to keep our costs fairly low, thus being in a position to provide a bit more bang for our client’s buck. Will it be hard? No doubt, but I think we can do it and regardless we’re going to give it our best shot!