This week, I was reminded how stressful owning and operating a business can be.
A friend had a stress attack that seriously stopped him in his tracks. His doctor said that it could have led to a heart attack from the stress it put on his body systems.
Now, I’m not saying that it was caused by something in his business, but I know he works hard at the business, always looking ahead and thinking about his team, the business key indicators, and on how to improve the business. What I am saying is that for all of us, business is stressful.
As business owners we owe it, not only to ourselves, but to our families and loved ones, and to those who depend on us, to stay healthy and resilient. At the end of the day, resilience is about mental flexibility and the ability to adapt to change and uncertainty.
It’s a tough world for small business out there right now. When you see global interest rates at record lows, you know the world economy ain’t exactly “booming”!
So if you own a small business and you see customers saving money and choosing wisely about how, where and when they spend their money, what can you do?
Well luckily we have three lessons we can learn from previous tough times.
The first lesson is how to cope with disruption. We know that whenever political, economic social, technological, legislative and environmental changes take place, old business models get disrupted. Take the old manufacturers of camera films – their business was being disrupted, so what did they do…or not do?
Then there’s the lesson about how people talking about you can carve a niche for your business. Early Apple computers became beloved by early-adopters because they “heard” so much about them.
Finally, what about the lesson from being able to provide customers with certainty. How many remember Coca Cola’s foray into “new” taste?
In a tough business world you have to innovate, stay relevant, and make sure people remember you – and you have to do it over and over again.
In a disrupted competitive market, small players can win if they offer a better customer experience.
Social media, depending on your small business, can be multiple times more effective than traditional advertising.
Find the right balance between flexibility and having established processes so that customers experience certainty, but also have a tailored experience.
Why don’t you go over to teikoh.com to check out more tips, tools, and resources to create powerful strategies, show leadership, and grow your business? Sign up by giving me your name and email and I’ll send these free ideas to your inbox every week. And trust me – I hate spam so I will never trade your details to anyone else!
As an entrepreneur and small business owner, I know that you want to build a long term business to give you a great life with your loved ones, and to provide financial freedom and independence. In order to do so, the business you are creating needs to be resilient – resilient to bad fortune, bad times, strong competition, unpredicted hardship, and everything else, right?
So what makes a business resilient and how do you create such an ecosystem in your business?
Let’s get straight into it – in this video I give you the three characteristics of resilient businesses that I have distilled from over 35 years of working with small businesses and resilient entrepreneurs all over the world.
I truly mean it when I say that in my experience, all over the world and under any adverse conditions, the entrepreneurs and small businesses I have seen ride the bad times and not just survive but improve, are those who have those three characteristics. This means to me that they are common characteristics you need to have, wherever you are, facing whatever situation, in whatever business, selling whatever product or service!
If they’re common characteristics then learn from others and use their formula.
If you want to know more about how to grow your business into that long lasting dream, go to my website and see all the free tools, ideas, systems and downloads there.
This is the final video in the series about what you can do when your business isn’t doing so great just now.
I am truly positive about working on your business. I truly believe that if you reframe any situation, you can look for the positive and you can come up with strategies to take you forward. All my writing and video talks in my blog are about business growth, about the systems and tools to take your business and your life up another level.
However bad times happen.
Only, I believe the same attitude can overcome bad times, and in the last two videos I gave you some ideas about how you can turn a bad situation around.
Do I know what I’m talking about? Yes I do. Apart from spending over 35 years of my life successfully advising entrepreneurs and small business owners across the world on how to create the business they see in their vision, I have also had cause to pull myself out of near bankruptcy.
Bad partners. Yup, bad partners, but even today I don’t see it as “their fault“. I own my own destiny and you should too. I looked at my “near-death business experience” with realistic eyes and relied on all the systems and tools I knew and created strategies and pulled myself out and created a very successful consulting business from the ashes. You can too – in the last couple of weeks I gave you ideas about how to create recovery strategies if business isn’t great for you at the moment, now watch this last video in the series.
Were you surprised by my last suggestion?
Despite my belief that you can and should keep looking for ways to pull yourself out of trouble, sometimes you have to look reality in the face and know when a situation is too wrong to be righted. Don’t make that decision lightly, but realise you may have to make that decision.
And finally if you are reading or watching this on one of my social media channels, what are you doing??? You are missing out on having great ideas, systems and step by step solutions to your business growth issues delivered directly to your inbox, every week, and for free!
Last week I wrote about how we have to be realistic and despite my wanting to help you grow your business into a successful long term business, we have to be realistic and admit that sometimes business isn’t doing great sometimes.
The question is what can you do in those times, how do you do something proactive to pull yourself out of a hole?
Well last week I gave you the first ideas on what you can do. This week I give a couple more ideas, watch this video now.
You can’t sit on your hands, right? If you want to grow the business of your dreams, sometimes you have to go through difficult times, and when you do, please don’t just sit there in fear and panic bemoaning your fate.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from over 35 years experience helping entrepreneurs and running businesses myself, where you go from time to time depends entirely on the effort and practice that you put into the situation. If you see it as the end, it will be the end. However if you see it as a challenge – another to overcome – your mind starts to focus on what you can do rather than what has befallen you! If your dream is worth anything, it’s worth fighting for.
Watch out for Part 3 of this series coming out next week – if you don’t want to miss it, I can email it directly to your inbox, just give me your name and email here.
If you’re reading and watching this in one of my social media channels, you may not be seeing each week’s video blog post because of the way social media works. Why don’t you make sure you keep up with all the ways you can grow your long term and resilient business – why not sign up here to get these updates delivered directly to your inbox (and hey, I hate spam so I promise never to sell or give away your information).
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