5 questions: is your business ready to push on in a recession?

Is your business ready to succeed in a tightening economic environment? Take our test to find out if you are:

At The Bridge , where we help companies to adapt, align and achieve in all market conditions, we say that the opportunities to differentiate your business and succeed in a downturn are always there – if you can answer the following five questions affirmatively:

1. Are your company headlights still switched on?

How far are you looking ahead? What are your goals this/next year and beyond? Do you have a list of target clients and opportunities in place for this and next year? To target them, have you made a plan and agreed it as a business/division? And do you have the resource in place to activate those plans?

In a downturn, it can be tempting for businesses to cut the teams that create and deliver on these strategies. Whether in-house or external, we always argue for companies to keep focusing on the road ahead, keeping the headlights on so that your opportunities to drive turnover, value and growth continue to flow.

2. Do you have strategy in place - and actions underway to deliver?

Fail to plan: plan to fail. Structured action that identifies core objectives, audiences, messages and strategies enables purposeful progress. Then, it is one thing to put in place a company strategy to target clients and demonstrate your value to them, but strategy without action always leads to failure.

And, at a time of economic challenge, the tempo needs to lift, not slacken. ‘Never waste a good recession’ is a mantra I have heard from successful business leaders: if you’re not pushing forwards when the going gets tough, you can be sure that your competition will be.

We find that independent challenge is so often a valuable part of this process, looking from the outside in to challenge and test strategy from the client perspective. Which brings us to:

3. Do you really know what your clients value?

At all times, and particularly when they are tougher, it pays to check what your core clients value. Then check again.

To sound like Basil Fawlty and state the bleedin’ obvious, you significantly improve your chances of winning work if you know what your clients value about you and/or the service you provide that they need. However, in our experience not nearly enough companies actually bother to ask their clients in a systematic way: which means they are just guessing.

We say: take the guesswork out of your plans and messages by undertaking an independent client perception audit. We find that doing them for our clients is always intensely valuable for everyone: your client learns that you’re truly interested in what they think, you learn what they are working to achieve and how you can help drive them along the path, and we learn how to help you demonstrate consistently the behaviours and initiatives that align with both your brands. This means you can then be efficient in demonstrating the value you give them.

4. Can your clients see the value that you generate for them?

It is one thing to say that you are walking in lock-step with your clients, in total alignment, but we ask: can they see what you’re doing?

This is so often the Achilles heel of Kiwi businesses. ‘We don’t like to brag’, they say. We respond by saying that it is one thing to brag, and entirely another to ensure your core clients and targets can see the value that you generate. To us, action without communication = invisibility.

So, are you demonstrating proof of your client alignment right now? Can they see the breadth of what you offer? If not, now is the time to ensure that your actions and communications are lining up in ways that matter to your client base.

5. Are you demonstrating the right behaviours?

Alongside value, we have identified four key behaviours that we know that clients consistently evaluate you on (alongside the usual / expected behaviours of integrity, value for money, can-do attitude etc).

One of the four is Hunger. This is something that is not easily - or authentically - written down in a tender response. You need to demonstrate your hunger in your actions and words outside of tender time: what you do as an organisation and the way in which you do it.

We would of course be happy to reveal the other three to you. Do get in touch to find out more.

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So how did you get on? 1/5 or 5/5?

Our focus at The Bridge is as a market strategy consultancy helping clients to adapt, align and achieve; so that you win more work; improve client satisfaction; and increase employee engagement (and who wouldn’t want that?!). Feel free to comment on how you see the economic environment shifting this year for business, and on what you see as they key behaviours exhibited by successful companies – in all environments. Scott Jacobs #recession #adapttochange #broaderoutcomes #usethebridge