You’ve stepped back and answered your own questions satisfactorily about what you offer, your differentiation and your market’s preparedness to pay.

Let’s stay with the fundamentals a little longer because I think I glossed over one:

“What excites ME about what I can do for people and what that helps them achieve – and do I know for certain that it’s the same thing that will excite them?”

This is the raison d’être of your business: You need to be able to clearly articulate it and transfer that enthusiasm to your audience.

A client came to us three months ago. He runs a successful recruitment business that has grown over the years yet he realised he’d lost interest in it and for some time had only been seeing the problems there. He’s now regained his focus, made it into a leaner operation, re-energised his staff and is actively looking for and creating opportunities and solutions.

Many businesses can and do fall into coasting along when the economy is buoyant. Sometimes radical changes need to be made when circumstances alter and the economy takes a drastic nose dive. Those changes, whatever they may be, start at the top: With YOU.

I posted here last week about how my cousin took the tough decision to reduce the size of his workforce.

He hadn’t lost focus but there simply wasn’t now enough work coming in to continue to support the business as it was. Unlike corporations that are making hundreds, if not thousands, of employees redundant, these weren’t faceless names on a payroll – they were people he had worked with for years. Yet he had to do it to ensure the survival of the company and job security for the rest of the staff.

The last thing I’m advocating is that you let people go whose skills you will need to help take advantage of the upturn when it comes. But if you go back to basics, your core business, and involve your key people to see how they can contribute to that, you might find you have a few nice surprises!

If you’re ‘too close to see the wood for the trees’ why not bring in someone you respect and trust to work with you? While you’re at it it’s worthwhile remembering that saving is the other side of the coin to making money by increasing profitable business. A packaging & design expert recently saved a company thousands of pounds. The first thing he did was to invest time talking to the people on the shop floor, something their management hadn’t done for years…