Unless you’re really lucky in that sense and you’re perhaps in the business of fulfilling government tenders or you’re something like a rope manufacturer servicing industries which continuously require your product, at some or other stage in the lifecycle of your business you’ll probably experience a serious downturn. The good times don’t last forever and neither do the bad times, but it’s all about preparation if you’re going to get through the bad times and have your business survive. It’s all about what you do when the good times are rolling.

For the most part waiting it out and ensuring you survive during the bad times makes for a cookie-cutter strategy for business survival, but that’s not where it has to end. The basic principles of running a business so that it survives the slow times in part dictate that you shouldn’t completely cut back on your marketing and advertising efforts. The idea is that although prospects may not go on to complete the purchase immediately, your business brand is always in their minds and hopefully on their lips as well. So sometime in the future when they are ready to buy what you have to offer, you have to make sure you’re still in business and you’re still around to be able to fulfil those needs.

Naturally though you’d probably cut back a little on your marketing and advertising budget as the need arises, but you won’t be totally cutting out that area of the operation of your business. That said though, when you have a limited marketing budget to work with it can be really challenging for your marketing and advertising efforts to appear to make any visible impact.

The natural course business operators usually take would then be to try marketing and advertising channels which don’t directly dip into their marketing budget, but can be just as effective in landing new clients and identifying new prospects, such as sending a representative to the various networking sessions the organisation would have naturally been invited to. Make full use of this opportunity! Every networking session is indeed an opportunity and it’s likely a much bigger opportunity than what you might first think.

An opportunity to branch out and expand

Although it’s always encouraged for a business operation to have as narrow a focus as possible by way of what you specialise in, sometimes branching out and expanding is so natural that you can’t go on operating within a rigid framework of exclusive specialisation. Going beyond that however, if you operate a car dealership for example and units are moving along particularly slowly, who is going to care really if on your books it shows up that you made some profit collaborating with something like a rope supplier to get through the lean times? Nobody!

It’s these types of opportunities which are available in abundance at networking sessions.  Don’t be afraid to broaden your horizons – you don’t have to officially change your mission statement and business vision to branch into other little business operations which form part of your main business or even if they’re very far removed.