Business Owners Toolbox Blog Discussions and articles to help the small business owner solve the challenges they face as they grow their business.

March 14, 2017

How to Prepare for the Next Downturn

Filed under: Growth Management,Growth strategy,Thrive in tough times — Tags: , , , — Mike Van Horn @ 12:02 pm

Times are good, aren’t they? Will they stay good forever? Of course not.

Back in the last downturn, what do you wish you had done to prepare for future tough years? The time to prepare for hard times is during good times. That’s now.

You don’t want to hunker down and miss out on opportunities now for fear of what may lie ahead. So how can you take advantage of profit and growth opportunities now while taking prudent steps for later safety?

  • Control your costs. This is not sexy, but it’s the single most important step. And it’s the opposite of what many business owners do. When cash is rolling in, they go on a spending spree.
  • Run a lean operation. Don’t get lax with routine expenditures. Weed out people who aren’t doing the job you need done. Stay on top of scheduling, and don’t have more on hand than you need for each part of the day or week.
  • Hire top quality people; train them well. Build a growth team, and nurture their loyalty. A strong, loyal growth team will also be a “get through tough times” team.
  • Build habits of productivity and profitability during good times, so they will carry over into tough times. Make sure your incentives require and reward productive, profitable operation.
  • Raise your prices. Don’t lag behind your competition.
  • Keep your customers happy and loyal by performing impeccably, and handling mistakes completely and openly.
  • Make sure everything you sell is profitable. Make sure your systems can tell you what is most and least profitable. Weed out unprofitable products or services that drag down your margin.
  • Build up business savings, made possible by raising prices, controlling costs and boosting profits.
  • Stay on top of opportunities. Innovate in your products, services, marketing, and operations. Don’t get trapped behind the innovation curve by sticking with lower margin offerings.
  • Seek counter-cyclical business niches. What do you sell that will stay strong through a downturn?
  • Grow into profitable niches, so that you have a stronger basis for profitable operation during a downturn. Don’t be caught trying to sustain an unprofitable operation when a downturn hits.

Surprise!  Your preparation for a down cycle looks very similar to growing during good times.

Want a set of questions to help you discover how to make these things happen in your business? Just ask me and I’ll email it to you.

May 20, 2013

Are You Having Growing Pains?

Filed under: Culture of Growth,Growth Management,Overcome growth barriers,Profit — Tags: , , , , — Mike Van Horn @ 3:53 pm

What’s keeping you from growing your business to the size and profitability you want? Has your growth been slowed by things that keep dogging you? How can you smash through those barriers and move to the next level?

Here’s what I hear all the time from owners:

— You’re a solopreneur, and you want to grow beyond what you can handle by yourself.entrepreneurial vision

— You have a handful of employees, but everybody’s reporting to you, driving you to a frazzle.

— You’ve got managers, but you’re still running day-to-day operations, and you’d love to hand this off to a trusted top manager, to free you up to focus on growth—and a vacation!

If you’re nodding your head yes to any of these, check out our free webinar, Smash Through the Top 10 Barriers to Growth, on June 4.

I’m doing it jointly with two other small business experts: attorney Nancy Lewellen and productivity consultant Rosie Aiello.

Here are the details.On that page, scroll down to see the 10 barriers we will cover.

I will focus on three areas:

1. Management style for growth. Make sure you’re not the bottleneck to your company’s growth.

2. Profitability. See how you stack up against the 12 Principles of Profitability.

3. Marketing & Sales. Make sure your Magic Chain of Marketing has no missing links.

This free webinar will be an exciting tune-up for you, to help you quickly discover ways you can overcome your own growth barriers.

Check it out and sign up now while you’re thinking about it.

Call me at 415-491-1896 if you want to find out if it would be right for you.

August 2, 2010

The 3 Barriers to Small Business Growth

Filed under: Entrepreneurship,Growth Management,Not yet categorized — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Mike Van Horn @ 4:10 pm

Your business is growing and profitable, then BOOM, you hit a speed bump. Or you get stuck in a swamp. What happened? The bigger you grow, the tougher it can be to grow yet larger. I call this the “paradox of small business growth.”

As your company grows, you’re likely to run into three barriers at different stages of growth. Seems to me these are dang near universal!

Barrier #1. You’re a solopreneur, yet you want to grow beyond what you can handle working by yourself. But you get stuck in “the business is moi” trap.

Your growth challenge: Learn how to find good employees, then trust and manage them well.

Barrier #2. It’s you and the crew, but further growth is limited because everybody reports to you, and it’s running you ragged.

Your growth challenge: Learn how to be the CEO and entrust day-to-day operations to your skilled managers.

Barrier #3. You’re a successful, strategic CEO of your growing company, and now it’s time to move on to the next thing—sell, retire, start something else. But you’re so tied to the business, you can’t bear to turn it over to others.

Your growth challenge: Learn to let go.

I’ve been working with owners at all three levels for a lot of years. Here’s what they have in common: They have a management style that has worked very well to get them where they are. But to get to the next level—and they definitely want to get there—they must change what works. “It works, but break it anyway!” And this is very painful.

Many can’t make the leap. They decide to stay the same, and come up with very convincing explanations why further growth is not desirable for them. Alas.

There are straightforward ways to tackle these barriers. Once you see them laid out, you say, “Oh yeah, I could do that. I just need some guidance.”

This fall I’m going to offer a program that addresses each barrier. (You can only be at one barrier at a time.)  I’ll elaborate on each of these barriers in later posts.

In the meantime, I’d love some examples from the Peanut Gallery. If you read one of these and moan, “Ohh, that’s me right there you’re talking about!” let me know your story. Where do you want to go; what’s in your way?

We learn best from each other. You learn to transcend your barriers by seeing how others have done so (or even by watching them be stuck).

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