A Survival Tips and Techniques Blog | UrbanWoodsman.com

A new AP poll shows virtually half of all people recently surveyed are now concerned about losing their job. That’s nearly double since the same survey was done last year. The ailing economy is driving some people well beyond just worrying and into something far more serious – something that’s being identified as recession depression.

A rising number of studies are associating the recession to health problems – in particular anxiety, heart disease and stress. For example, academics at the University of North Texas have found that three to five years after time periods of job loss and financial insecurity, there was a distinguished increase in the number of heart attacks. In the meantime, researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine report that surveys succeeding the collapse of the Soviet Union showed that the regions with the highest rate of job loss also had the highest death rates.

More recently, the Capio Nightingale Hospital, an independent mental health hospital in London, has reported a “dramatic” growth in stress-related cases in 2009. The hospital saw a 20% rise in the number of people looking for advice for stress-related problems in January. And The Priory Group, an independent provider of addiction services, has also reported seeing more patients from the finance sector who are suffering from stress-related illnesses.

National headlines have focused on suicides of top executives such as French businessman Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, 65. He killed himself in his New York City office in December. The Washington Post reported he had lost more than $1.4 billion investing with Bernard Madoff, who has acknowledged losing $50 billion while operating a Ponzi scheme.

Along with plummeting 401Ks and rising unemployment, there is clearly a dangerous emotional price in the compounding economic crisis.

In times of soaring unemployment, suicide rates do go up, according to the American Association of Suicidology. Unemployed people have between two and four times the suicide rate of those employed, according to a report written by Dr. Alan L. Berman, executive director of the American Association of Suicidology.

While Berman emphasized there’s been no statistical correlation between suicide and subsequent U.S. recessions since the Great Depression, there may be grounds to be concerned during this downswing. The quantity of foreclosures, with more than one million people recently losing their homes, is nearly the same quantity that lost homes during the Great Depression, when the population was about half of what it is today, he wrote. And combined with unemployment, “home loss has been found to be one of the most common economic strains associated with suicide,” Berman wrote.

While being mindful of the state of the economy is important, there’s certainly a point where you can be too centered on the recession. If you’ve reached your breaking point, you can try these recession survival tools to break yourself out of the depression:

Turn the television off. The news can be like a train wreck sometimes. You know you aren’t getting anything beneficial out of listening to more bad financial news, but you just can’t look away. If the reports on the TV are starting to get you down, it’s time to just walk away. Read a book, play with the children, or do anything else that gets your mind off of the economy.

Find something positive in your life to value. There’s always something you can be happy about. In this time of climbing unemployment, having a job in itself is positive. If you’re able to make your house payments every month, you have something else to be cheerful about.

Decide not to let fear of the economy make your decisions for you. If you’ve scrimped and saved, for example, for a new oven, you should feel positive about carrying out your purchase. Don’t feel like you’ve got to squirrel away your savings in case the economy doesn’t recover right away. Assess your individual situation to determine what things are appropriate for you and your family.

Focus on what you are able to control. You can’t do a thing about the rising and falling of the securities market. You can, however, control how much you spend or save. Rather than distressing about the things you can’t change, give yourself a feeling of empowerment by taking control of things that are within your command.

Finally, key points for employers include: raising awareness of mental health and stress-related issues in the workplace, recognizing the essential contribution made by stressed or depressed staff, and the fact that these are problems which can affect anyone.

Please feel free to use this article as long as credit is given to the resource box.
© Copyright Arthur Levine, 2008
Words: 471
Keywords: Recession, Survive, Prevent, Debt Control

We can’t prevent a recession from happening, but there are a number of things to do so that we survive it with a minimum of pain.

1. Have the proper attitude – you have to have faith that you can do something positive if you are going to survive the coming recession.
2. Have faith in yourself – you have to believe in your own abilities if you want to be successful at surviving a recession.
3. Don’t panic – this is not the time to start selling the investments in your 401K. We are probably closer to the bottom than the top and you don’t want to create a tax liability for yourself.
4. Think long term – You are probably going to recover most of what you have lost if not all when the recession is over. Historically things get better over time.
5. Reduce Your Expenses – Sit down and make a budget. Try and decide what expenses you can reduce if you lose your job and you need to make limited resources do.
6. Decide what’s Important – Do you know what is really important to you? Is it your home, your car, your medicines, or your life style? Something is going to have to be cut.
7. Alternate Income source – If you want to survive this recession you may need an extra source of income. Examine your talents. What kind of part time work are you good at? A second income is better than none.
8. Marshall your assets – Are you sitting around holding onto antiques or jewelry or other unused assets that you don’t like or need? Sell them and build a nest egg to give you more security in these trying times.
9. Your family – If you are really experiencing trying times it is okay to ask relatives for a loan to help get you through them as long as you intend to pay it back. Worst case you can move in with your relatives or if you are doing okay have them move in with you.
10. Debt Control – Talk to your lenders, your mortgage holders, your credit card company. They can help you spread out or defer your payments so that you both recover from these trying times.

It’s really up to you. You can survive this recession if you believe that you can. This is not the end of the world. It is only a stage in your life that you are going through. So are the rest of us. We all have to learn to cope.

Warren Buffett once observed this about economic downturns: “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” Well, the water’s receding and unless your company is at the absolute top of its industry, you’re probably more than a little worried about your level of “exposure.” Do you have what it takes to survive in these troubled times? It’s a scary question. But you can’t afford to spend too much time wallowing in anxiety and (to torture an analogy) scanning the shore for the nearest towel to cover your inadequacies.

If you play your cards right, you can reduce your pain during this downturn and come out stronger. People still need products—not just any products but the right products—and someone needs to provide them. No reason it can’t be you. But you need to get started making changes right away.

There are three steps you can take that will dramatically increase your chances of surviving—and even thriving—in our dismal economy:

Survival Strategy #1: Cut the waste. (And we’re not talking about reusing paper clips!) It’s time to reinvent the one function in your company that is more wasteful than any other. It’s your new product development, where the average company squanders over half its R&D resources on new product belly-flops. Can you think of any other function—production, accounting, HR—where this level of waste is tolerated?

Most companies don’t have enough R&D people to drive existing projects at a rapid pace. How would you like to “hire” dozens or hundreds more people who already know your company’s culture, customers, and technology… and can start work tomorrow? Don’t you think that would save your company? Well, you can do that: Just kill the dumb projects that are destined to be duds—really kill them, don’t just wound them—and set these people free to actually do some good for your company.

That sounds great, you may be thinking, but I don’t know which projects will be duds. Precisely! You don’t know. But your customers do! Instead of huddling with your colleagues around a conference room table to decide what your project portfolio should look like, let’s get a little crazy. Let’s ask customers what they want you to work on.

First ask customers what outcomes they want (which is much different from showing them your potential solutions). Then have them rate the importance and current satisfaction levels for each outcome. Do this with several customers in a market and you get the Market Satisfaction Gap for each outcome. A high Gap means customers are dissatisfied with an important outcome… and are eager for you to fix this.

Our clients have created Market Satisfaction Gaps in hundreds of markets, and they are usually surprised to learn what customers really want. But better to be surprised before development work begins than after the product is launched.

Survival Strategy #2: Harvest the “best practices” of other companies. It’s easier than you think. Simply by learning what works for other organizations, you can immediately increase your effectiveness in key customer-facing activities, such as pricing, sales management, and marketing communications. Have you ever left a company to work for another and discovered the new outfit had some pockets of mediocrity? Your new hires may be having the same experience. Instead of waiting for new employees to randomly cross-pollinate your organization with improved practices, you need to be much more proactive. You need to find, adapt, and drive these best practices into your business fast.

If that sounds overwhelming, I have two acronyms for you: APQC and ISBM. The American Productivity and Quality Center is one of the world’s leading benchmarking firms. Based in Houston, Texas, APQC has probably already benchmarked any area you can think of. Instead of forming a company benchmark team that will take three months just to frame their work, check them out at www.apqc.org.

But if—like most people—you tend to learn more from people than reports, find an organization to tap into. If you are a B2B provider (not consumer goods), you can’t do better than the Institute for the Study of Business Markets. Based at Penn State, the ISBM counts as its members over 100 leading researchers and 70 of the most advanced B2B firms. To check out a wealth of reports, consortia, workshops, and other learning opportunities, visit www.isbm.org. You might be surprised by how much “inside information” these thought leaders are willing to share.

These firms know that companies that simply “hoard their secrets” fall behind those that continually share and adapt. As Ralph Oliva, Executive Director of ISBM, puts it, “It’s really about how you implement new tools. Tiger Woods wouldn’t be worried if I used the same golf clubs as he did.”

Survival Strategy #3: Ask customers what they want. (Novel concept, huh?) The third and final tip can be practiced only by companies that provide products and services to other companies (not consumers, in other words). Solid research done by Huthwaite International indicates that the best way to sell a product is to ask customers what they want. In designing my new-to-the-world New Product Blueprinting process, I asked: If that’s true, why wait until the product is already developed? Let’s ask customers before it’s developed so we can a) develop a better product and b) engage them so they’ll be primed to buy.

This isn’t practical if you sell toothpaste to millions of people, but it works quite well if you’re a B2B provider and would like to influence your ten largest customers. I have developed a host of tools used to interview B2B customers in a very respectful, peer-to-peer fashion that leaves customers very engaged in your new product development. Of course, new products can take more than a year to develop… so how is this going to help you now… in the middle of an economic downturn? That’s the fun part—and one of the unforeseen, unintended consequences of his brand of B2B product development.

We were focused on long-term product development, but our clients began telling us that their newly learned interview techniques so impressed prospective customers, that it cast them in a new light. Imagine you are the customer: The last ten suppliers have tried to sell you something they already have, and here comes a supplier that listens to you to understand your needs. Who would you want to work with?

A marketing manager in Europe had been trying to start one new product project with a customer in the United Kingdom for years. At the end of his first New Product Blueprinting interview, he left the customer with six projects in hand. Customers are simply looking for suppliers who are competent and care… about them.

The bottom line? It’s time to put these three tips into practice and keep a cool head about you. Human nature being what it is, chances are good your less astute (and more fear-driven) competitors won’t.

When the tide goes out and the economy turns down, your competitors will be tempted to forego their long-term prospects in favor of short-term survival. You should hope nobody dissuades them. As Napoleon said, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

And here’s the best news of all. Have you noticed that none of these three tips asks for near-term/long-term trade-off? In every case—reducing R&D waste, adapting new best practices, and engaging customers—you will reduce your short-term pain during the downturn and increase your long-term gain afterwards. So regardless of the tide, keep your swimsuit on and enjoy your swim.

# # #

About the Book:

New Product Blueprinting: The Handbook for B2B Organic Growth (AIM Press, 2008, ISBN: 978-0-9801123-4-4, $35.00) is available at bookstores nationwide and from major online booksellers.

For more information, visit www.newproductblueprinting.com.

During good times in ancient China, surplus food and wealth was stored in great strong houses to provide succour for future famines and droughts. Are you one of many business people left wondering what will happen next, now that the Celtic Tiger has passed on and the winter of recession and customers with tight wallets is upon us?

If you want to know 7 key business survival techniques, which should be applied to any business who wants to be around next year, then read the rest of this article now.

Read 7 Golden Rules for Recession Survival here.

Many business owners are now painfully aware that getting new clients and selling more to existing clients is far more challenging in today’s environment. Unfortunately anyone who tells you that they have a quick fix for your marketing worries is either a magician or a con-man!

Just because we have been working with businesses for years now, doesn’t mean that what always worked will work today. We have had to radically adapt the strategies that our best customers use, so that they can continue to get resounding, measurable results using field tested strategies and marketing plans.

So here are 7 Golden Rules, that if you start to apply now, could not only ensure your survival, they could actually signal some serious growth.

1. Assess Your Sales: If you have one or more sales people it makes sense to know what they are doing well, so that you can create repeatable success. Now is not the time to waste valuable sales time on things that are wasteful and don’t work. Take stock today, and either assess your sales department and processes or ask a trusted advisor like 3R to do it for you.

2. Assess Your Margins: Everyone should know their most profitable lines. But do you know which products consistently sell well, with great margins and to which type of customer they sell to? After Cash, Profit should drive your business forward. Remember it also drives your clients as well!

3. Assess Your Marketing: So where have you spent your marketing budget over the last 12-24 months? Do you know precisely what worked, and what return you got for every Euro spent by campaign? Now that times are tougher, rather than cutting out marketing, trim the fat from the marketing that doesn’t work and focus on what does. You first must take stock of where you are.

4. Monitor Your Cash-Flow: Most companies in today’s climate will leave their bills till the very last minute before paying them, if at all! So what policies do you have in place to ensure you have enough working capital? Today is the best time to take a long hard look at your cash position and forecast, because without adequate liquidity, you may fail to be around to take advantage of the huge opportunities that recessions offer to the well prepared.

5. Create a Strategic Plan: The rules of the game have changed, so have you prepared for how you will play the new game? The old saying “failing to plan is planning to fail” holds truer than ever in today’s turbulent economy. Once you have taken stock, through honest, and possibly external professional assistance, you need to craft a plan to steer you though the current storm.

6. Survey Your Clients: OK, so you have taken stock and assessed what you feel you need to do – now go check it out in the marketplace, with people who have trusted you in the past: your customers. As well as double checking you plan, if done the correct way, you will uncover cross-sell opportunities as well as obtaining testimonials and referrals.

7. Execute and Monitor your Plan: A vision, without corresponding action is a mirage! Now take action and measure everything you do, as you will make mistakes. These mistakes only become failures, however, if you fail to learn from them!

What we have touched upon here are some vital ingredients for continued survival. Each company is unique, as are your customers, and how you apply these, with or without professional help, will vary depending on your circumstances.

Banks will not tolerate late payments or missed repayments of loans and for companies that find themselves in cash-flow difficulty, the only solution, other than going under is to seek professional help that the bank will approve of.

If you are interested in how 3R can help you with your banks, and you feel that our proven track record of success with our clients will also serve you well, just fill out our Business Health Check form. A 30 minute call, will signal if we think we can help you not just survive, but perhaps grow as well.

This article was written by Peter Lawless of 3R sales and Marketing. The 7 Golden Rules are steps taken from the 3R? Success Framework, which have been used successfully with small and medium sized businesses for years, helping them survive and grow.