This is great stuff PS. I’ll get that book this weekend. Also, this is just a quick post because I’m literally optimizing our website right now so we can get as many calls as possible in the coming months. (Based on the info I’ve gleaned on this forum, I decided to do a web overhaul last fall, and the site was just completed recently.) Since 90% of my new business comes from the web, it’s imperative we maintain a very strong presence.
I’m convinced some of my competitors will go out of business in the coming months, and so I’ll pick up their business. This has already been happening over the last 3 years (if not longer,) but I only began keeping tabs on them about 3 years ago.
To answer some specific questions – yes, I can sell my evergreen items consistently through a recession, although I’ll sell less of them, so the key is to make sure my phone keeps ringing. On more custom items, it’s actually the same; keep the phone ringing because only a certain % of the calls will turn into business, and in a recession there will simply be less calls and less business.
I just need to make sure my website is always coming up first in search results for the products I sell so I can at least get the calls.
My first job out of college was selling yellow page ad space to small and medium-sized businesses. It was during the recession of the early 90s. The businesses that stayed in business were the ones that ‘ignored’ the recession and kept up with aggressive marketing. (Most businesses are tempted to cut back on marketing to save money, but I saw first hand how that thinking really hurt them in the long run.)
As for my offshore production in China – I suspect the pricing there will get a little more aggressive, because they’ll be scrambling for work too.
The last thing I want to touch on, is most of my labor is Hispanic. Most likely I’ll have lay-offs, causing some of them to return to their families in Mexico. (Yes, they all have green cards, and yes we check their ss #s. If we didn’t our turn-over would be too high.) Yes, even though they are legal, they will leave the US.