In a recession the small business needs to reassess what the customer wants.

     In the good old days when jobs were plentiful and budget always grew every small business would know what the customer wanted, that is why the business was growing nicely year on year. The way to grow was to find more customers for your service or product. But what happens in a recession?
 
     Customers cut back their needs, and the competition starts to offer deals that can hurt your business. You can fight back, you will fight back. Life is tough but you will persevere. You will do this but there are other ways of winning new business. Consider another way.
 
     Break down your business into its parts, then try and see all the alternatives for reconstruction. This is an exercise best done on paper with a colleague or two. List all the attributes of the business and the staff on the left hand-side, then try and see what happens if you try and rebuild the business from the skills base upwards. Will you still be the same business or are there other opportunities that thus far you have never seriously considered? Let me give you a simple example.
 
     My window cleaner has a van with its own water container built in. He has ladders, and he is a general handyman at home. So if we forget he is a window cleaner he could be someone who mends roofs and windows. He is mobile and has a supply of water that could clean my car or clean my soffits (for which a ladder could be very useful). He also has the added advantage that he already has lots of trusted customers so when he sees an opportunity while cleaning windows he is first in line to put the roof tile back in place or clean the algae off my patio.
 
     I had not consider having the algae cleaned off my patio, but now I look at it and think how bad it looks I ask how much, consider if I could do it myself, think not because I do not possess a high pressure sprayer like him and the next thing I know I have a spotless patio awaiting the first day of summer and firing up the barbeque.
 
     A lot of small businesses have skills and expertise that are not utilised 100% of the time. By setting time aside for a reconstruction exercise the small business manager gets to see all the potential in front of them on paper. From this you can develop a plan of attack. No longer are you fighting the competitors toe to toe, you are fighting with an advantage that secures your customers and wins over new ones.
 
     This technique is very effective with small businesses. The speed at which new services or products can be brought to market by smaller enterprises means that by the time the competitors have twigged that you have got ahead it will be too late for them to stop you. Another point to note is that the number of ideas generated normally far outweighs the ones that get used. The remainder can be parked and reviewed when time allows.
 
     This reconstruction exercise always seems to throw out at least one really wacky idea that is so different that it deserved to be revisited with a view of taking the business in a completely new direction. Two hours, a pen and a sheet of paper is all you need to start.