Last week my BUSINESS BULLET was about using any extra time you may have as a result of the economic slow down to invest in yourself, to take some time out, to get a life, to just stop and take a breath. I am a firm believer in the need for business owners to have their attitude and energy right as the real key to small business success. But it goes a bit deeper than that as well.
If you are finding that things have got slower in your business and perhaps you have more time on your hands or some of your staff have more time, don’t let people stand around doing nothing. It can be very hard to go from being flat out (often for years) to running at half speed. It can lead to a form of “BUSINESS DEPRESSION” where the business and everyone involved in it struggles with motivation and energy. In some ways the business can flat line and it is a real trap to be aware of because the longer it goes on for the harder it is to pull everyone out of the hole.
My advice simple. If your business is starting to feel like it is in a rut, or sliding into BUSINESS DEPRESSION, we need to give everyone a purpose. Develop an internal campaign and get the whole team focused. I found my business suffered BUSINESS DEPRESSION several years back when a large client got into financial trouble and we went from going a thousand miles an hour to a virtual stop, literally overnight. We were all shocked and dazed and certainly fell into a rut. I knew I had to do something to snap us out of it, so I declared an internal campain for our business – “BACK TO BASICS”.
This campaign meant that as a team we made a list of all the things in the business that we needed to improve. We added projects that we had been too busy to do for months (or years) and anything else that we could think of to give the business a boost. Tasks were divided, some we worked on individually, some as small groups and others as whole. We had all of our tasks and projects on a whiteboard and we set to it.
Interestingly it pulled us all out of our slump. We all had a purpose and we all had a reason to get come to work in the morning. Before long we were all fired up, feeling great about getting our list of projects done and the business was sharper, leaner and much stronger.
If you think your business may be sliding into depression, you need to do something as quickly as you can. People need a purpose and they need direction. Doing what I did in my business achieved both and positioned the business perfectly as it got busier.
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