There is some misunderstanding of this concept. Recently I have heard two people condemn the phrase, one calling it “silly”, another calling it “dangerous”. These people will never be innovators or true entrepreneurs, because they have completely missed the point, and changed the meaning from what it really is.

When you think outside the box, it does not mean you do not apply common sense, or that you do not abide by necessary limitations that affect safety or legality.

It simply means that you do not let preconceived ideas, or the “rules” imposed by other people, which do NOT apply, constrain you from thinking creatively.

We do that… We assume that because 90% of people in the US send their kids to public school, and because we have done it that way for generations, that somehow it must be better. We assume that if the SBA teaches people to start a business and tells them that they have to have heaps of money to do it, and that they must have a business plan that conforms to bank requirements in order to get that funding, that this is how it must be done. We think that if we have been taught to do things a certain way, that we must do it that way, even when that way may not make sense for our particular situation.

Innovators and true entrepreneurs are not held back by limitations that do NOT affect safety or legality. They are able to see beyond the preconceived ideas and methods that others are constrained by.

In the web world, things are done on an enterprise scale, and taught for that scale, and nobody ever really stops to think that they simply do not scale well for small business, or how different the needs might be. They assume that you must do this, you must do that, and if you do not, that your website won’t perform. They do not stop to think that on a micro-scale, the things they require won’t make ANY difference at all, but will increase costs, and that perhaps they should be done at a later time when it WILL matter. Our “out of the box” thinking was to simply analyze those factors, and make decisions based on reality instead of assumption or dogma.

That is all it means to Think Outside the Box. To approach things from a new direction, and to consider new ideas in a productive way.

If you intend to go somewhere new, you can’t do it by following other people. You take the wisdom of others and learn from it, then you formulate a new plan that still fits the wisdom, but which does not incorporate the ideas that do not apply just because everyone else does it that way. If you want to LEAD, you have to get out ahead and try something nobody else is doing. If you want to succeed at it, you cannot compromise known safety or legality factors, the things you risk are just yourself.

It isn’t silly, and it isn’t dangerous. It is bold, and the path to true success.

It didn’t seem like that big of a choice at the time. I mean, it was sort of a scary choice to make, and I knew that it was one of those “letting go of the security blanket” type choices. I thought I knew what it meant at the time. I didn’t. And when I realized what the choice ACTUALLY meant, I was astonished at how it contributed to the defining aspects of our business, and even our identity as business owners and service providers.

This has happened to me over and over. It hasn’t been a single choice, but many, which have shown this pattern. A small choice, which seemed a little against logic, but which we made because in spite of the fear attached, it felt right. And then the impact unfolding into an eye opening concept. I’ll tell about three of those choices:

1. Years ago. I chose to do flat rate pricing instead of hourly rates. Scary… what if I underestimated? But I did it because it felt right. It has been more than a defining aspect of our business. It has been totally empowering. I didn’t have to track hours while balancing children and business. I saved that time I’d have put into tracking hours. I no longer had an earning ceiling. The faster I worked, the more I made. WOW! That has been huge also.

2. Making the choice to train my own competition, without holding back any trade secrets or empowering information. Scary at first. But the impact on our business even in the last two months since making that choice, has been huge. It is like a whole new world of potentials and possibilities have opened, and the things that are coming back to us are just incredible. I never could have predicted how good this one choice would be.

3. Making the choice to drop HTML sites and focus on dynamic sites. Since that choice was made, new opportunities have opened up. Not only that, but we feel more capable of pursuing certain things that we felt inadequate to do before. Our focus on making our dynamic site services better, has sharpened. Our vision of what we need to do next, has become more clear.

Each of those decisions seemed at the time like a small one, even though the philosophy we had to overcome was a major limiting one. How easy it would have been to say, “Nope, I’ll just do it the way everyone else does.”, and dismiss the idea to change. How easy it would have been to be caught in the rut that would have limited our potentials.

Those decisions that we make, which go against conventional wisdom, and which our mind tries to minimize into insignificance when we fear taking the leap, are often the most important ones. The ones that define us as unique, and which give exponential power to our growth potentials.

Where we are today, compared to where we were even two months ago, is astronomically different! Better, bigger, more exciting! And I can see, that if I had failed to make the choice for flat rate pricing 10 years ago, and then reaffirm it each time we grew or offered a new service, we would not have grown this much, and we would not have as much potential to grow further. I can see that the choice to train my competition is a fundamental aspect of where we are going now. I can see that the choice to abandon HTML websites and focus on dynamic sites is opening doors and potentials that I was little aware of at the time.

Fear will stop us. Dismissing choices and making them insignificant can in fact make US insignificant. Considering those possibilities, and being willing to take the risk, face the fears and go forward in new directions, can explode our potentials and make us a force to be reckoned with!

Which would you rather be?

Yesterday, I enjoyed a nice chicken salad on crackers, made especially tasty by stirring in a healthy amount of green tomato relish. The day before, I savored nachos, topped with zingy green tomato salsa. Tonight, I’ll slice and fry the last green tomato to serve beside dinner.

Sometime about the end of August, our abundant tomato crop was hit with the first freeze. We weren’t sure then whether we’d get any mature tomatoes or not. In the best Frugal Yankee tradition, I began looking for recipes for green tomatoes.

Relish, Salsa, Fried Green Tomatoes, Pickles, Casseroles, etc. Who knew there were so many uses for unripe garden fruits?

Every single one required two things from me:

1. Additional ingredients. Sometimes they were things I did not have on hand – I had to get them specifically if I wanted to utillize the abundant crop of green tomatoes.

2. Effort and specific types of work. What I did with them made all the difference.

You can see where I’m going with this…

We didn’t plant the garden and say, “Oh! I hope we get a LOT of green tomatoes, I’m just so looking forward to having to make-do!” We had big dreams when we planted 40 tomato plants. We wanted sauced, diced, and ketchuped tomatoes!

That first freeze didn’t kill our hopes. In fact, after that first freeze, which only killed the tops of the tomatoes, we gathered a small amount of red tomatoes – enough to make a weeny batch of ketchup. A few more tomatoes ripened indoors after a hard killing frost in September.

But we had more greens than reds, and we had to do something with them. In order to use them, we had to add the right ingredients, and if we didn’t have them, we had to go buy them. One or two were things I’d not need for anything else – I had to get them specifically to make use of those green tomatoes. And I had to do the right things with them, to make them into something good, otherwise they’d just be yucky green tomatoes.

Life, family, and business all do that to us. We plan our plans, and start to carry them out, and along comes a disaster that blights our hopes and kills the plans. What do we do then?

Do we cry that we didn’t get our juicy red tomatoes? Do we look at the distruction of our plants and at all those sad green tomatoes and see nothing but disaster? Or do we go seek out recipes for green tomatoes, and then add the necessary additional elements to turn them into something unexpected, but every bit as tasty and useful as what we had originally planned?

Sure, I still wish I had been able to harvest a bounty of red, ripe tomatoes. But since life handed me green tomatoes, I’m just thankful that there was something good I could do with them to turn it into a blessing of a different kind.

Part 6 of a 6 Part Series on Recession Survival

Outsourcing has a couple of applications within recession survival. It can help to manage growth more fluidly if you manage to continue to grow, or it can help you in downsizing if that is what you need to do.

Now, first, I have to make one thing clear. You hear all the time that it makes more sense to hire someone to do something if they can do it faster and more efficiently. The example is given that if you bill at $45 per hour, then you can save if you pay an outsourced subcontractor $25 per hour to do the job instead.

That ONLY works IF you have MORE profitable things to do in the same time! If you do not have enough work, outsourcing only saves money if it saves you from costly errors, or helps you make a leap forward in your business that you could not make without the service or which simply yield a higher result when done professionally (marketing, website services, printing services, etc). Otherwise, you really have no choice but to do it yourself, even if it does take you more time.

Outsourcing can help you find automation solutions (you can hire a professional to help you devise them, or to create or install them for you), it can help you create templates that you may not know how to create yourself, and it can help you handle work overflow (so you do not lose clients), without having to hire an employee.

If your business is scaling back, you can either offer a work at home option to your employee, and keep them on part time, or you can move to outsourcing to at least keep the services and preserve as much of the business as possible.

When you have a chance at something that you cannot otherwise handle yourself, or which you lack the expertise to do completely, you can find skilled subcontractors to help you with parts of the job.

If your services need to change in ways that offer different combinations of tasks than you previously offered, and you are not skilled in all of them, you can collaborate with other professionals to be able to offer something more. It is better to get $400 from a $500 contract than it is to not be able to GET the contract. In this way, outsourcing can help you be more flexible, to meet a wider variety of needs in changing circumstances.

Usually, outsourcing is built on a backbone of networking relationships. When you work with subcontractors, you develop a mutually beneficial business relationship. It often ends up being one where you refer other work to them, and they refer work back to you. It helps you build a network of people who know you, who know your work standards, and who are happy to refer others to you. Since they know you, they can speak with conviction when giving the referral, and that goes further than referrals from people who have not actually worked with you.

It won’t be a solution for everyone, but it can be a valuable tool in managing work loads, and in being able to supplement your skills with other specialized skills when needed.

Part 5 of a 6 Part Series on Recession Survival

One key to saving money, and giving your customers higher value in a recession, is to systemize and automate where possible.There is NO BUSINESS which cannot benefit at some point from systemization or automation.

It may be as simple as creating a routine to do repetitive tasks faster. It may involve creating a template to start with each time you write a contract or proposal, or for producing products, documents, or other items. If you do something once a week, or more, you can usually find a way to make it faster.

Automation is something that can be implemented in a website, or through online services, or through use of the right tools in the office. It is one of the keys to breaking through to new levels of profit and getting past some of your time barriers, but it can also be a key to retaining high value while containing costs for your customers or clients.

For small businesses though, it is important that you automate the right things, and in the right way. There are three basic keys to good automation:

1. It should save you more time than it costs you. Done at the wrong time (too soon), or with the wrong tools, you’ll spend more time setting up and maintaining the automation than you’ll save. So think about the long term tasks involved before you jump in, or you’ll just bury yourself.

2. It should NEVER negatively affect your unique selling proposition, and it should not harm your customer relations. Good automation preserves what is unique about your business. It allows you to automate the IMPERSONAL parts of the business, while retaining the essential elements of personal contact or custom service that may define your business. This is especially critical for small businesses, because this is often what allows you to compete with larger companies that are fully automated.

3. It should save you time, while simultaneously enhancing your ability to deliver consistent and high quality service or products to your customers. The point here is that it should make business better for THEM, too. Done right, it makes your business better, and is not something that lessens quality or availability.

Some of this can be done through a website, and often it can save you money over other options.
Some can be done with free software – either on your desktop, or installed into your hosting space.
Some can be done through purchase of hardware or equipment in your office.
Some can be done with templates or other tools that you make, which eliminate the repetitive steps in a process.

Time can be saved simply by devising routines, or systems, for getting tasks done, that shave off time. Not “automation” per-se, but more of an assembly line procedure where you work from templates, start with the same base each time, or work out the fastest way to do something, then do it that way every time. Often, this lays the groundwork for automation, because it helps us spot the repetitive tasks that CAN be automated without harming quality.

Automation and systemization are one of the things that help you achieve extraordinary results, either in growth, uniqueness in your business, or in offering higher value for less money. In a recession, all of these aspects can be part of defining the success potentials and making you an exception in the sea of losses.

Part 4 of a 6 Part Recession Survival Series

I live in a double wide mobile home. I do not plan to move any time soon. Why? Because in 9 months, it will be paid for. The house payment even now is low. The house meets our needs, houses our business, and does not interfere with our ability to succeed. Since our business is conducted on the phone, by email, or in person in other locations, it does not harm our business success. It allows us to reduce our operating expenses considerably.

When looking at where to economize, you want to make sure that the economies do not harm your ability to effectively conduct business. If we held appointments in our home, we’d have to have a better house. The point being, use what works for your business.

Here are some ideas, in no particular order:

1. Refill ink cartridges. This works great for color ink, for some printers. It does NOT work well for black ink, the refill ink tends to bleed and feather.
2. Buy in bulk where you can. Share purchases with another business owner if you need to.
3. Recycle shipping boxes and materials. Make it a badge of honor by creating a 3X4 label that says, “This box proudly recycled by (company name.”
4. Use flat rate long distance. Try Qwest for Small Business. Only use internet phone service if it is good quality with your connection.
5. Make sure your website is functioning in all the ways it can to save you money.
6. Review all of your utilities and see if there are ways to cut them. A little caulk or weatherstripping can save on energy bills.
7. Consolidate business travel. Keep trips to a minimum. Tell clients that you are combining appointments to conserve energy. They’ll get it.
8. Stock up on closeouts and sales of items you regularly need.
9. Look for alternatives for your most expensive supplies.
10. Buy more RAM for a slow computer, instead of getting a new computer. Get a pro to help you clean up the hard drive, trim down unneeded programs, or scan for malware.
11. Postpone haircuts for 1-2 weeks longer. Wear just a little less makeup. Use a dollop less shampoo. Wear pants an extra day before washing. All of these things reflect on business, even though they aren’t precisely business expenses, but they can often be nudged a bit without causing negative effects.
12. Go paperless as often as possible. You’ll save on paper and ink.
13. Look for Free and Open Source software first – There is a ton of really good free stuff out there, for basic business purposes, and specialized purposes. Try Open Office, NotesBrowser, Serif PagePlus, The GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, Audacity, CamStudio, and much more.
14. Look for bootstrap options instead of debt. Debt places a burden on you each month, bootstrapping gets you profiting faster, by work and workarounds. As business grows, you can move from bootstrapping to a healthier cash flow based on revenues instead of debt.
15. Invest in things with reasonable assurances of returns. Don’t gamble, and throw away money in the hopes that it will yield a high return. This goes for marketing, buying more computer or web services than you need, and other business purchases.
16. Set up a support forum – you can reduce support costs this way, because even though you have to answer a lot of questions there, the answers benefit more than one person. Other users will come in and help you also.
17. Review your internet connection. Too slow a connection can cost some businesses more than the price of an upgrade. Faster speed for others mean only minimal compromises that do not harm productivity. Analyze your needs, and adjust your plan accordingly.
18. Save money in your home. If you can live on less, you can survive tough times better in your business. Our best advice for saving on groceries? Use your crock pot. Soups, casseroles, and roasted meals are easy to prepare, just a few minutes tossing ingredients in the pot, and you’ll have dinner 8 hours later. Combined with a bread machine, a crock pot can be a means of avoiding fast food and quick fix purchases. Since dinner can cook while you work, you save time, and avoid impulse purchases.

Look at your business with new eyes. Where can you find alternatives, cut waste, save pennies, and compromise without killing the essence?

Keep what truly matters. Take the cuts where they are less important.

Part 3 of a 6 Part Recession Survival Series

Sometimes you are going to have to change more than marketing messages to survive great changes in the attitudes and priorities of your target market. Sometimes you have to change your very product and service line.

At its simplest, it means offering lower cost options. That is sometimes possible by offering less. But sometimes “less” guts it of value. So to offer a lower price, you have to find a way to do it that is new – that preserves the value while lowering the price.

And sometimes you have to completely abandon a product line, and move to something else. Some product lines just won’t survive. If there is a high chance that your target market is going to dry up, don’t delay! Explore alternatives NOW, and get them lined up, ready to roll. Start selling them alongside, and have your fallback product or service line working as soon as possible.

When looking for ways to offer more, for less, start with office economies first. We’ll have an entire article on that, but basically, look for ways to save first.

Then look for ways to produce faster. This may mean starting with templates, creating package deals instead of custom deals, investing in intelligent automation for selective areas, or developing systems for speeding up your work.

If you can’t do that without removing some value, then look over your product or service carefully – what is the MOST ESSENTIAL value point? What are the least essential value points? Can you drop a few of the less essential ones, while keeping the most essential, and lower the price that way?

When you are looking at new product lines, consider things related to what you already offer if at all practical. Then you don’t have to completely change your business. The key is though, that you want to either pick up your existing target market as they drift, or you want to pick a newly emerging target market early on. Look at where your customers are going when they leave you, or look at what they are retaining while they let go of your product or service. Go into that, because it is more likely to last through the crunch.

For 90% of the businesses out there, change will be required. And some of it will be dramatic, painful change. But without it, you sink. With it, you grow in new ways, and become a better business person.

Part 2 of a 6 Part Recession Survival Series

So things are changing. That means you have to change. Only a very fortunate few are going to survive it without changing, and then only if their business is already providing rock bottom value. Everything else is going to require change on the part of business owners to be able to keep business coming in.

There are several facets to this, which we’ll cover in separate articles.

The principal thing that happens in a recession, is that people reprioritize. If you were on their list of affordable choices yesterday, you may be struck from it today – or they may decide that they can only justify half the expense that they could justify the day before. And it literally happens that fast. It doesn’t stop there either, because one day they’ll decide on half. The next day their hours at work may be cut, and you may be stricken entirely.

How are you going to keep people coming to you as a viable option? Maybe your marketing message has always emphasized quality, indulgence, service, the extras. People still want that, but when money is tight, they see dollar signs in front of those words! So somehow, you have to get words in there that emphasize value, affordability, low cost, better results for the expense, etc. Concepts that now take precedence.

People will be concerned primarily with two concepts:

1. How to save money on essentials or reduce the cost of their favorite indulgences to the point that they can still justify them.
2. How to make money, in a lower risk environment.

If you can demonstrate an ability to help them with either of those goals, in a way that helps them feel that you have sympathy for their situation, you have a good chance of keeping business. Maybe you can do that just by pointing out things you didn’t emphasize as much before. Maybe you’ll have to completely revisit your target market – will you shift from a mainstream item to a luxury item, or will you rescale to adapt with your existing target market as they change?

Find out what your customers most want and need. Then find ways of communicating the ways that your product or services supply those needs and wants.

Be willing to change your slogan. Be willing to change your primary marketing messages, and indeed, the very identity of your business if necessary. We are heading into something that will affect our nation strongly for a decade or more. You won’t be wasting your time on a temporary change. This kind of action is necessary, or you’ll be too late.

Part 1 of a 6 Part Recession Survival Series

As belts tighten and budgets squeak, people are drawing new lines to define what they think of as essential, and what they classify as a luxury. They’ll hang onto essentials, they’ll either let the luxuries go, or they’ll find lower cost alternatives to them.

Right now, that line is being redrawn almost constantly. As people realize that it isn’t just a blip. That it isn’t going to go away, that it is going to be long, ugly, and bad. This means their idea of what you are, is going to be in a state of almost constant flex. It means you have to think ahead, not just about what they think today or tomorrow, but how they will think if worst comes to worst, and life gets very hard.

So who decides whether you are essential, or a luxury?

You do. But you can’t just TELL your customers or clients that you are essential and BE essential.

You have to listen. You have to HEAR what they think essential is. Then you have to BECOME what they define as essential.

It means being creative. Maybe soap is essential. But maybe the good soap becomes a luxury because now they can only afford $1 per bar for soap instead of $5 per bar. How will you become essential again when they decide like that? Can you?

If you insist that the $5 bar is better for their skin and preserves their health, reducing the cost of lotion, or allows them to wear less expensive fabrics and be comfortable, or that since they use less of the expensive stuff to get clean that it is actually a better deal that it appears, then maybe you can be moved into the essential classification again.

Half of this is going to be marketing. How you describe the benefits. What was a benefit yesterday may not rate as an important benefit today. “Indulge yourself” as a slogan may become completely irrelevant. Cease to exist as an effective message. “Affordable Indulgence” may be a message that was scorned yesterday, but embraced today. People may want you to tell them what a good deal it is today, when yesterday they were only concerned with how good it was. Mincsets and thought processes, priorities, and values, are GOING to change.

The other half is the actual product or service. Can you change it, make the effort to contain costs, through creative strategies, while still keeping the price the same (while your expenses rise), or even drop the price, offer a lower cost option, etc? I’ll address specific ideas in a later article, but this question is the one that defines the successes in a tough economy. If you can do this, you can survive. If you cannot, you probably won’t.

So go look at your business – examine your products and services with a critical eye. Look at your marketing messages and figure out whether they are going to meet the changing needs. Be creative, and come up with a way to change what you do, so you can be essential. Because if you are a luxury, you are going under.

A ship in the harbor is safe. Most of the time. During a storm though, the ship is safer at sea. In the harbor, the confines that make it safe at other times, becomes a trap, and the ship is in greater danger. Out at sea, navigation away from the worst of the storm is still possible, and fewer obstacles are present to dash the ship to pieces.

Our economy is heading into a storm. It is likely to be a bad one. How can you get your business out of the trap of a harbor, and out to sea away from the fury of the storm? How can you find calm seas, or at least, less turbulent waves and winds?

In a volatile economy, sitting where you are, hoping that things won’t change, may kill your business. Smart sailors watch the weather signs, listen to the reports, and steer clear of the troubled seas. If they cannot avoid them, they batten down the hatches and try to ride it out. But they try to avoid it first, and only settle to ride it out if there is no other option. And even then, their choice is backed up by changes in their actions, to give their choice the best possible chance of a favorable outcome.

It isn’t time to pull back into the false security of a harbor. It is time to move out, and take smart actions to preserve your business. To adjust for the winds and waves so they don’t swamp you.

• Assess your current business health, and make smart corrections for current problems or deficiencies.
• Develop a contingency plan, based on what your customers are most likely to do as things get hard.
• Watch your stats, and be ready to act if you see declines of more than 1-2 months.
• Implement your contingency plan, and be ready to move into different ways of doing business if necessary.

We’ve seen a lot of businesses go under recently. Big ones. It didn’t happen suddenly. The signs of an impending storm were there for a long time before the company declared bankruptcy, or sold out, or laid off workers. They either failed to adjust out of ignorance, or decided that they’d try to ride it out in the hopes that it would not get too bad (in spite of clear signs to the contrary), or in hopes that something would rescue them if they just waited. Don’t wait when you should be taking actions to adjust your business! Failure never happens suddenly, it always happens slowly, and there is plenty of time to react if you just do it in a timely manner.

Smart sailors know when to act. And they know to watch the signs. Don’t let the rut of familiarity trap you when wise action can keep your business going strong in spite of what happens around you.