Page 34 - Flathead Beacon // 12.24.14

34 | DECEMBER 24, 2014
BUSINESS FLATHEADBEACON.COM BUSINESS IS PERSONAL Mark Riffey
Defending Your Business
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BUSINESS IS NOT EASY AND WE (business owners) make it harder by making what will later seem like silly mistakes. Hopefully, we learn lessons from those mistakes, much less a bit more often.
That isn’t necessarily the hard part.
Sometimes, business gets tougher because we get the wrong kind of help. The kind of help I’m speaking of includes things that your clientele and staff might do or say, things that get published in the news, or even changes to regulations that don’t affect your business directly, but affect how your clients run theirs.
One of your jobs as owner is to antici- pate and build defenses against situa- tions that could threaten or even destroy your business. You should anticipate these things, defuse them, prepare for them, and work around them.
Anticipating these situations is what allows you the time to defuse, prepare for and work around them – that’s re- ally what defending your business is all about. Most of these situations will present themselves whether you like it or not. The secret is being prepared for them in advance.
CLIENTS AND PROSPECTS
Most client and prospect-related sit- uations can be avoided with proper sales and service training. A number of these will come to you in the form of sales ob- jections, misinformation, price shop- ping and other things that your market- ing is designed to deal with.
Reacting to these situations in the moment will often produce a solution that hasn’t been well thought out – and usually hits profit first, while setting precedent you don’t want to set. Antici- pating and training for these things will prevent the need to react rashly in most cases.
MEDIA, INDUSTRY AND GURUS
It’s easy to place the blame on the me- dia – particularly today when some news outlets act more like news creators and take part in less than authentic clickbait campaigns to get your attention.
Media includes far more than the lo- cal or even national papers. It includes the trade organizations and industry groups that affect your market, and the “guru” types who command attention of your market.
The key is to be monitoring every- thing you can that relates to your busi-
ness, your clients, your clients’ business and any external entities that affect them. There are plenty of automated tools out there to make this easy.
Monitoring isn’t enough. You have to lead the market by taking a position on what’s going on. Some will follow, some will not.
REGULATORY CHANGES
There are a couple of angles to con- sider.
One is for the business that simplifies the act of dealing with government agen- cies of any kind, at any level. These busi- nesses also live and die by the frequency and volume of changes in those regula- tions. It can be a bit of a roller coaster ride.
Ideally, you need to make sure that these regs aren’t the sole reason your cli- ents do business with you. If your model is designed and totally depends on the ability to help those who need to work within the regs and nothing else, you’re at risk. Rather than depend on a sin- gle revenue stream, use the knowledge you’ve gained about these clients and their business to find ways to help them in addition to the ways you help them deal with regulatory challenges.
Another angle is all about staying on top of the changes that affect your cli- ents and leading them in the direction that keeps them out of harm’s way. Any efforts you make to combat these issues are a different, and perhaps simultane- ous, path while the rest of your efforts are still at work.
EQUITY
One particularly strong way to de- fend your business is to build equity into your business model.
You might think that you can’t do this because you don’t deal in real es- tate or stock, but that just isn’t so. If your business model allows you to know that you have sales booked for the next 30, 60 or 90 days (if not beyond) – that’s the sort of equity I’m speaking of.
Having those sales booked in ad- vance, regardless of how you’ve done so, gives you the flexibility and freedom to make better decisions when defending your business, because you aren’t think- ing about how you’ll make payroll next week when making those decisions.
Defending your business is one of a business owner’s strategic responsibili- ties. What are you doing to defend yours?
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