Survive a recession with good business practices and keep your long-term business goals in sight. Cut unnecessary costs but remember to leave room for your business to grow and thrive. Downsize your costs and staff as necessary to ride out the financial storm, but avoid panic and choose carefully when reducing staff.
Instructions
1. Review your business plan. Keep your focus on the long term but uncover ways to cut costs in the short term. Find unnecessary expenses and reduce them. Review entertainment expenses, association fees, club fees and other perks. Shift costs to individuals or cut the programs completely. Downsize perks to ride the recession out.
2. Renegotiate business agreements if possible. Seek out new vendors, explore relationships with smaller companies and consultants. Turn your business into a lean machine to weather the recession. Downsize costs associated with doing business.
3. Assess your employees. Reassign employees to areas that need manpower. Utilize existing human resources before seeking replacements to reduce training time and increase company loyalty. Review the existing skills present in your workforce and make sure you utilize all the training and skills your business already has.
4. Cut unnecessary employees from the payroll. Check the costs related to downsizing employees including severance agreements, unemployment costs, employee morale and productivity. Remember you need to keep doing business. Assess if all business functions are possible with retained personnel. Price the cost of outsourcing before downsizing existing employees. Keep both long-term goals and short-term needs in focus when reducing staff.
5. Spread the cuts among all levels of your organization. Institute pay cuts at the executive level as well as further down the line. Keep morale positive in the workforce by sharing the cuts caused by recession.
