Taking Advantage of Our Current Economic Crisis

As everyone realizes, our business world has changed, perhaps irreversibly. Businesses are struggling to stay alive. Small businesses are being hit across the boards. Perhaps, you are struggling in this very moment to maintain your business. Well, the good news is that as a small business, you may be best positioned to take advantage of the new opportunities presented by this economic paradigm shift.

Stop, for a moment and reflect on what is occurring in businesses of all sizes. Staffing levels in all sectors are being adjusted - from trimming in some sectors to wholesale layoffs in others. Think about the implications! As this downsizing occurs, employees with special skills or who have specific job knowledge are being laid off. In many cases this special skill area did not require a full time employee to complete the tasks. With the release of this employee, the special task or skill set is no longer available to the business. The real costs of the loss of this skill set, while not immediately recognized, may, after a period of time severely impact the business. And here lies the opportunity for a perceptive business entrepreneur.

Now is the time to identify skills and capabilities you can offer to businesses that are realizing the impact of these lost specialty skills. This loss of skills can cost the business in inefficiencies; in errors and mistakes; in terms of potential fines, compliance costs, and lawsuits; and in greatly increased stress - a stress that comes from performing work for which an employee has not been properly trained. In many cases, the person who is now performing the special skill tasks occupies a higher level of responsibility than the employee that was terminated. Often the person now performing this task is a senior manager or owner of the business who is now totally lost in how to execute the task properly. It becomes a case of not knowing what they don't know! So, consider, also, the cost to the company when that supervisor or manager can not focus on their "real" job. Within this framework, you should be able to demonstrate how sub-contracting these functions to your company can become very cost effective.

Should you decide to adopt this type of strategy, the next step would be to identify businesses that should be receptive to this type of presentation. Get your presentation together, and start pitching! Use your network to locate managers and business owners who are complaining about the loss of special skills within their businesses. You may find that you soon need to add staffing to service all your new clients. And how do you face that challenge? Well, how about hiring from all those skilled people that have been laid off.

To recap, identify skills and capabilities that you can offer to companies that have lost these same specialty skills through their staff reductions. Cobble together the part-time needs of several businesses to grow the full-time offerings of your business. Do a good job and prove your value proposition to your client, and the chances of them going back to the way they used to do it will be pretty slim.