Your Name, Company Name, Website
John Fairclough, Resicom
The Moment I Thought We Might Not Make It
We provide services to national retailers. Our top two clients, which made up over 80% of our sales, cut their spend at 80% and 90% respectively during the economic downturn. This work was canceled. Leading up to it, we were assured that the programs would stay in place, and hired and trained six additional people for six months to handle the growth we were expecting. They shut off their spend within 4 weeks of one another.
How We Turned it Around
We built a Recovery Plan that addressed each area of the company.
Sales: We need to look for additional revenue streams with the people we were already working with. We met with clients and found some opportunities.
Sales Team: We aggressively added people to our sales team and created many more marketing tools to support them.
Finance: We advanced money from our credit line and moved it to another bank to ensure we had cash on hand. We become much more open book with finances so people could see what was happening.
Operations: We aligned our spend according to workload and instituted pay cuts. We cut expenses and renegotiated contracts/pricing agreements with our vendors.
HR: We over-communicated what was happening in the company and added a lot of transparency to how we were performing. We established a goal of 6 communications per month - a weekly update, a mid month report, and a monthly message from our President.
Lessons Learned
- Diversify revenue streams. Ours were too dependent on a small group of clients.
- Manage the business as if we are in a recession. All of the improvements we made, make business sense regardless of climate.
- Stick to your values. It was important for the recession to not redefine why we do the things we do. We stayed the course on development, and it has paid off.
- Have a recovery plan built before you need one (while you have a clear head and can think through scenarios well).
- Keep your team informed. We did this okay before the recession, but we learned how important it is to show people how things are going.