Harsh economic environments can have adverse effects on your business, however, there are some important practices that can ensure that your business survives.

There is a saying that when the going gets though, the though gets going, and you have got to be though in order to survive in a very harsh economy. The economic situations sometimes gets very unbearable, making cost of living go high with a corresponding fall in the standard of living of citizens, living you and your business in hot waters, as you both seek for survival.

The good news is that you need not be paranoid as survival in a harsh economic environment is possible if certain drastic steps are taken. Lets us look at some very important measures that can keep you and your business alive when the economic situation gets dire.

 

We all do experience changes in economic situations but what you do when the situations become dire goes a long way to affect you financially. Here are some important measures you can adopt to ensure that your business and you are doing fine;

 

Avoid impulse buying;

In a situation where the state of the economy becomes so dire that you are left with no option than to cut your spending by a significant margin, then the best way to do so is by avoiding impulse buying. Impulse buying is simply buying things you have prior intention of buying. So how do you avoid impulse buying? To avoid impulse buying you should properly have a list of the items you need before you go shopping, as this would guide you on what to buy and what not to buy, so that you carry on you an amount of money that approximates your budgeted list.

 

Identify less expensive alternatives;

In order to cut down on your expenses, you would need to identify alternatives to items you regularly use in your business or domestically which are less expensive to what you previously were using.

However, you should make sure that the alternatives you identify do not have a negative effect on its intended use. Let’s take for an instance where you identify a less expensive material for your production and the material has a negative effect on the output, making the product less in terms of quality than it should otherwise have been much to the notice of customers, then it can be said that the less quality material you used did not achieve its intended purpose, hence it would have a negative effect on your sales.

 

Identify necessities;

In an economic meltdown the only way to ensure that you and your business survive is to look around and identify items that are very necessary. What I mean is that you need to diversify in your business as economic conditions change. The best way for your business to survive in harsh economic environments is to ensure that you are providing items that are very necessary to consumers as anything other than that would reduce patronage and the knock on effect would be marginal or no profits at all.

 

Reduce your operational cost;

Another way to ensure that your business survives in a harsh economic environment is to look at areas in your business’s operations where you can cut down cost without the end result not having a negative effect on the outputs produced. Just like we discussed earlier when talking about identifying less expensive alternatives, reducing operational cost by practicing downsizing, which is cutting down on your work force would go a long way to ensuring that your business survives the harsh economy.

 

Encourage the practice of car pulling in your organization;

When the economy becomes dire, one of the areas most widely affected is transportation and reducing your transportation cost would go a long way to save you a lot of money. One of the best ways to reduce transportation cost is to encourage the practice of car pulling among your employees.What is car pulling? It is simply a practice were several people board a single vehicle to a common destination. Apart from car pulling saving you monies, it is also very environmental friendly.