Growing in Lean Times

I started performing magic professionally in a serious way in 1999 but my business really took off in the eleven months after the 9-11 attacks. While everyone else was complaining of lost jobs, a failing economy, and tight purse strings I was hiring family members to help me deal with all the business that was coming in.

Fortunes are made during difficult times and the difference between struggling to hold on and ramping up for rapid expansion is as simple as understanding that people don't change. People want the same things they always did. People want to enjoy life, be comfortable, and continue life as usual. Oh sure, people say they want "change". Politicians live selling "change". But change for the sake of change is NOT what people want, people want consistency.

So, if you want to survive…forget that. If you want to GROW your business in the coming 12 months here's how to go about it. Remain consistent. Demonstrate your strength.

You don't need to slash prices, you don't need to raise travel fees to compensate for rising fuel costs and you definitely don't need to cut back on advertising. Instead, what you need to do is to keep delivering a quality product or service and work on demonstrating your strength.

How? Ramp up your marketing. Print and mail an extra post card. Run an ad in a magazine that you know your buyers read. SaurageResearch.com recently reported that 47.2% of consumers say that magazines are more likely than other media to get them to do an online search compared to broadcast television (42.8%), newspapers (42.3%), and cable television (34.9%). The fact that magazine advertising is about the least expensive of those is just a bonus.

Review your web site. Does it inspire confidence in your ability to deliver? I'm not talking about inspiring confidence in your ability to perform the task you sell, but in your ability to actually DELIVER what you promise when you promise it. There is a BIG difference between a competent plumber who shows up some time on the day he said he would and a competent plumber who shows up at the exact scheduled time wearing clean clothes and a smile.

When times get tight, people notice the details more. They don't stop spending money, they just stop spending it haphazardly. If you are at the top of your game you will GROW market share as your weaker competitors fall off the vine. The difference is about inspiring confidence and then delivering on that implied promise.

But I guess inspiring confidence will have to be the topic for another time.

By the way, I went to this new format for the newsletter where I send out a brief teaser to let you know what the article is about. If you want to read it, you click the link to come here and get the rest of it. Too many people were complaining about the newsletter getting blocked by their increasingly totalitarian SPAM filters and rather than edit what I want to say (or add a bunch of symbols to break up important words in an attempt to trick the computer), I figure I'd just try this and see how it works.

You will also be able to now access and review past issues easier as well as comment on articles