Downtime should be renamed productive time for business owners and CEOs. When things feel slower, owners have a natural tendency to create more work for themselves. Choosing work that optimizes your business operations instead of drowning yourself in busy work means defining where you should spend your time and your money during this time.
Save: Subscriptions
You probably did this with your personal budget too but go through and see what unnecessary recurring expenses are being charged to your credit cards. Is your business paying for software and services you don’t use regularly or definitely won’t use during this time?
Invest: Automation
Have you dreamed of a business that runs itself? There’s a number of opportunities for automation in your business that you maybe haven’t had time to explore until now. Upgrade or change CRMs, look at lead generation and marketing automation tools, connect your pillar pieces of software to each other to reduce administrative hassles. What processes take place on paper than can be replaced with a digital experience?
Save: Rent, Office Supplies, and Other Overhead
Your utility bills for your office space are going to be the minimum for the coming months as you remain away. Make sure you’ve contacted all of your office support vendors to pause services (snack, coffee, custodial) and look at what that money could be used for instead. A lot of our clients are reducing or getting rid of their office space completely after this. If you’re in that boat, that frees up a significant budget to do strategic growth initiatives like hiring change-makers or investing in business development and marketing.
Invest: Digital Marketing
Are we biased? Yes, however, this current crisis proves that your brand has to stay in front of people and digital communication is the number one way to do that in all cases. Many of our clients ramped up their online marketing or increased budgets during this time to help them stay more relevant and in front of their audience. If you’re a service-based business falling behind on digital marketing and branding, then now is a good time to invest in services that get you in front of your customers and can scale to become a lead generation machine for your business in the future.
If you are thinking about the marketing strategy for your business, especially what to do in this weird time, then check out this free one-page framework for defining an updated growth strategy for your business during this crisis. Our team at Hot Dog Marketing is offering a workshop for new and current clients that are trying to figure out what their next stage of growth should look like considering everything that’s happened. Now is a great time to invest in strategy and marketing projects – what you do now will define what your business becomes in the future.
For more up-to-date content to help you during this time, check out our new series Zig When They Zag: Resources to encourage a growth mindset in uncertain times.
