Diversified Income Strategies – How they can help your business grow in tough times

Diversified Income Strategies – How they can help your business grow in tough times.

Using clever diversified income strategies when your business is struggling is the key to success. One of best opportunities to grow your business comes when times are tough, really tough.

If you’ve been running a small business for any length of time then you know that every season there’s a new storm to face. Whether it’s a market downturn, a government policy change or a worldwide pandemic. That’s kind of business as usual for a small business owner.

In fact if you’re going to be truly successful as a business owner learning to expect and weather the storms is a necessity. Only those who have the appetite for facing these challenges ultimately succeed and win, despite and in spite of whatever gets thrown at you.

There are 3 keys to being a success in a challenging situation:

Perpetually Trim Your Sails

What does that mean? It means actively, and proactively reading the conditions of your business, and your marketplace. It means being willing to change the way you offer your services, and how you’re pricing your products. And the way you’re marketing yourself.

It means cutting waste, and letting go of ideas you’re holding too tightly on to and things that are anchoring you down and stopping you from moving forward. It would be wonderful if our business sailed along smoothly on the course we’d mapped out at the start, a nice straight line to our plotted destination. That’s not how life or business works.

That’s a good thing, because if it was like that we’d miss out on all great things we’d learn, the opportunities we’d never have found along the way, and the person we become from having to force ourselves to be better at the things we aren’t confident in.

Prepare to make tough choices and decisions – business is business you might have change the way you operate, the staff you have and the clients you serve. They can’t all come with you to the next stage of your business journey. So you can be friendly but you can’t be friends. If you don’t make tough choices, the business won’t be there to serve and employ anyone soon enough.

“When you can’t change the direction of the wind, adjust your sails” – H. Jackson Brown Jr

Learn to enjoy the roller coaster ride

Running and growing a small business is not for the fainthearted. The day you went into business for yourself you made a decision to take a really big risk. Everyday you take the same risks.

Every time you hit a bump you need to ask yourself, do I want to go back? Or do I choose to go forward and work out how to make this work. If you’ve made the decision to cut your safety lines then the only satisfying way is forward. But don’t do it alone.

Connect with your business community, they’re all on the same ride you are. Activate your group of trusted advisers to help you think outside of the box, and plan to move forward responsibly and steadily. You haven’t got a crystal ball, do one day at time – one week at a time and remind yourself when things get a little scary: “It is what it is, now what are we going to do about it”

“Life is like a roller coaster, twists, turns, ups and downs. But what a ride! “- Lisa Layden

Develop Diversified Income Strategies for your small business.

There are 7 Income sources that Financial Planners and Millionaires talk about:

Earned Income which is the money that you earn by doing something or by spending your time e.g. the money that you make in your job, the salary or fees per hour you get by working for someone else.

Profit Income  or the money that you earn by selling something for more than it costs you to make. e.g. Businesses selling their goods at a profit, whether at the retail or wholesale level, as distributors or manufacturers.

Interest Income the money you get as a result of lending your money to someone else to use, e.g. investing in another business, putting it in the bank etc.

Dividend Income  the money that you get as a return on shares of a company you own.

Rental Income or the money that you get as a result of renting out an asset that you have, like a house, or a building.

Capital Gains the money that you get as a result of increase in value of an asset that you own.

Royalty Income the money you get as a result of letting someone use your products, ideas, or processes. They make all the revenues, they do all the hard work and you get a small percentage of what ever they earn.

The problem here is that you, as a small business owner, are under a lot of stress and need to come up with quick, realistic and practical ways to use what little you have to create different services, products and potentially different customer segments to buy from you. This is where good Business Consultants can help.

Diversification does not mean being unfocused or scattered in your approach, it’s a deliberate planned process of increasing your businesses profitability.

Here’s some questions to get you started:

1.  What segments of my customers, are going dry up as a result of this problem?
2.  How long will the problem last for?
3.  Are there other customers who we haven’t focused on that aren’t impacted by the problem?
4.  Are there other services who are overloaded by the problem that we could act as a subcontractor to?
5.  Do we have under-marketed products and services that we’ve forgotten about that we can make customers aware of now?
6.  Can we deliver our service/product differently to our customers?
7.  Can we change our packages to allow customers to buy in bit sized pieces to help spread the cost?

Get help with your Diversified Income Strategy now.

Currently we’re booking 1 hour  (ZOOM call) Diversified Income Strategy Sessions with all business owners, to help them come up with realistic and achievable plans to not only weather the COVID19 impact, but to seize this as an opportunity for innovation in their business model, where they can grow their business and find new markets and income streams.

If you want help with this process – BOOK IN NOW for your session.