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9 Tips On How To Survive A Financial Crisis As A Business

April 9, 2020

how to survive a financial crisis

I’ve had a lot of my business friends ask me how to survive a financial crisis. It’s a trying period and something that we need to stand united on, and be creative, and we can get out of this together, stronger.

how to survive a financial crisis

I’ve put together a list of tips that can help you spark ideas on how to survive the financial crisis. Hopefully this helps, and feel free to ask more questions through the comments section.

1. Reduce Costs NOW

Review all expenses right away. You should kill low-utility subscriptions. Now is the time to either do it yourself or find alternative ways. If it is something that you absolutely need, you can try emailing in to ask for a discount for your services.

2. Offer EXISTING customers NEW services

Explore new, complementary services that add value to your existing core services/products. For example, restaurants can offer beverages, or frozen meal-prep sets that people can heat up on their own, or even DIY meals where people can get all the ingredients necessary from you and cook it up themselves. 

Similarly, if you are a bar, you can sell ready-mixed beverages instead and have them delivered to your customers.

3. Make The Tough Decisions

It is a crisis, and you cannot save everyone. Make retrenchments if you have to, in order to save the rest. The alternative is that your company goes down and everyone fails.

4. Embrace Digital

Go online. Embrace delivery through the Internet if you were a purely brick & mortar business before. This doesn’t just apply to things like food delivery. It works for service-based businesses too. For example, gyms and personal trainers can offer online classes.

5. Front-load Revenue

Cash is king, especially if you’re trying to figure out how to survive a financial crisis. One way to generate revenue up-front is to sell discounted gift cards or annual subscriptions or packages so that you can collect revenue up-front from your customers.

6. Explore Different Channels

If you were purely on SEO before, start exploring PPC. If you were purely D2C, start exploring distributors. Experiment, don’t assume what works.

Throughout my entrepreneurial journey, I’ve learnt that whatever you read online and get advice about is from the perspective of ONE person/company. Everyone is unique, and that means sometimes we have to try things out ourselves to see if it really works for us.

7. Improve Customer Service

Customer service is an integral part of any business. A consumer will choose a company with better service anytime over a company with poor customer service.

8. Collaborate With Other Businesses

Partner with complementary businesses to offer packages to both your customer bases. For example, if you were a business coach, you can partner with a marketing agency to offer business packages to each of your customer bases. Or if you are a bar, you can work with restaurants to do a meal package.

9. Focus On Profitable Areas

Now is the time to be prudent and highly-focused. No one knows how long a financial crisis can and will last for. If you have areas in your business that aren’t profitable, you need to cut them out now, more than ever. For example, if you run multiple restaurants, now is the time to cut outlets that aren’t profitable and explore new channels such as going online instead and operating from a central kitchen.

How To Survive A Financial Crisis

These are just some short, actionable tips that you can adopt or use to spark ideas if you are trying to figure out how to survive a financial crisis.

If you have more tips or if you have questions, feel free to leave a comment below. Stay safe everyone!

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