Pandemic Thinking: How To Keep Your Head In The (Long) Game


by RJon Robins, founder and CEO of How To Manage A Small Law Firm

The COVID-19 pandemic is crippling and toppling many U.S. small businesses. Often called “the backbone of the economy,” small businesses that are managing to survive face an uncertain future.

As states start to reopen, consumer spending is in steep decline while unemployment skyrockets and many people remain hesitant to venture out. But some entrepreneurs will find their businesses in trouble because they had the wrong mindset toward customers all along.

Small business owners everywhere are infected by pandemic thinking. But they were infected with this thinking before the pandemic. It’s only now the strategic weakness of short-term, fear-based, transactional thinking in all different kinds of businesses is becoming more obvious. Pandemic thinkers ask the wrong question, ‘What can you do for me today?’ Rather than, ‘How can we work together to build a long-term mutually-profitable relationship?’

Business owners who built long-term relationships with customers and clients can weather this storm. Those who didn’t think this way before can adopt elements of this kind of thinking and they’ll start seeing the benefits almost right away.

Here are three tips for small business owners on how to develop long-term relationships that benefit both customers and businesses:

1. When first meeting, look ahead at the relationship 10 years from now.

The scale of a person’s thinking has a lot to do with whether they win the game. Look for all opportunities to be of service, even in some small way, to earn the right to call the person a client. Every deal doesn’t have to be a grand-slam. Just get on base. Just get into the game. That way you can discover opportunities to be of greater service and have a client for life.

2. Show you care.

A lot of people don’t know how to show that they care. Ask yourself when is the last time you called to check on a former client to find out what’s happened in their life or business since the last time you did business together? What are their plans for the future? What can you take off their plate and help them with today even if what they need is just someone to help them think things through? Good relationships built over time are especially evident during the pandemic. Ironically, though, a pandemic is a perfect time to begin a marketing campaign like this and besides, you probably have a lot of free time on your hands anyway.

3. Have a long-term business plan.

A business being run without a 12-month, forward-looking budget is like a car being driven with a windshield covered in mud, and on an unfamiliar road with no particular place to go. A business that is being run without weekly cash-flow projections is like a person stumbling around in the dark in an unfamiliar house. To take an active, consistent interest in your clients and develop programs encouraging them to keep coming back, it helps to have a long-term written plan for your own business.

Businesses generate revenue by solving problems for their clients and customers. And right now there’s an abundance of problems, which is another way to say there’s an abundance of opportunities. Whether you already have or decide to begin developing great long-term relationships with clients, it’s an investment that will pay long-term dividends.

 

RJon Robins is founder and CEO of How To Manage A Small Law Firm, the leading provider of management services  for the solo and small law firm market. In 2019, How To Manage a Small Law Firm was named by Inc. as one of the 5,000 fastest-growing privately-held companies in the country for the fifth consecutive year. A graduate of American University and Nova Southeastern College of Law, Robins is a member of The Florida Bar and The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners.

Share

The post Pandemic Thinking: How To Keep Your Head In The (Long) Game appeared first on Young Upstarts.



from Young Upstarts https://ift.tt/2BbklyI

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How To Promote Your Grand Opening

Image
Your business grand opening will be one of the most important — and memorable days — of your career as a business owner. You’ll always remember how much effort you put into it, and what your turnout was like. And there are plenty of reasons why a successful grand opening is so important: if done correctly, it can invoke curiosity and excitement among consumers, and set the tone for the future. Fortunately, there are several ways you can ensure that you make the most out of your grand opening. Here are some promotional tips you should consider: Give Out Free Samples. Of course, whether you’re able to do this depends on the type of product or service you offer, however, giving out free samples is a good way to start to build buzz around your grand opening. For example, if you were just opening a local coffee shop, you might set up a kiosk with small cups of coffee and engaging coffee-inspired cutouts for photos. Then, you’d hand each person who accepted a sample a flyer (or QR code)...
Read more

13 Important Branding Lessons From The Top 4 e-Commerce Giants

Image
by Katie Lundin of  crowdspring Simply showing up online with a business website isn’t enough to guarantee success. E-Commerce giants Apple, eBay, Craigslist, and Etsy seem to have cracked the code. Together, they brought in total revenues of over $275 billion in 2018. They are successful businesses and successful brands . You may notice some notable companies missing from our list. I recently wrote about 19 important branding lessons from the top 5 U.S. retailers , including Amazon and Walmart. The most successful e-commerce businesses know that their brand identity and brand is everything . We’ve studied what these 4 e-commerce brands are doing right and cultivated a list of 13 actionable branding lessons that can help your business. eBay. Evolve to stay relevant. In today’s fast-paced digital world, technologies and trends often become obsolete before we’ve even had a chance to understand them. Online businesses that stand the test of time are relatively rare. And, th...
Read more

Improve Your Marketing In 2020

Image
A brand new year is a fresh opportunity to take your business to new heights. You may have achieved a few of your business goals in 2019, and that’s amazing, now let’s ensure you keep that momentum going! When it comes to marketing, strategies are evolving all of the time. To get you off to a good start in 2020, make sure to put these four on your to-do-list. 1 . Try Influencers. If you haven’t leveraged the awesome power of influencers yet, make 2020 the year that you give it a try. As a business, you want to gain the trust and loyalty of your target audience. If you find the right influencer, they’ll already have that trust, ready and waiting for you to tap into. Influencers have plenty of followers who admire them and will listen carefully to their recommendations. What’s more, they know how to present the mention of your business as authentic within their content. Such tactics are highly effective because the audience does not feel as though your business is pushing a sale. Wh...
Read more