Action Plan

Are you embarking on any growth plans?
We know it will be harder to grow this year, but that is certainly the goal: to grow anyway.

How will you do this?
We’ll be focusing on sales and marketing. It seems these are what companies tend to drop during a downturn, but that’s counterproductive. We’re going to do more target marketing and spend more time with existing customers. Plus, we’ll focus on the new prospects we’d like to see.

Will you be hiring more people to handle this increase in marketing?
If the right person or people came along, we would definitely hire more, but they would have to be the right person in this environment. What we will be doing is far more targeted marketing to get in front of prospective customers more often than we might have in the past.

So how are you taking advantage of these slower economic times?
We are partnering with another individual, who is not currently an employee, who will be doing something different than what our business is today. We’re exploring diversification with a product that will be used in the health-care industry. (Right now we’re in promotional advertising.) But we found a product and we know the right person to go out and market it, so we’re trying to put the product and person together to go out and attack a different market. The opportunity came along; we weren’t looking for it. A year ago, we probably wouldn’t have time to look at it or thought it was an official way to go. Whereas now, we are looking for other opportunities than what we do on a day-to-day basis.

Are you worried about the coming year?
I don’t think it’s as bad as everybody thinks it is. It’s not as much as waiting for the economy to change as waiting for everyone’s attitude to change if they were a little less scared and more positive, everything would pick up faster. If something doesn’t happen today, the work we put in today will pay off when it turns around. It’s like building a building; you have to put in the foundation. It is a planning issue; you can’t sit down and just look at the next two to three months, you have to consider the next two to three years, and whether what you’re doing today will benefit tomorrow. I think a lot of people are just looking at today.

Interview by Lindsey Norris

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