Businesses big and small will occasionally go through down times. Times when the money isn’t flowin’ quite like it usually does.
When that happens, a natural instinct is to go cut the budget.
To look over the expenses and start cutting out stuff and making some difficult choices. All in an effort to make income greater than expenses yet again.
It can, however, become a self-sabotaging affair to cut some expenses. It is a bit of a catch-22.
For one, when you get your mindset pretty firmly into cutting expenses instead of on how to MAKE MORE MONEY, then it is hard to recover. You will tend to breed what you expect… and making big budget cuts shows that you expect to make less money.
But, the main thing is also about what you choose to cut.
See, I’ve seen many businesses who will make cuts to promotion and marketing. They’ll discontinue marketing campaigns, cut the promo budgets, lay off people from the marketing department. In our smaller scale businesses, we go peel back on Facebook ad campaigns. We’ll stop spending money on anything that will expand the business and instead try to do stuff the “free” way.
All that is a mistake. Why?
Because, how are you going to get your income back up if you stop spending anything on what brings in that revenue?
When your income stats are down, it is OK to cut expenses if you must. But, not on promotion! You INCREASE that.
You find any and every way to do marketing and promotion, even if it involves spending money. That’s your key to getting income back up again.
And, if your income is already really low (or zero if just starting out), then again…
Don’t get stuck in a mindset of shortages. Don’t make “cuts”.
Promote!
– David
