The Coming Recession: How Can Small Businesses Protect Themselves and Reduce Losses

The Coming Recession: How Can Small Businesses Protect Themselves and Reduce Losses

Anyone keeping up with the economy knows a recession is coming, and it is coming fast. Be it due to a lack of knowledge or be it deliberately, the Fed isn’t doing anything to stop it, if not deliberately hastening it. We can’t be sure when and how hard the recession will be, but what we know for sure is small business owners and poor people will get hurt the most. The elite class has never been hurt by recessions. It falls back on us, the owners of small businesses, to protect ourselves from the recession. Preparing your company ahead of time and adopting the right strategies will help you minimize the damage and ensure your business can survive the recession.

Diversify Your Income

Most recessions hit a particular sector much harder than the others. The 2008 recession was really bad for real-estate, the dot-com bubble bursting predominantly hit the tech market. The early 1990s recession due to the oil-price shock hit the sectors predominantly dependant on oil. You can go as far back as you want, you’ll always find some sectors not affected by a recession.

What does this have to do with your business? Well, now that you know how recessions work, you can structure your company in a way that will result in the least amount of damage. Diversifying your sources of revenue by trying to make money from as many sectors as possible is not only a very common business advice, but it is also one of the primary protectors against recession. Of course, doing this as a small business is particularly hard, but there are still some steps you can take:

• Try to provide services and products close to yours: when running a business in a certain sector, there are areas it is naturally easy for you to expand into. For example, it is really easy for a fast food joint to expand to add coffee shops, and it is really easy for a women’s clothing factory to enter the clothing market for children. While this is still acting in the same sector, it is nonetheless counted as diversification. Consider your business, your products, and the market, and look for friendly similar markets you can expand into.
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• Collect data on your clients: if you know who are your clients, you’ll know where your weakness lies. Information is power (which is why the government and the media always tries to hide it from you), and if you want to be a successful businessman, you need to collect information on your users. For example, if you learn your business is wholly dependent on a certain age group, race, or income group, this means you’re more open to shock. Try your best to have a consumer-base that is diverse.
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• E-commerce never hurts: e-commerce is becoming the primary way people buy products. Even young people who upload videos online use platforms like fourthwall.com to build e-commerce businesses for themselves, virtually everyone is trying to do it. Sadly, almost half of small businesses don’t have a proper e-commerce platform. An e-commerce platform makes it really easy for you to inform your customers about new products and new changes, and in the event of a recession, you’ll be able to update the website quickly to respond to the challenges the recession brings.

Go International

While the US market will inevitably face a recession very soon (let’s say due to some ‘corrupt actors’), it is not certain the whole world will face a recession. Even the extremely devastating recession of 2008 spared a few countries. So, if the recession is inevitable back home, why not protect your business interests by targeting markets abroad? Although it might sound like a hard thing to do, provided you do these things, the globalist elites have made it exceedingly easy for us to do business online:

• Make sure you have a professional-looking website: unless you provide highly-specialized B2B services, your website will be your portal to the international market. Potential customers will judge whether your business is trustworthy and your products worth it based on your website – it’s design and the content. That’s why it is important to hire a professional web-developing agency like cshark.com to help you come up with a good-looking and intuitive website that helps you with your endeavor.
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• What kind of products and services do you offer? Depending on the nature of your business, it can be exceedingly hard or exceedingly easy to enter the international market. If you’re a small-time gun-shop owner, sadly, it will be impossible for you to go international with your business, because many countries aren’t free like the United States of America and they have absurd gun regulations. On the other hand, if you’re providing financial services, there are little regulations in front of you to go international and provide your services to people in other countries. That’s why you need to look at your products and services and check the rules and regulations governing international trade in these things.
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• What market should you expand to? The last thing you need to decide is the market you want to expand to. Some markets like China’s are almost completely closed off to us (while they export their cheap stuff here), and while Mexico’s and Canada’s markets are almost completely open to us. Aside from this, you need to make sure the products and services you provide are in demand in that country. For example, Iraqis don’t even know what is a bank, while high-quality financial services would be in high-demand in Northern Europe. Do some research on the state of each market you are interested in and determine their health and the amount of demand for your products/services and then decide.