When the world around you changes, it’s important to pivot and develop a new plan for your business —especially during a crisis.
A crisis of any kind can be devastating to business owners and entrepreneurs but if you stay focused and change the way you do business, things can get better and you will still have continuous success.
A crisis hit us in 1990 and we didn’t give up, we changed everything about our business and made it better and here’s how we did it!!
A Story About Survival during a Crisis
Lots of people including the younger people out there haven’t been through significant challenges like this in their life. So there’s a lot of anxiety happening inside businesses and startups.
To help entrepreneurs and business owners, I’m going to go back and just talk about some things that have happened to me in my world of business.
I’m an older entrepreneur now, therefore, I’m going share a story of crisis from about 30 years. Beginning in 1990, I had hundreds of employees. We were doing business all over the world.
We had offices in the US and in Europe. We were beaming into dozens of countries. We had inventories, overheads, buildings, customer service centers, right at the same time the 1990 Gulf War started.
It was a devastating situation for every entrepreneur in the world because the world shut down. It was very similar to the eerie feeling that we have today.
Learn more about How To Survive in Business During a Crisis —Part 2.
The Moment We Changed Our Business Plan
When the Gulf war hit, everybody was tuned to their TV set. They weren’t tuned to my infomercials. They were tuned to CNN and the news and our sales plummeted on a global basis.
Our banks were calling.
We had massive problems that were hitting us right now. It was a devastating situation, but we hunkered down.
We learned from it and we ended up changing a lot of our business practices and business models.
I love that word: pivot. When something goes wrong, you need to pivot and shift your perspective. —Kevin Harrington
Learn more here on how you can take away the word fail and make it about change
We ended up deciding and asking ourselves at this particular time… why did we need hundreds of people to do fulfillment, to do phone calls, to do phone answering, to do customer service, etc? We realized that we didn’t!!
So we simply contracted it all out. So we changed and did a complete overhaul on our business model.
The Crisis Made Our Business Better
We started selling off assets and then streamlined where we could contract things out.
So today, we operate a business that does over $100 million a year with less than a dozen total people —where before we had hundreds.
Overall, we learned from the old mistakes and now 30 years later, I’m able to say……
“I went through a crisis 30 years ago that has given me some strength for today and the ability to survive in business.” —Kevin Harrington
If you stay focused and don’t give up, you can see success happen in your business —but you must pivot and make the necessary changes to survive in business during a crisis
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