探花精选

All kinds of economic changes affect businesses, whether full-blown recessions or market fluctuations. Unfortunately, financial uncertainty can cause companies to fail entirely, but it’s possible to push through the storm and succeed.

Who better to learn how to weather economic uncertainty than those who have already done it?

For this piece, we surveyed hundreds of owners who led their businesses through the Great Recession of 2008, and more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, and asked them for the strategies that propelled their companies through.

Table of Contents

• How Entrepreneurs Navigated Recessions
• Current Economic Downturns & How to Prepare for the Next One

How Entrepreneurs Navigated Recessions

Let’s dive into what business owners told me about how they successfully navigated through the Great Recession.

1.Cut The Lard

The most common strategy adopted by business owners who survived the Great Recession was to cut unnecessary costs.

A quarter of survey respondents said that operating lean saved their businesses.

While keeping a team intact where possible is a priority, many business owners reduced headcount, trimmed the number of hours worked, or gave essential staff furlough days in lieu of layoffs.

Managing inventory and payables was another popular cost-cutting measure, including:

• Not purchasing new equipment
• Only buying what you need to get by for 30 days
• Paying essential vendors

Many business owners reduced their advertising costs, and, where possible, eliminated their rent by going fully remote.

, founder of the creative agency Tmg, adopted a more drastic cost-cutting measure — he relocated from New York to the Dominican Republic to reduce his living and business costs.

While these hard cuts are often painful, business owners such as , former director of Communication at , recommend making them “quickly to keep the business running: “Don‘t wait, and make sure...