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Consulting in a Economic Downturn

By crooky | April 4, 2008

There is a lot of talk around these days that we are at the tippig point on the verge of a downward economic slide. The weak US dollar and the “sub-prime mortgage crisis” is fueling this speculation to a certain degree but I think that everyone should be nervous. The question that a lot of my friends in consulting and other businesses are asking themselves right now is what they can do to save their business?

When you’re a consultant, there are options that are in some respects, less painful that what you might do if you had a manufacturing company.

Find New Pain Points, Serve Them

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My friend Geoffrey Hansen at Rocket Builders believes that there are two kinds of businesses that do well during a recession - new services and disruptive products. Everyone is looking for ways to do things better and cheaper during a recession so anything that can provide these advantages will do well in the years to come.

This means two things:

- New companies/products/services entering the market
- More established companies changing their business model to a more recession-friendly mode

Take a good hard look at your consulting practice. Once you’ve identified companies that need to respond to a changing market, can you offer something that will help them? For example, I do market research. One of the best services I can offer to a recession-bucking business is insight into new markets.

You could also call me. I have literally hundreds of ideas and I am planning on implementing a few of them myself but if you’re worried about a recession and the impact that it is going to have on your business - call me. Let’s talk about it. I can’t give away all of my ideas on this blog or there wouldn’t be much need to hire me now would there?

I hope this has given you all some food for thought.

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Aaron “Crooky” Cruikshank is the Principal and Founder of Friuch Consulting. He has written professionally about science and technology

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Topics: Business of Consulting |

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