So if you look for all the problems and difficulties that change will bring your business then you will find lots of problems and difficulties.
However if you look for all the opportunities that change could bring to your business you will find these opportunities as well.
Here's a good example:
A few years ago I knew two people who each owned a business that did fax marketing. (In other words they helped businesses to promote their products and services by sending out faxes to local business owners.)
Both people had successful businesses with a lot of happy clients.
Then a new law was passed governing SPAM and the end result was that sending faxes to people who had not specifically requested them was now illegal and could no longer be done unless you wanted to pay huge financial fines.
Overnight this law change meant both businesses could no longer offer their original service.
One person promptly closed their fax marketing business and did nothing else.
The other person closed their fax marketing business and immediately opened a new business offering a high quality telemarketing service to create qualified leads for businesses selling an expensive product or service.
That business is doing very well and was a great example of a person focussing on opportunities around change instead of focussing on the problems of change.
Strategy Two: Change your thinking
I used to speak to teams of real estate sales people and shared marketing ideas that they could use to improve their sales.
One year I was about to speak to a large group of several hundred real estate people and at the time the real estate market was in a slump with a tiny number of buyers and a huge number of sellers.
Before I gave my presentation the owner of the real estate company spoke for five minutes.
And one thing he said still sticks in my mind years later.
"It's not that hard times are now here in the real estate market" the real estate owner said. "All that has happened is that easy times in real estate have now gone."
He went on to explain that in the past year or so sales had been very easy in real estate with lots of buyers and sellers. So many real estate people were doing well with no real effort. Now the market had changed so that you could still do well, however now you had to put in some energy and effort and do some work.
It's the same thing with a new government and new rules and regulations.
It's not that hard times are now here it just means that the easy sales or business that you used to enjoy may no longer be available to you.
You may now have to do things better and smarter.
Strategy Three: Use all the resources you currently have
If you own a mobile phone today there is a good chance that you only use around 10% of the features of your phone on a regular basis.
So a lot of the things you could be using your phone for you don't use.
It's the same in business.
You probably only use a tiny amount of the resources you currently have on hand.
Here are three resources worth doing more with...
Resource 1: Your existing staff.
In most cases you can get your existing staff to do 20 per cent more than what they are doing right now if you get them to focus on using their natural talents and what they are very good at doing.
There is helpful free guide called 'The Acres of Diamonds High Performance Solution' that is worth reading.
It shows you how to identify what your staff are brilliant at and how to use this knowledge to help your staff to get more done and really enjoy their work at the same time.
You can get this guide from The DNA Project
Resource 2: Your past marketing campaigns that worked well.
I wrote a NZ Herald column about reusing your past marketing campaigns that explains this concept in more detail.
You can read it at this link
Resource 3: Your existing clients and customers
If you add value and stay in touch regularly with your past and current clients it's very easy to get regular repeat business and great referral business.
I wrote a helpful NZ Herald Column on how to do this at this link
Summary:
Change is always scary.
However if you use these three strategies you can often thrive and do well in business regardless of what changes may happen.
"I can't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination." Jimmy Dean
Action Step:
Which of these three strategies could you use in your own business to handle change well so you thrive and do well under the new government?
Graham McGregor is a Marketing Advisor and helps businesses who offer an expensive service to quickly attract ideal new clients. You can download his brand new 106 page marketing guide 'The Expensive Service Marketing Solution' at no charge from www.TheExpensiveServiceMarketingSolution.com
