Recession Strategy

Speaking of strategy, there are at least four words I could give to survive the recession: Price, Quality, Innovation and Efficiency. We'll have to just focus on minimum profit. But we should still do our best not to compromise the products and services quality. We should also continue to innovate. And lastly, maintain and even raise the efficiency of the processes.

Apart from working on the web site, I've generally adopted a "batten down the hatches, cut expenditure to the bone and (try to) build up cash reserves" approach to getting through the recession.

Bit up and down really, lots of factors involved, Olympics, school holidays, summer season even down to a few customers selling up and leaving London altogether. I have enough contract work to tick over comfortably. The last 10 days have been relatively quiet, but the previous 6 weeks it was constant every day, which only ends up getting to you in the end anyway. Now that summer is nearly over I expect things to start picking back up again. I'll only start worrying if interest rates start rising as I think that will be the nail in the coffin that kills everyones business...

Barney - I would be interested to know how much the recession effects your business - surely when you need a plumber you need a plumber regardless of whether you want to pay for one or not!?

It effects it massively, many people will put of doing major refurbishment projects simply because they have no idea as to if their jobs are safe or not. One thing I have learned over the last couple of years, it makes no different what size of house or how many cars you see parked on someones drive, it just means they have bigger debts and more to lose than the average guy in the street.
Secondly the general public public have no idea of what raw materials cost, they will Google say the cost of a boiler, but they won't Google the sundries that put it all together and make it work. So I may well be asked to quote for a heating installation, the customer having done his/her research knows the price of the the boiler, say

Really interesting point!! I hope my question didn't sound too ignorant - I suppose in times of recession people are more cautious about how they spend money and will be looking to cut corners and leave off extra expenditure where they can so won't replace their boiler for example unless they really have to!!

There's lots of huffing and puffing in the construction industry at the moment about kick starting it off with new build projects, new towns on both brown and green belt sites, until they stop talking about and start implementing these projects the construction industry will remain dead as a Dodo. It will only work though if they are building affordable housing for everyone not the select few luxury apartments that are beyond the general publics wage packet and on top of that you then need to get the banks to start offering mortgages, without them lending with a reasonable deposit there is no point in even digging the foundations let alone hanging a front door.....

Funnily enough I have just been reading the Daily Mail and just read this, which kind of proves my point....