Tag Archive for: business slump

Even the most dynamic and driven entrepreneurs and professionals can find themselves falling into something of a professional slump at some point in their career. It’s not that things are going badly, it’s just that they’re not improving, the ideas have dried up, and it’s difficult to see the business adapting sufficiently to meet the inevitable challenges the future will bring.

When this situation strikes, and you find yourself in the doldrums, there are a few things you can do to work on revitalising your process and getting back on the upwards climb.

Work on encouraging more creative discussions in the company

Many businesses end up bringing in consultants in order to inject new ideas into their company. Sometimes this works, but often it’s just a smokescreen that covers up poor personnel management in the workplace.

If you have even a handful of team members working under you, it should be more than possible to summon up creative ideas in-house in order to streamline and improve your business processes and come up with viable solutions to the problems you may be experiencing.

The key issue is in the way that may managers deal with meetings and brainstorming sessions. Rather than throwing a big question out there such as “who has a viable solution in mind for this problem?” you should be opening up a more dynamic and less threatening space in which creative discussions can thrive.

The direction you take should be more along the lines of “I want you all to come up with an idea in the next few minutes, don’t worry about it being “good”, this is just to get the ball rolling”. When people feel comfortable sharing whatever’s on their mind, you can begin gathering novel thoughts and refining them with some work into viable and applicable strategies.

Broaden your knowledge of the business world in general

You may be a master of your own particular industry, but understanding how other, tangentially related parts of the broader business world work, will give you a useful degree of insight into how your role is affected by wider market forces.

This, in turn, can make you more dynamic in your ability to manoeuvre professionally.

You can begin expanding your knowledge in any area. What is forex? What beside-the-scenes constraints affect the performance of your key suppliers?

The main thing is that you begin expanding your understanding of market forces per se.

Consider branching out and expanding your services

Many companies begin with a laser-sharp focus, but expand and branch out their operations over time to encompass a greater range of services. Sometimes this can cause resources to be wasted, but at other times, it opens new markets and areas of innovation that had previously been untapped.

Is there something your clients need, that you’re not currently offering them but perhaps could? A “package deal” where more of their needs are served by a single trusted brand is often an attractive proposition, and it allows you to trade off the trust you’ve already built in your field.