GoFaxer Blog

In a recent article by Bill Fleckenstein, he says that pessimism is called for in the coming economic future. I know that this isn’t what you small business owners want to hear. But it may be the truth.

Some people think that the embarrassing collapse and rescue of Bear Stearns was the low point of a system that is turning around. But Fleckenstein doesn’t buy it.

The overwhelming reality is that both the collapse of the real estate bubble and the credit crisis, have combined to create and extremely unstable economic situation for the near future. It’s for this reason that many economists aren’t feeling optimistic.

One is forced to ask the “Therefore what?” question in regards to their small business. I think that the first thing that one needs to realize is that although tough times may be ahead, the market won’t completely collapse.

There still is opportunity out there. There still is good reason to think positively about the long term future. As long as there’s innovation, with genuinely great new products that people want to buy, the long term forecast will always be postive.

With that opportunity, comes a greater responsibility for young and small businesses to be extremely wise with their financial expenditures. Anyway to cut costs, be it using less paper through fax services via the Internet, or saving money on electricity through more efficient light bulbs, now is the time to do it.

Aside from looking for new innovations like online fax, small business owners are always looking for advice from the big guys. Jack Welch might exemplify the American business leader.

When I was first looking into the business world, trying to decide whether there was a place for me, I picked up legendary GE CEO Jack Welch’s book, “Jack: Straight From the Gut.” If you haven’t read this you need to go out this weekend, buy it, and read the entire thing from cover to cover.

Jack Welch might seem a little full of himself, but frankly, in terms of business, he sort of should be. He knows how to take a very big company and make it a monster. Consequently, you should probably know what he has to say about the subject if you’re running a small business of your own.

One of his central themes is setting stretch goals. He says that at GE they would set goals that reflected their dreams. These goals represented the highest possible result that they thought was reasonably possible.

The result was a company culture that never hit their goals but they always did far better than they would have without the goal. This culture was always ambitious, shooting for the moon and getting far better results than anyone else could have projected.

As I’ve stated many times before, the floundering economy means tough times ahead for small business owners. Although there will be obvious efforts to cut costs, including ditching the fax machine for Internet fax technology, there is one major advantage that many employers are forgetting.

Now is the perfect time to hire. Why? Business is the art of upgrading your team. And the jobs market has been flooded with possible new hires. This means that you’ve got a new selection of potentially great employees. It’s a buyers market for hiring.

Bloomberg.com reports that the U.S. lost 80,000 jobs in March. That’s 80,000 potential new hires that have flooded the market. Now, granted, a lot of them may not be great picks, hence their firing, but a some of them may be really great people that just found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Even though your own P&L may not be looking great, now may be the time to let go of a few low performers, while hiring a few really great new players. Restructuring can be painful sometimes, but now is probably the perfect time to do it. If your current set up is working well, don’t go kill the work horse, but if you’ve got problems it’s time to find some new blood.