The best part of every busing is being able to win the trust of new customers, knowing your business is solving the problems of the mass community in every Conner of the globe. But watching your business going down the drain and not knowing the cause or what exactly to do to revive a business can be so heart breaking.  Worst is that many entrepreneurs don’t notice their business is taking a recessive twist until it finally clashes.

All businesses have one or two warning signs to signal that there are failing before it finally clashed. Some of these signs include; reduce sales, losing loyal customers, no new customers, not being able to pay employees and bills.

If you are an entrepreneur and notice any of these signs, it’s safer to take action immediately. You can still revive a business before it reaches the point of no return. Below are 10 concrete strategies to revive failing businesses, this include changing business model, finding the problems, changing marketing strategies, you can take to revive a business before it runs into catastrophe.

 

1.     Business Revival Strategies: Find the Problem

This is the first essential thing to do. Try to find where there are lapses, what is causing them and only then can you be sure to tackle the problem squarely.

Look at it this way. You are in a boat on the high sea and suddenly, water start to enter the boat. The first thing to do to ensure your safety is not maybe to stops the engine. The first thing is to try and figure out what is causing the water to enter. Stopping the engine may only add more fuel to an already worst situation.

A thriving business can fail for plenty of reasons. Example; business not changing proportionately with the market, competitors may be taking your customers, a more better product may have been introduce, your sales team lack skills and experience. 

Things you can do to identify the problem; try going back to when sales and profit were at their best. Then ask questions like;

• What changes after such period?
• Are there any new competitors?
• How are my customers’ relations since then?
• Did I fail to update my product offerings?
• What about advertising, did I improve?
• What is the prevailing economic situation?

Often times, it’s better to hire an expert to be able to objectively find the problem. If you can narrow the reasons businesses fail to a few or just one, you’ll be able to focus your business revival strategies or efforts.

 

2.    Business Revival Strategies: Revive Your Marketing

Following recent statistics, it has been proven that 8 out of every 10 (80%) businesses that failed were due to poor marketing strategies.

At this point, let your customers speak to you. Go back to them and ask them what they want, how they want it and whether you can supply it. While is a worthy exercise to every business, to an entrepreneur in trouble waters, it’s a necessary move before thinking of investing significant efforts in an attempted business revival strategies. If you’re an online business, ask your customers for their reviews or comments on the product or send them emails seeking their reviews.

You may discover that your customers are still loyal to your product but you aren’t making it available to them in a way they can purchase. For example, if you advertise exclusively on a local radio and your customers are now getting their news mostly online, they will not get your ads. Retargeting your pricing, advertising channels and other aspects of marketing strategies that have gone astray can revive a business in a hurry.

One of the best and least expensive ways of reviving a business’ marketing is through direct e-mails and the price of renting a new list, you can conquer new markets.

Other marketing strategies that can cost-effectively reach new or existing customers include developing relationships through social media such as Twitter and Facebook, leveraging search engine marketing strategies and geographically targeted offers with the likes of discount websites. You can get up valuable insights into how you may be able to market more effectively by using free online business resources.

 

3.     Business Revival Strategies: Know Your Customers Better

This may just be your missing lead. No knowing your customers is a fatal error a business can make. You can’t be supplying shoe size 44 to your customers whose shoe sizes ranges between 40 and 43. Unless you’re really clued in to your niche, know what makes your customers tick, and understand their problems; you’ll do a terrible job trying to present an appropriate solution.

It’s best if you carry out a little market research, talk to your target audiences. Talk to actual customers. Use surveys, ask questions on social media and solve the riddle of how to connect with each type of customer you’ve got.

 

4.     Business Revival Strategies: Rejuvenate Offering

By carefully and objectively evaluating your customers’ needs and desires can help you find ways you can change your product or services to meet those needs. For example, in the process of studying why your auto spare parts business is struggling, you may realize that the best thing to do is to include a mechanical repair workshop.

Understanding the reasons businesses fail or why your business isn’t working is essential but that alone won’t always provide a way to make it work. Therefore, when you find yourself in that situation, seek expert advice. It may be best to talk to other entrepreneurs in the same or similar business that seems to be succeeding. Find out what they are doing differently that is making them to be thriving. It may be something as relatively minor as changing the packaging or change in the flavouring in the case of canned food.

There is also a possibility that your product hasn’t changed but your customers have. For instance, if you are operating a restaurant serving European dishes in a locality and that neighbourhood becomes dominated by Americans or Asians. Your classic European dishes won’t entice them.  If such is the case, changing your offering to reflect the needs and desires of your new demographic could not only revive sales but raise them higher than ever.

On the other hand, customers themselves can stay the same but due to technological or other changes their needs shift dramatically. Such scenario occurred recently in the laptop computer market where with the introduction of Apple’s iPad, tablet computer in 2010 the once hot sellers, laptops suddenly fell out of consumers attention, forcing manufacturers, software developers, retailers, and others to reassess their products and strategies.

 

5.     Business Revival Strategies: Re-pricing

Sometimes, the problem may just be around the price, either being higher or lower than you can make ends meet. It’s important you take out time, study your prices in relation to other market conditions like the purchasing power of your customers, your cost of production and implement the best for your products.  

Pricing products tends to be easier than pricing services. This is because with your products, you know what it cost you to buy the raw materials or make those products, so prices can be determined readily easy based on desired profit margin. But this is not as straight forward with services, even with business services. You’ve to factor in things like Internet service, salary, electricity bills and other office expenses.

If your price is low, don’t double it overnight. Instead, try raising prices for new clients only and observe what the market will bear. If you’re getting negative response, the stake may be high that you might have raised them too much. But if you’re closing sales too easily, you might have the possibility to raise those rates even more.

 

6.     Business Revival Strategies: Changing Business Model

While changing business model may sound like a simple idea, it’s the most challenging technique you can try to save your business. To an entrepreneur struggling to set-off bills, pay the rent, changing their business model can be a difficult, if not impossible task. Still, it can be done.

A good example of a business that has been force to change model is the telephone solicitors. In the past, calls to consumers’ homes offered an inexpensive way to market a variety of goods and services. But the wide availability of answering machines enabled consumers to select calls, rejecting those that appeared to come from telemarketers. Furthermore, new regulations further tightly limited the acceptable hours and purposes for such calls, and the increasing presence of caller ID sealed the deal. Now call centers that used to serve telephone marketers are devoted to technical support, customer service, and similar functions.

 

7.     Business Revival Strategies: Alternative Financing

With the global economic facing a downward recessive nature, most big financial institutions won’t give you a loan. When conventional lending sources like banks aren’t willing to help you come up with the money you need to keep your business running, alternative financial institutions may. Crowdfunding for example allows you to raise funds for small business from online businesses and instead of repaying your donor; you offer them gifts (why this system is also known as reward crowdfunding). This method of fund raising is now very popular among small business. 

Peer-to-peer (P2P) Online Business lending is another good option. Here, people go online to lend and borrow money directly to each other. You get easy business loans compared to traditional banks once you fulfilled all the requirements. The advantage here is that you get easy business loans on the other hand; their interest rates are one of the highest in the industry.

Finally, bankruptcy has proven a last-ditch answer for many businesses struggling with intractable financial issues. But you can still get your finances back in order and take necessary measures to become profitable again.

 

8.     Business Revival Strategies: Reduce Costs

Though this may not be a lovable action to most business owners, but sometimes it’s necessary. You may be able to reduce or cut your costs enough to keep going by shutting down some locations or branches, or even the entire business temporarily. If labor costs proof to be the major portion of your expenses, you may be able to use temporary, contract, or outsourced employees to replace higher-cost, permanent workers.

 

9.     Business Revival Strategies: Handling Growth

You started small and didn’t expect to burgeon overnight. Just ask any business that’s ever been the recipient of the “Groupon Effect” or Oprah Effect” and then had a flood of sales the next day. Rapid growth isn’t always a blessing. If you’re not prepared for the strain your servers will experience, the flood of customer service calls or the number of sales to process, you risk seriously harming your brand’s reputation.

Rapid scaling should be a good thing, but you need a plan to quickly hire more staff and train them, as well as how you’ll manage more website traffic, phone calls, and customer service requests.

 

10.     Business Revival Strategies: Recognize Reality

In the real world not every business survives. If you are unable to pay employees, have an essential line of credit cut off, or get dropped by critical suppliers, the decision may be made for you. At times the best you can do is realize that there is no hope and shut down the business while you can still do so in an orderly fashion.

 

Restating can be easily said than done but if you try all the strategies listed here and you are still face with the hard reality of survival, there may be nothing you can do about it. Accept the hard truth and close it systematically.

Hopefully, your small business will be wildly successful and you will never have to face the prospect or the complications of winding it down. But, if you do find yourself faced with the hard realities of failure, it’s always helpful to know that you are not the first nor second, neither shall you be the last.

Having a failed business is not the end of the world neither is it the end of your business ventures. Many successful entrepreneurs you meet today may have a one in a life time fail business. Your ability to learn from failure would likely end up in a better place than you were when you started the business that failed.