“Most great people have attained their greatest success just one step beyond their greatest failure.” – Napolean Hill
Running a small business isn’t easy, even during the best of times. According the United States Small Business Association:
- 30% of small businesses fail within two years
- 50% fail within five years
- Only 25% of businesses last 15 years or longer
Any small business owner will tell you that running a small business is challenging. You have to manage a thousand moving pieces, ensuring that you stay on top of cash flow, employee performance, sales, marketing, and many other factors. Many owners struggle to manage all the different elements, and their business struggles as a result.
When circumstances get tough, running a business becomes an even greater challenge. Throughout the years, many events have occurred that placed a squeeze on businesses:
- The Great Depression
- World War I and World War II
- The Cold War
- The 2008 housing market collapse
- The 2020 coronavirus pandemic
During these difficult times, many small businesses folded under the pressure. They simply weren’t able to keep going.
But many businesses have survived these incredibly challenging circumstances. Some of them have even thrived. In the early 1920s, Prohibition prevented the sale of alcohol in the United States. As you can imagine, this made things difficult for producers of alcohol.
But many companies adapted and came up with creative ways to save their businesses:
- Yuengling made ice cream
- Pabst made cheese
- Coors produced dinnerware
- Schlitz churned out chocolate
- Stevens Point Brewery went into the soft drink business
The point is that your business can make it through hard times. You’ll need to get creative. You’ll have to take decisive action. And you’ll need to make tough decisions. You need to pivot, but you can do it!
In his book How The Mighty Fall, Jim Collins wrote:
The signature of the truly great versus the merely successful is not the absence of difficulty, but the ability to come back from setbacks, even cataclysmic catastrophes, stronger than before. Great nations can decline and recover. Great companies can fall and recover. Great social institutions can fall and recover. And great individuals can fall and recover. As long as you never get entirely knocked out of the game, there remains always hope.
Don’t give up. There is always hope!
In this small business survival guide, you’ll discover effective steps to take that will help your business thrive in the midst of difficult times. Doing these things won’t make things “easier,” but they could be the difference between your business surviving or dying.
– Chapter 1 from :The Entrepreneurs Survival Guide (How To Thrive During Challenging Times)”, Ellen Tyler