Repositioning Your Business for the New Normal

My business partner and I attended an Agency Management Roundtable (AMR) meeting in early November with some pretty savvy marketing and public relations professionals who own small agencies across the country.  These entrepreneurs meet semi-annually to share best practices designed to improve the performance of their businesses.

After two days of swapping new ideas and advice about their agencies and doing business in a recession, it became clear that most of these agency owners face many of the same business challenges I do. Our discussion also reaffirmed that we need to plan for what likely will be the new “normal” way of doing business, even long after an economic recovery.

Here are a few of what we marketing types call the BGOs, or “Blinding, Glaring, Obvious” takeaways from my AMR experience. Many of these BGOs are not new concepts. But all are worth revisiting as we adjust our business plans for 2010: