IF YOU WANT your wide-format printing business to be poised for a bright and colorful future, here’s how to build brand resilience.
1. Use force multipliers to amplify effort. These are tools, habits, processes, or people that significantly increase the potential of accomplishing your goals as a business. Catalysts that create extraordinary results. Meditating before work, taking a walk at lunch, hiring a virtual assistant, using project management software, becoming more optimistic, using paid media instead of less efficient forms of advertising are all force multipliers. They cause a chain reaction of positive events and outcomes. This year, each PSP must learn to find constructive alternatives to anxiety-promoting thinking. During times of crisis, what keeps your business mentally healthy centers around the small choices you make every day. How much of your energy are you wasting on paranoia?
2. Set healthy time boundaries. The best part about working for someone else is, every day at six o’clock, you can just walk out the door and leave. And you don’t even have to entertain another thought about work until the next day. But when you own the business, you can’t do that. The business never leaves you, even when you leave. For many independent business owners, this level of responsibility is attractive and invigorating. My friend who lives in Paris runs a custom jewelry business. She jokes that her staff works full time, but she works all the time. And her tip for resilience is healthy boundaries. Her rule is, she doesn’t check her phone for the first hour after she wakes up and doesn’t watch or read any news for the last hour before she goes to sleep. Also, France’s employer’s union has a legally binding labor agreement that requires staff to switch off their phones after 6 p.m. That’s why her staff comes back each day rested and ready to sell. How might you set limits on your team’s energy output?
3. Go slow enough to capitalize on novelty. My biggest advantage as a business owner has always been speed. Velocity has afforded me opportunities most entrepreneurs will never get. Resilience and speed are natural allies. But speed can end up hurting innovation. Every once in a while, it’s key to go slow enough so that if you run into something interesting, you have a chance to take advantage of it. For example, during the first stages of building my new software as a service platform, Prolific, my energy and enthusiasm were so high, it was hard to sleep. But a part of me also knew there was no rush. My team’s progress needed to be steady and incremental. Every day, new research yielded insights that made our product better, which was more valuable than hastily launching three months earlier. Figure out your unique balance. Don’t move so slowly that accumulated inertia is impossible to overcome, and don’t move so quickly that you rob yourself of the chance for meaningful growth.
Should you move fast or take your time?
Ultimately, despite the uncertain climate in which we live, you can still be the most resilient independent business owner you know. Use these tips to bounce back and move forward into that bright and colorful future.