SBA Loan Workout: Surviving the Downturn, Successfully Emerging!

It's been over a year and we all understand the recession is here to stay for a long while. There is little any of us can do about this fact of business life.

However, we can make the appropriate business adjustments to take full advantage of the reduced but available business activity, so we can all prosper and emerge successful, despite the economy.

Here are the three basic requirements:

1. Downsize

2. Re-invent your business equation

3. Do your debt workouts

Downsizing is easy: cut employees from each department, reduce your employee base to balance your current production needs and reduced budgets. Do not believe you cannot survive this downsize requirement, or that each person is crucial and irreplaceable to your operation, the remaining employees will fill in, will increase their productivity and will make you more money for less outlay. The biggest mistake small business owners make is not cutting fast enough or deep enough.

Re-invent your business equation. This is tougher to describe, but you must review your process, your market, your marketing and reconsider any sort of change that may make sense to increase profits, and decrease expenses and overhead. Outsourcing, focusing on one section of the market, changing pricing, adjusting product line, or services, changing billing procedures, everything you do must be inspected and either made better or possibly eliminated, but major systemic changes designed to increase profit and decrease costs are timely.

One client called off opening a new store and instead added to his sales force. Another shut down all manufacturing, outsourced it and became a sales and marketing business. Another increased vertical integration, manufacturing and distributing his own product and stop selling other manufacturers' product line. Internet marketing instead of traditional marketing and on it goes. Make the necessary changes you need to become immediately profitable.

Do your debt workout. This is also a crucial exercise. You must eliminate your excess debt your business is now supporting. This is critical for your long term survival. Failure to handle this will cost you your business in due time. Your revenues are down; your debt must come down also.

Implement these three strategies and you will survive and prosper from now on. Fail to implement these strategies and your business will soon fail also.