Tips for Successfully Fighting a Decline in Business

Declining growth can be difficult to handle especially if you don't know what to do. The ailing newspaper market across Europe and the United States gives business owners a new perspective on how technology changes the world and what owners can do to fight obsolescence in their business. As times change businesses need to get tough.

Consider Gavin O'Reilly's business the Independent News & Media company in Ireland. O'Reilly is the owner of the biggest news empire in Ireland but has been seeing his profits decline as other technologies take on more precedence with readers. He is not sitting back and watching the dollars decline as many other companies are doing. Instead O'Reilly isn't going to manage decline He is going to fight it.

Tip 1: Fight decline don't just try and manage decline.

There is a significant difference between fighting decline and managing it. Fighting decline means that a company is willing to do whatever it takes to make profit margins return to previous levels. This may require a company to implement dramatic changes in the way they do business such as structure, marketing techniques, customer's profiles, developing growth strategies, etc. Managing a decline means that companies will only do reactive things like cutting costs and laying-off workers in order to maintain profit margins. Eventually the market forces will catch up to the company and either force it into bankruptcy or make it susceptible to a take over.

Tip #2: Be willing to take some risks and change the structure of your business.

O'Reilly says, "It does not have to be the pattern for the industry. It is not just the UK quality market. The simple fact is that newspaper publishers need to invest in a growth strategy and most of them have not. Most of them sit there and accept that a general decline is almost a cost of doing business and we don't accept that (Milmo, 2004)."

The Independent News & Media Company was losing as much as 9 million pounds a year. Instead of letting the Company continued to decline they developed a compact version of their newspaper and went into the tabloid market. Immediately they began to see as much as an 18% increase in readership.

Tip #3: Change can bring problems. Overcome them.

That doesn't mean that change won't bring problems. The Independent got into a tiff with many advertisers over the prices they charged for column space. Therefore some of the customers left their market because they weren't happy with the changes and the new pricing structure. In the end, however, the Independent was able to handle these problems and build additional customers which brought it a profit.