Okay, I’ll be the first to propose that no active living business person has been through what you and I have just experienced: the Great Recession. Think about it: considering the Great Depression, which started in late 1929 with the stock market crash, if today you were an active business person who is 80-years old, you were born on Monday, January 8, 1934. If you are a 90-year old business person, I question how active you are in day-to-day business today, not to mention that you probably would have had a lemonade stand in the later part of the 1930s (which I’ll discount as running a true small business).
The point I’m making is this. Take a bow. If you are reading these words, you’ve literally survived the Great Recession. It’s now time to thrive in 2014. Why can I make these assumptions? Because the job reports are trending favorable. Today, ADP released its monthly jobs report showed growth approaching 250,000 jobs added in December. Annualized – that’s approaching 3-million jobs in 2014. Wall Street pundits are rushing to “true that” this morning. From there, it’s very simple. If you have a job, you spend money!
Here’s my guide for you to consider moving forward:
- Niche on SMBs who are hiring, not firing. At a very basic level, read the local business journal for hiring notices and leasing wins/real estate transactions. Also, peruse the new business license applicants in your local business journal. Do not read the obituaries. Contact growing firms who need new IT goods and services.
- Align with the big dogs. Say what you must about Microsoft, but I’m offering that you should pivot your messaging to “devices and services,” so you are leveraging its marketing message. This is a wake-up call for the server baby sitters who are still mourning Small Business Server’s demise.
- Migrations and Office 365. I’ll repeat myself from my original 2014 predictions. Spend the first six months in 2014 focused on migrations. Spend the second half focused on Office 365, which is ramping for prime time in 2015.
- Education. This is always an evergreen strategy. Hopefully you used the Great Recession and associated downtime to retrain yourself. It’s an on-going strategy and you can learn at any time. I’d suggest you consider our traveling Emerging Technology Tour featuring PowerShell programming (HERE) and our Million Mile Migration Madness tour workshops (this week in SoCal, next week in NYC and Charolette; details at www.xpmigrations.com).
- Attitude. You know it’d make a world of difference if you were more positive moving forward. I understanding being wounded by the recession – truly. Have a stiff drink, get over it and move forward. Is singer Don Henley said in his 1984 hit “The Boys of Summer” that you “never look back.”
