by Ronald Manalastas

Created on: June 30, 2010

While recession continues to run as a powerful business killer, small business owners have inherent set of distinct advantages – speed, flexibility, and manageability – that can help mitigate or neutralize recessional difficulties. Unlike their counterparts in many large business organizations, small business owners can quickly make important decisions, change business models, adopt new operational paradigms, and manage new growth objectives based on their internal capacity to respond to external factors of business.

To leverage these distinct advantages to a sustainable position of strength amid recessional pains, it is best for small business owners to adopt the following basic strategies:

1. Practice quality

The exercise of continuing improvement provides small business owners with high quality thinking and decision making. It is essential that small business owners be driven by a strong appetite for new knowledge about products, markets, technologies, processes, regulations, competition, and other external factors affecting their operations, including best-practice approaches in business. Small business owners must strive to think out of the box to the extent of doing strategic benchmarking with key competitors and knowing other points of reference beyond their respective industries.

The practice of quality connotes continuously chasing perfection, not being comfortable with the status quo and always seeking differentiators for the business. The practice involves a mindset of non-contentment with mediocre or average performance as it represents a relentless effort to excel against the harsh odds of recession. In essence, it cuddles the idea of being big through well-thought plans and actions befitting an organization without the luxury of resources to bear the impact of blurred vision, lapse in processes, and erroneous judgment.

2. Strengthen cash flow-consciousness

Extended serious cash flow problem has been the nemesis of many businesses regardless of size. The phrase “cash is king” has an immortal business value, more particularly for small business owners. Many small businesses have failed to take off or experience the brighter side of the enterprise due to sudden closure engendered by irreversible cash-strapped operations.  

While practicing quality, it is difficult for the small business owner to miss the importance of having sufficient cash reserve to support business operations at any given time. The business owner would

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