Davenports – Helping you through the economic crisis

As the economic crisis starts to bite, often the first to feel it are the small businesses. However, there are many steps that can be taken in order to reduce the effects and to ensure that you come out the other end stronger and ready to take advantage of recovery. Davenports have a range of offerings that are designed to re-enforce all of the accepted advice on business survival. Here are our top tips and how we will address them for you.

1. Control expenditure

Every business has scope for reducing costs. You should be carrying out an audit of all of your expenditure and a good place to start is with your true costs of paper processing. Using Davenports all processing is electronic ensuring that postage and printing costs are reduced whilst also reducing your carbon footprint at the same time.

2. Collect debts with enthusiasm

Many small businesses find that payments to them are late and that valuable management time is taken up with chasing debts. Davenports can manage all of your debt problems leaving you free to develop new markets and position yourself for recovery.

3. Focus marketing

Too many businesses cut their marketing costs when times are hard. The surviving companies continue to market but focus their work so as to get the maximum return on their marketing investment. Disappearing from the radar is a sure fire way of people thinking you have gone. Davenports can assist you in keeping a strong presence in the marketplace through their web design services.

4. Maintain and improve quality

In difficult times the customer has to feel valued. You need to ensure that you are offering a level of service that reflects this. Paying your bills on time and processing in a professional manner all helps to convince people that you are a reputable business. Davenports accountancy services linked to debt management can ensure that you provide a quality service whilst also ensuring that you do not run into cashflow problems.

5. Don’t be complacent

You may feel that you have everything under control and that you have all the suppliers that you need. However, if you are finding things tight so may many of your suppliers. By choosing Davenports you not only have a supplier with a long track record of quality service delivery, you also minimise your dependence on suppliers by using one supplier for a number of services. Sensible businesses always have an alternative in these difficult times.

6. Be honest about your business

Burying your head in the sand about the true state of your business will do you no good and will probably lead to things getting worse. Davenports understand that it is difficult in today’s business world to be perfect at everything. We are realistic enough to accept the shortcomings of our clients and we are happy to work with them to resolve them. One of our favourite phrases with our clients is that we offer to ‘unmuddle’ things for them. So let us help you to face up to the challenges within your business.

7. Position yourself for recovery

In order to be best placed for recovery you need time to innovate and develop new markets. This is impossible to do if you spend all of your waking day fire-fighting and trying to survive to the next dawn. Davenports service offerings are designed to leave you free to be the innovator that you started out as before the economic situation started to bite.
We are not someone that wants to tell you what to do. We are an organisation that exists to work in partnership with you, releasing your potential to return to being a business owner, not a business slave. All of our offerings are designed to tackle the real problems facing you and businesses like you. They aim to ensure that we will be working together in the good times as well as the present ones.

8. Take responsibility for your own destiny

In difficult times it is easy to do nothing and blame everything from the Government to the problems with mortgages on the other side of the Atlantic. The trouble with that approach is that failure becomes a self fulfilling prophesy. Those businesses that use this time to strengthen the way they do business, position themselves for new markets and see the present situation as an opportunity for the future will be the ones to benefit. Davenports exists to help those that want to look for a way forward rather than those that want to adopt a blame philosophy. Remember:

There are three types of people in this world –

Those that make things happen
Those that watch things happen
Those that say ‘what the hell happened’.

If you want to be someone that makes things happen,please contact Jason Davenport on 01865 52 29 52. or visit www.davenportenterprises.co.uk