{"id":2339,"date":"2013-11-27T18:02:06","date_gmt":"2013-11-27T18:02:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/startwp.logomaker.com\/blog\/2013\/11\/27\/small-business-headed-decline\/"},"modified":"2024-03-07T16:09:48","modified_gmt":"2024-03-07T16:09:48","slug":"small-business-headed-decline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/startwp.logomaker.com\/blog\/small-business-headed-decline\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Your Small Business Headed for Decline?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-4955\" src=\"https:\/\/startwp.logomaker.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/Closed.jpg\" alt=\"Closed Small Business Decline\" width=\"240\" height=\"160\">Every fews months (often longer), direct mail guru and copywriting genius, Alan Rosenspan, sends out his newsletter (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.alanrosenspan.com\/newsletter.html\" target=\"_blank\" aria-label=\"(Opens a new window)\" rel=\"noopener\">subscribe here<\/a>). It&#8217;s one of our favorites and always includes an item or two worth thinking about. This past week, the newsletter posed this question from Jerry Reitman, ex-head of Ogilvy &amp; Mather Direct and integrated&nbsp;marketing at Leo Burnett:<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>\u201cWhat do you think are the first early indicators that your business&nbsp;is in a state of long-term decline?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>This is how Mr. Rosenspan answered:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>1. The demographics turn against you. You may be serving a&nbsp;customer base that is either not growing or shrinking. An example&nbsp;would be the cigar industry, although they have been somewhat&nbsp;successful in attracting younger people and also women.<\/p>\n<p>2. Your costs are going up, but not your revenue. If you cannot&nbsp;charge more for your product, or enhance it in any way, you will&nbsp;gradually surrender your margin as all other costs increase, such as&nbsp;labor, distribution and even raw materials.<\/p>\n<p>This is also true of your marketing costs. If the cost of acquiring a&nbsp;customer keeps going up\u2014but the value of the customer stays about&nbsp;the same\u2014you will soon be in trouble.<\/p>\n<p>3. You have a limited product range. If you only sell one or two&nbsp;products, it\u2019s much harder to increase customer value.<\/p>\n<p>4. Your company is not innovating\u2014while others in the category&nbsp;are. As the title of a recent business book read, \u201cIt\u2019s not the big that&nbsp;eat the small; it\u2019s the fast that eat the slow.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>5. You are experiencing more customer dissatisfaction. This is&nbsp;sometimes hard to detect\u2014for example, if you work through channels&nbsp;or agents\u2014but it\u2019s always worth exploring. Early indicators might be&nbsp;lapsing customers, higher return rates, shrinking distribution.<\/p>\n<p>6. You\u2019re in the \u201cmiddle\u201d with limited added value. Technology has&nbsp;enabled customers to bypass the middle and buy directly from&nbsp;producers. For example, the travel industry looks very different now&nbsp;than it has in the past.<\/p>\n<p>7. You sell a commodity\u2014like books, CDs or DVDs. This makes&nbsp;you especially vulnerable because people can buy the same items&nbsp;from anyone else. You need to create something that makes your&nbsp;company different and better.<\/p>\n<p>We are living in an age where almost any business can be&nbsp;marginalized, virtually overnight. If any of these warning signs are&nbsp;true of your company, you need to act quickly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Good questions for any small business owner to ponder. And if the startup you\u2019re working on has one or more of these characteristics, you may want to think twice about the idea\u2014or even better, think about how you can avoid the pitfall of business decline.<\/p>\n<p><em>Photo credit: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/mlrs193\/6015396482\/\">Nick Papakyriazis<\/a> via <a href=\"http:\/\/photopin.com\">photopin<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/2.0\/\">cc<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Every fews months (often longer), direct mail guru and copywriting genius, Alan Rosenspan, sends out his newsletter (subscribe here). It&#8217;s one of our favorites and always includes an item or two worth thinking about. This past week, the newsletter posed this question from Jerry Reitman, ex-head of Ogilvy &amp; Mather Direct and integrated&nbsp;marketing at Leo [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":2332,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,42,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-advice","category-start-ups","category-success"],"blocksy_meta":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Is Your Small Business Headed for Decline? | LogoMaker<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Nothing lasts forever. Is your small business headed for the end\u2014here are a few indicators that your small business may be declining or headed for the end.||Nothing lasts forever. Is your small business headed for the end\u2014here are a few indicators that your small business may be declining or headed for the end.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Is Your Small Business Headed for Decline? | LogoMaker\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Nothing lasts forever. Is your small business headed for the end\u2014here are a few indicators that your small business may be declining or headed for the end.||Nothing lasts forever. Is your small business headed for the end\u2014here are a few indicators that your small business may be declining or headed for the end.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/startwp.logomaker.com\/blog\/small-business-headed-decline\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"LogoMaker\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2013-11-27T18:02:06+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2024-03-07T16:09:48+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/startwp.logomaker.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/Closed.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"240\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"160\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Amber Ooley\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Amber Ooley\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"2 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/startwp.logomaker.com\/blog\/small-business-headed-decline\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/startwp.logomaker.com\/blog\/small-business-headed-decline\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Amber Ooley\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/startwp.logomaker.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/5f0e84c2ffd89ceeefa1233736e28140\"},\"headline\":\"Is Your Small Business Headed for Decline?\",\"datePublished\":\"2013-11-27T18:02:06+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2024-03-07T16:09:48+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/startwp.logomaker.com\/blog\/small-business-headed-decline\/\"},\"wordCount\":485,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/startwp.logomaker.com\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/startwp.logomaker.com\/blog\/small-business-headed-decline\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/startwp.logomaker.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/Closed.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Advice\",\"Start-ups\",\"Success\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/startwp.logomaker.com\/blog\/small-business-headed-decline\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/startwp.logomaker.com\/blog\/small-business-headed-decline\/\",\"name\":\"Is Your Small Business Headed for Decline? | LogoMaker\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/startwp.logomaker.com\/blog\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/startwp.logomaker.com\/blog\/small-business-headed-decline\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/startwp.logomaker.com\/blog\/small-business-headed-decline\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/startwp.logomaker.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/Closed.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2013-11-27T18:02:06+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2024-03-07T16:09:48+00:00\",\"description\":\"Nothing lasts forever. 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