The First Thing Businesses Cut in a Downturn Is Exactly What Grew Ours to $120 Million

Global layoffs have been piling up. We’ve seen Amazon slash 16,000 corporate roles, UPS downsize 30,000 operational jobs and Nestlé cut 16,000 positions. But for most business owners, cutting staff should not be the first move when cash flow gets tight.

That’s because revenue problems can often be marketing problems in disguise.

Oftentimes, there are ways you can cut back or improve revenue flow without resorting to layoffs — and I have real-world experience with this.

In 2008, I made a marketing decision that crippled my revenue until 2010. In 2020, a similar situation arose during the pandemic, but this time I tried another tactic, and the results set my business on a new trajectory that led to us nearly doubling revenue in 5 years — from $64 million to nearly $120 million.

Here’s exactly what I did and how you can put it to use for your business.

1. Stay consistent with your marketing to avoid drops in leads and revenue

During the 2008 housing market crash and subsequent recession, my business PostcardMania suffered a drastic hit because 46% of our clients were in the mortgage and real estate industries. When we lost a majority of our customers and revenue, I was dead set against laying anyone off, so I took a pay cut and — against my better judgment — I also cut back on my marketing.

That was a huge mistake.

The following year was even worse, and I wasn’t even sure we were going to make payroll. Revenue was down about 15%, over a million less than in 2008. I raised our marketing back to pre-crash levels and even increased it a bit. We recovered quickly, and 2010 became a new record-high year for revenue.

Marketing saved us back then, and it saved us again in 2020 when the pandemic hit and thousands of small businesses (my clients) were forced to close their doors. Our revenue dropped drastically in an instant — almost in half. This time, I closed my eyes, said a prayer and told them to keep the marketing going. We’d pay marketing and payroll and deal with everything else when it ended.

I had learned my lesson from 2008. What followed truly changed my business:

• Leads increased 9.24% (an extra 186 leads per week) in the six months following, without any extra spend. With competitors pausing their marketing, ours was more effective than ever.
• We went from 41% down on weekly revenue during the shutdowns to ending 2020 with a new all-time high (10% up) in annual revenue and then ending 2021 over 30% up.
• From May 2020 to 2021, we hired an additional 106 people.

If you focus on strengthening your marketing instead of shrinking your team, you give your business the best chance to survive tough times and come out stronger on the other side.

2. Make conversion a priority — you could be missing opportunities

Marketing consistently has kept my company strong, but it’s just one piece of the puzzle. Another piece: ensuring your marketing channels are optimized to convert interested prospects into real leads that you can follow up with.

Start with your website. If it’s cluttered, confusing or slow, you’re losing prospects immediately. Clear copy, lead capture forms and calls to action are essential. Even simple fixes, like a pop-up form or a better offer in exchange for an email address, can make a big difference.

Most visitors won’t buy on their first visit, so follow-up matters. Use digital ad retargeting through opt-in cookies, which is when your website logs a visitor and follows them online with your business ads. Retargeted ads keep your business visible and top of mind.

You can take this even further by going offline. When someone visits but doesn’t convert, trigger a postcard to their home. This gives your business even more staying power. Now your prospects aren’t just seeing you everywhere online; they also have a printed mail piece sitting inside their home. Studies show that business mail is read 4.8 times at home and stays in a household for up to 8.6 days.

You can trigger mail based on online behaviors like page visits, cart abandonment or time on site — but timing is key. That mail should hit within a couple of days, while your business is still top of mind.

Conversion comes down to tightening every step of the customer journey.

3. Get super organized with your follow-up flow to increase sales long-term

Conversion is the ultimate goal, but you also want to stay in regular communication with all of your contacts at every step of the sales funnel — both before and after the sale. A Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) helps you stay organized as a business owner so that you know exactly which stage each person is in and can tailor your follow-up accordingly.

At its most basic level, a CRM organizes information about your leads, customers and marketing efforts. But it can also integrate with automated follow-up tools, which means you don’t have to constantly manage consistency on your own — the system does it for you once it’s set up.

I suggest setting up specific triggers that will put these tools into action at pivotal moments. Such as:

• When a prospect contacts you (or goes a certain time without contacting you)
• If a subscription is ending or a service anniversary is upcoming
• If a pivotal season or holiday is coming up

And those are just a handful of possibilities. The key is to identify the moments that matter most in your customer journey and set triggers around them.

Common follow-up actions include a welcome email after customers sign up, a text reminder when they leave items in their cart or a follow-up postcard after requesting details.

Once you have these systems built and running, marketing consistently becomes hassle-free.

At the end of the day, layoffs shouldn’t be your first move. They should be your last resort. I’ve been in that position, staring at the numbers and wondering how to protect the business and the people who helped build it. What I learned is that the right marketing strategy can give you options you didn’t think you had.