One thing i have seen following posts on LinkedIn and Twitter is times are getting tough.
Here i am on my 51st trip around the Sun, and to be honest, i do not recall when times were not tough. They are far tougher now but for seemingly decades times have been tough. Cost of living was always hard but not as hard as it is now.
As i am sat here typing this, i am reading of businesses i once saw prosper and grow are now having to consider redundancies. Taking on perm staff is great. You have their talent and capability on tap. But then there becomes the problem, you have to pay them. No matter whether you have work for them, they are not agency or freelance, they cannot simply be told to go home.
For me, i have never engaged anyone FT permanently, never had that many resources. Not for the want of trying. For me i have always tried to keep my outgoings low (getting harder now) and the income higher. However, thats the problem, there isnt the money in the market. Parents simply do not have cash to spend.
Many are self educating the GCSE Astronomy, rather than sign up for help. Paying us for a service we offer to sign off their tasks. for me, its not a service i really want to offer, i would rather they signed up. Someone paying £35 then bombarding me with emails regarding it is simply not on. So to try to recession proof my business, i was forced to put the price of this service up. That won’t go down well with many Home Educators, but sadly thats it, 5-6 of those buying that service, i would rather they signed up to my GCSE Astronomy programme.
The latter too has had to go from a flat fee to a subscription service. I am not sure its popular with many but it makes it more accessible to those who cannot afford £155 upfront. Plus it makes it fairer in the length of support some recieve. One thing is for sure, its a challenging change, tweaking things little by little to ensure what we charge is far for what we deliver. But also for what people can afford.
I think if i have learned one lesson its we need to adapt. Yes times are tough, people have less money to spend but they do still have it. I have thought about it and come to the conclusion the last industries to lose out are
a) Pets
b) Children
c) Education
With the A, people will always invest in their pets, they will need food and we like to spoil them. I do not often see Pets at Home without customers
b) Children, what don’t they need, food, clothes, toys, and we deny them nothing. And that includes my third point
c) Education
No matter how hard times are parents will invest in education, its their children’s future after all. ( tend to hover here.
But above all one big lesson i have learned is the importance of diversifying, considering doing something completely different from your norm. I struggled for years to enter the E-Learning industry, managed a brief stint with the OU and that was it. No matter what i built, achieved, not good enough.
So now i focus on my ability to teach STEM subjects. There will always be work there.
But i also did First Aid Training, PC Repair, PC training. Anything i could make money from. Even did CV’s at one time (one of my clients was in the job centre!).
Sometimes when times are hard and you have fewer ingredients to work with, its time to get creative and that means being open minded as to what you do. To achieve that, sometimes the best inspiration can come from an ad in Social Media.