Effective immediately, become the owner of your store. This is very much the same advice Tom Peters gave a decade or more ago when he told us all to become the CEO of our career. The reason I want you to think store and store owner is because it’s a little more accurate to the climate, even if you’re within a huge corporation.

Store owners think in fairly simple terms. Is there enough money coming in? No? What can I do to get more? Am I spending too much money? How can I cut back? Stores run with a simple balance sheet mentality that helps you understand quite quickly the very basics of the business.

You can apply this to how you think about your own career, and/or to your offerings. If you’re not thinking about what you do as offerings, that might be a good first step. You might just be “an” employee, but you could envision yourself as a store owner in a larger marketplace, and that would probably help you better prepare for 2009.

How a Store Owner Thinks

Sam Walton came back from the war and bought a Ben Franklin store in Newport, Arkansas. He ran it better than a lot of other Ben Franklin owners. Here’s an example: one day, a guy came into the store saying he had an entire truckload of ladies nylons that he couldn’t return to the manufacturer, and the destination store couldn’t take them either.

Sam bought them in a heartbeat. He knew that he could sell them super cheap and get people into his store, where they’d buy other products. It worked. He started selling more than any other Ben Franklin in the area.

The story goes that franchise management for Ben Franklin didn’t like this, that they told Sam to stop it, and that Sam decided to go it his own way. He picked up a new store and called it Walton’s Five and Dime. Not too much further down the road, Sam started Wal-Mart.

What Sam did wasn’t amazing, wasn’t huge, wasn’t a genius play unto itself. He simply figured out what customers want and he gave it to them. His view: give them the best possible value for the lowest possible price. Don’t be cheap for cheap’s sake. Find the middle. He was a store owner that came up with a solution.

How Store Owners View Downturns

In this economic downturn, a store owner will do a few things. She will strengthen her existing relationships with customers. She will strengthen her relationships with suppliers, and perhaps work to understand which of her suppliers are having a tough time (so that she can find alternatives or maybe even help out). Store owners will look for new customers to handle the potential attrition a bad time might bring, so that customer numbers stay somewhat solid.

Can you see how this extends into your own business? If you’re an employee, have you started thinking about your suppliers (your company) and looked into how alternative relationships might form? Are you seeking out new ways to be useful during this time? Have you thought about which of your products might be more useful to others in the coming economic climate?

Now is the time to treat your career and/or your business as if you’re a simple store owner. Look for ways to strengthen your relationships with customers. Look for ways to manage your suppliers (employers). Look for the ways you will need to earn more, cut more, and balance your financial needs.

Does this make sense to you? How do you apply this analogy to you?

Photo credit, striatic

Clearly, I have no better ideas than you on that, but I do have some thoughts on what you can do to prepare for the news ahead. These tactics all fall into the bucket of “if apples all start falling off the tree, at least try to be the shiniest, best-placed, easy to pick up apple out there” school of thought.

With that said, here are some thoughts for you.

25 Ways Social Media Prepares You for the Downturn

First: Be Proactive

In a situation where everyone’s repeating the gloomy news, I advocate that you put your house in order. Other, much better websites will give you the how-to for your financials. I’m thinking about you, your career, and the face you show the world on the web.

1. Google yourself and see what shows up. If it’s not what you WANT to have show up, start building up a main site, and pointing to it using outposts.
2. Tidy up your LinkedIn profile. I’ve shown you before how to improve your LinkedIn Profile and how to make your LinkedIn profile for your future. Get cracking.
3. Get on Twitter. Make sure you have a nice avatar, and easy to remember name. (Amazing how some folks don’t do this.)
4. Then, start using Twitter Search intelligently. Look for search terms that make sense for you. (Try this query as an example.)
5. Make your blog ready for business. Or, make your blog a business unto itself.
6. Pick up great financial advice from trusted sources, so that you can live within your means.
7. Look for discounts, like 50% off attending a great conference (email me to see if I have more tickets left – cbrogan at crosstechmedia dot com). – Plug for my conference, but hey. Financial in nature.
8. Build conversational relationships with other business people in similar roles at other organizations on Facebook, on LinkedIn, and elsewhere AHEAD of needing the job.
9. If your job is location-specific, start a local community blog targeted for business types in your area. Make it about the community at large, but feature prominently in it. Share this information with local news sources, local press, on Craigslist, etc.
10. Take new photos of yourself and upload to Flickr, nicely labeled with who you are, your blog’s URL, etc, so that people might find you and your likeness easily when Googling.

Money-Making Opportunities

If you’ve got to find new ways to make loot, don’t fret. Just put some effort into finding which money-making opportunity might pay off the best for you. As others are worried about their jobs, why not find ways to augment your earnings in the short term by trying some of these ideas.

11. Investigate products you can sell on your website. Consider getting an affiliate account with Commission Junction or LinkShare
12. Sell your own educational products on your expertise, especially if it would help retrain someone out of a job.
13. Expand your offerings to cover new service or product ideas.
14. Shift your existing pricing with the current economy in mind: shorter terms, different payment options, one time deferred first payment, etc.
15. Seek stock opportunities to purchase for your portfolio in their depressed state (if you’re into stocks).
16. Sell the first ten pieces of advice as consulting to other people in the community out of a job.
17. Look for project sharing opportunities, especially if you do something that’s somewhat modular like web work.
18. Look for ways to consolidate your business practices with other people. There might be economies involved in partnership that would make a world of difference.
19. Find ways to revamp old products or services or offerings and re-sell them today.
20. Turn 3 hours of your “after work downtime” into “serious business planning” work time. (It’s 11:40PM as I write this, if this gives you any idea how seriously I treat this step.)

Five Quick DON’Ts

Sorry to end on a negative, but while you’re at it, make sure you don’t fall prey to these kinds of situations.

21. Don’t sit around amassing news stories on what’s going wrong. Yep, stuff’s going wrong. Deal.
22. Don’t worry that big companies won’t buy your product or service. Find the product or service that they will buy.
23. Don’t join groups of fired coworkers, no matter what they say the goal is. They are often pools of negativity, and if those folks also don’t have jobs, why would you look for jobs there anyhow?
24. Don’t jump at the first thing just because you like eating. The second thing is almost always right behind it. Give yourself space to evaluate.

Smarter minds than mine will tell you how to weather the storm from the financial perspective, but maybe some of this will help you out.

Any other advice that you want to share with the gang?

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Photo credit, Tony the Misfit