How to Have an Active Business Approach

For a while after I first started running our company, I had a much different attitude regarding the way a company should be run. I had what I like to call, a passive approach. Our business is a "Virtual Assistance" company. We help other businesses expand by taking on their extra workloads. We do this off site and over the internet, hence the term Virtual Assistant. Anyway, we used a very passive approach in running our business. We relied heavily on job boards, where people would post requests for assistance. We would frequently just sit back and hope someone would see our website or get referred to us by a past client. After some time had passed with this method, both my husband (who is also my business partner) and I had enough. We were tired of just getting by and never making any real progress in our business. We were even considering giving up our company out of frustration. After some serious debate we decided that the problem was in the way we were running our company. We knew that we could be profitable, but we had to simply try harder and take an active approach to marketing.

We started to write blog posts, like this one, that had links to our website. We started to use social networking sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. After trying this for several weeks, we noticed that we had much more traffic on our website. We were getting e-mails requesting our services and even getting phone calls. This really inspired us to try even harder. Then we started to go to in-person social networking events. Our local chamber of commerce meetings seemed like a good place for us to start. There we met other business owners and even picked up a couple of clients. The point to this post is that we were considering giving up at one time when we really didn't need to. It sounds overly simplistic, but the fact was we just weren't trying hard enough. I hope anyone who is experiencing troubles in their business life in these tough economic times can take this bit of advice from us. Often it's tough to admit that you haven't been trying hard enough, I know it was hard for me. I had to put my pride aside and admit that I was responsible for the lack of success. This is not to say that that's the only reason that you're business may be doing poorly. After all, we are in a very weak market right now. Before you throw in the towel, ask yourself if you are really doing all you can do to make your business great.