1. Invest in education: Continue to educate yourself, attend seminars, free online webinars, read books and trade magazines, keep up to date on what is happening in your industry and learn all you can.

2. Network and make contacts online and offline: Networking will keep you in everyone’s minds, also if you end up losing your job you will have a slew of business cards of others in the business that you can contact to work with during hard times.

3. Follow the market: Read the papers or watch the news, know what is happening and stay on top of it.

4. Pay off debt: If you can pay off any debt, now is the time to do it. Dealing with a recession is hard enough, but if you have a boatload of debt on top of that your stress level will go through the roof and you might not be able to pay it a few months down the line. Pay cash for anything you need, if you don’t have the cash, ask yourself if you really NEED it, or do you just WANT it? Put your credit cards in the freezer or cancel them and cut them up.

5. Cut back on extras: Seems simple, but do you need all the bells and whistles you have on your business or home phone or even your cell phone? Do you need to get Starbucks twice a day? Can you bring your lunch? Can you carpool to work?

6. Build your online presence: With a website, blog, newsletter or articles. Join online networking groups that relate to what you do, mentor someone or find a mentor, visit Craig’s list or other online portals.

7. Have your clients sign a long term contract or review their existing contacts and renew them or extend them.

8. Specialize in something: Make yourself valuable, employers are more likely to keep an employee who can do more than one thing.

9. Turn your hobby into a part time business: for example selling items on ebay.

10. If you don’t have to sell your home or any property, don’t. You won’t get top dollar and will end up losing money. If you can, work on the home or property that you want to sell so when the recession ends you can get more money for it, for example, paint the house, do some landscaping, whatever you can afford or do yourself to improve the quality of the property.

11. Update your resume now, just in case.

12. Learn more about jobs that are recession proof, industries such as food, energy, vices (tobacco), entertainment, medical services, debt collection, security or alarm services. Are any of these things something you could implement into your job or use as a part time job avenue?

13. Don’t cut prices, but reward your customers: During a recession business owners may think that cutting prices will help them and their customers. Don’t do it. Keep your prices as they are but offer your customers a coupon or a rewards program, to reward them for sticking with you during tough times.

14. Build value: Offer a buy one get one deal or buy one get something at 50% off. This increases your sales, where someone might have only purchased one item, with a deal like that it seems almost foolish to them not to take advantage of the deal and therefore purchase more from you

15. Get in contact with past customers who have not purchased from you in a while, this can activate a dormant account and possibly create more sales for you.

16. Follow up on any new leads and all old leads: Call them and see if they have a need for anything you offer.

17. Offer Outstanding customer service: To keep your customers you want to give them more than what they pay for. Keep your customers happy and they will stay with you.

18. Aggressively work on your marketing plan: send out press releases, keep yourself in the eyes of your target audience during the recession. Since you may have less work than normal, this is a great time to do this. Nothing may happen now but in six months you will see results.

19. Tighten or update and keep on top of your credit policy: now is not the time to extend credit blindly, and it is the time to collect from any customers that owe you money.

Let’s face it most businesses are trying to recover from a not-so-profitable Christmas season. The sale of big ticket items are at an all time low. Experts are saying we are “headed into a recession” I say we’d be better off believing that we are already in one and act accordingly. So what do you do? Most run scare and cut back on all expenditures and ride it out. That may seem to make good sense at first but let’s think it through. Doing nothing is not going to grow your business that I guarantee. We need to study our perspective market. YOU got into business to make a living. Now is the time to think smarter and work harder. You must weight your benefits and your detriments; can you expand your market? Perhaps you can add a direct marketing department to your company, or providing an extra service that can work seamlessly with your business without the need for an additional investment. Now is the time to be creative. Social networking is the flavor of the month and it works. MerchantCircle seems to have the right idea; more businesses helping each other. I applaud this Blog for doing the same thing. To add to my value as a advertising consultant I’m orchestrating a co-op distributing groups of coupons door to door for local businesses. This is done at a fraction of what it would cost them to do it alone. All of you keep up the great work. And lastly, my favorite point that Susan made was “Connect to give, not connect to get” that is my matra for 2008. Thank you, Ron