Matt Ryder discusses how recession reshapes business strategy, from marketing channels to geographic expansion. Recorded in July 2022, the conversation examines labor market conditions and how companies adapt when the economy contracts.
Put that coffee down. So session. You know, it's either been announced or it's coming up. A recession is, I believe it's 2/4 in a row of negative or neutral GDP growth. That's what a recession is.
That's the definition.
Yeah.
And how do you expect that to impact our industry?
You know, I think it's going to be really good for some and not so good for others. This is an interesting recession, I think because we have a labor shortage, which I, I could be wrong, but I don't think that there' really ever been a labor shortage and a recession at the same time. Usually there's a enormous labor surplus which then leads to a recession because there's so many people kind of sucking from the government te and there's just not enough jobs to go around. It just creates chaos. But like everyone's understaffed right now, which is kind of crazy to think. And so I don't think it'll be a really bad one. Personally talking to like my wealth advisors and stuff like that, they're saying hunker in for an 18 to 20 more month, not crazy recession, but it will be one. So that's like from, from my advisors telling me that this is not financial advice in any way, shape or form. Don't listen to me on anything. But yeah. So I think the industry, I think there are like certain things that will be greatly like, it'll be really positive, like when Covid first came. And I think it'll be similar here. There's two types of business owners, business owner that like hunkers down, reduces costs, reduces spend and tries to kind of like stay with their core group of clientele and weather the storm and they just kind of head down. It's a valid strategy. Then there's the other guys who go, well if my competition is doing that, I might as well just ramp it up to the moon and then try and take the risk. Right. And that's why you saw like a big shift during COVID and like all these like people came out of nowhere and I was kind of one of them because the strategy was reinvest, reinvest, reinvest, reinvest. And the businesses that did that were able to take market share so that, that like that will happen again. You'll see a bunch of like the, it's like the low to mid tier people, they tend to hunker down, the big boys because they've got the capital there. So like, you know, the big guys like your Dan Henry's and all these Kind of dudes who are really established in Sam ovens, those guys will probably go even harder in the paint and probably get even bigger. Okay. But then you'll see most of the mid tier guys kind of drop off and then a couple of them skyrocket. Right. So that's kind of usually what I see. And the ones that will be able to do that are the ones that will reinvest and they'll have a lot of different marketing channels. Okay. Because like we don't know how it's going to affect YouTube. We don't know how it's going to affect LinkedIn. We don't know how it'S going to affect TikTok. We don't know how if it's going to affect Facebook or Facebook groups or paid advertising versus organic advertising. So I think that having a diversified strategy is in a few different economies is going to be key to having sort of recession proof marketing because it's not going to hit every economy in the same way. Sure, like Australia will be hit, but not that bad. I don't really think so. I think that like about 8 months ago I made an active decision to ramp up our Australian presence. Even though we are Australian but such a small amount of our income was coming like 5 or 10%. Now it's more like 25% of our income or 30% is coming from Australia because I knew there was a recession coming in the US so we made an active choice to really push Australian stuff and then we made an active push to push some UK stuff which is now being hit harder. So we like at seventh level, for example, we've been paying to have our stuff seen in the UK but we haven't actually marketed over there. That only just started about six weeks ago.
So you're kind of back to the start of things we've talked about many times here of like audience building before you actually start to like you're going for reach rather than conversion.
Yeah. Because if we, if we reach enough markets then we then we can choose to convert instead of having to figure out last minute how to convert. So I think being in, being in a few different markets is important. Like if all of your people are Facebook group in the US it's probably not a great place to be right now because we don't know what's going to happen. People in the US could hunker down generally speaking. I think skill based things like sales training will go up because businesses invest in sales training during bad economic times. That's just what they do. And during economic boom.
