Prep for a Recession Series: Introduction

Prepare your Business for a Recession

Workshop Series

When the economy tightens, development, design, engineering, and construction companies may feel it first. Capital gets cautious, timelines stretch, and requests for proposals feel scarce. But here’s the truth: the firms that grow during a downturn aren’t the ones with the biggest marketing budgets—they’re the ones with the smartest strategy.

Strategic companies weather recessions successfully because they’ve been intentional and disciplined. They didn’t overhire sales teams or drastically increase their marketing budgets. Instead, they evaluated their existing client base and service offerings, then aligned their budgets accordingly. Even as a marketing agency owner, I’ll be the first to say—don’t overspend on marketing to prepare for a downturn. The most profitable companies I’ve worked with during recessions were the ones that spent wisely, not excessively, on marketing and sales, and focused first on bolstering their existing business.

They evaluated these five key aspects of their business and strengthened them.  

1. Evaluate your current clients. Adjust.
2. Evaluate your services. Adjust.
3. Evaluate your budget. Adjust.
4. Cast a more strategic (not larger) net.
5. Take all these lessons and execute a plan to work smarter, not harder.

Over the next few weeks, we will post a series of blogs with workshops you can conduct with selected team members. Each topic will reflect these five key practices and include workbooks that help you through each evaluation.
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Recommended Team Members

Before we dive into these workshops, set yourself up for success by inviting a few key people to the conversation. We recommend assembling a group of 4–8 individuals, including:

1. An owner or executive, ideally someone who has moved up through the ranks and witnessed the company’s growth. This person should have enough authority to lead the execution of the workshop findings.
2. A finance leader, preferably someone detail-oriented and well-versed in the company’s financial reports.
3. A high-performing mid-level employee who oversees day-to-day operations and mentors junior staff.
4. A marketing or sales team member who understands how the company closes deals and communicates value.
5. A junior employee with 1–3 years of experience, particularly someone respected by peers and known for their integrity.
6. An HR representative who conducts exit interviews and can share insights on employee experiences and turnover.

All selected team members should demonstrate integrity, collaborate effectively, and be able to listen as well as provide constructive feedback. This exercise will involve sensitive topics and require reviewing a significant amount of information. It's important that no one gets “stuck” on a single issue when the rest of the group is aligned—flexibility and open-mindedness are key.

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Workshop Topics and Requirements

1. Evaluate your current clients. Adjust. Workshop to publish June 11th.

Bring: A comprehensive list of every client to populate our workbook.

Workshop: We'll create a comprehensive report listing every client your company has worked with. Using the grading system and worksheet provided in the workshop blog post, we’ll evaluate each client based on key risk factors, including:

• Profitability
• Market sector and client base stability
• Team experience and engagement with the client
• Gut instinct on long-term potential (often overemphasized during downturns)
• Performance and resilience during past recessions
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2. Evaluate your services. Adjust. Workshop to publish June 18th.

Bring: A comprehensive list of every service you offer, ideally listed with their accounting codes to support better reporting. We'll provide an example of what this could look like, depending on what you do.

Workshop: Pull an accounting report showing your revenue and services rendered over the past few years. Using the same grading system as Part 1, we’ll analyze each service to identify:

• Which services are performed most frequently
• Which generate the highest profit margins
• Which are gaining relevance based on current market trends (e.g., AI-related services)
• Which your team most enjoys delivering
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3. Evaluate your budget. Adjust. Workshop to publish June 25th.

Bring: A comprehensive budget for the current year and the actual spend for the last two years.

Workshop: Pull a detailed budget report that outlines your company’s spending across all categories. We’ll evaluate your top expenses, with a focus on how each of these items support our services and clients:

• The costliest third-party vendors or service providers
• The highest-paid internal roles or departments
• The most expensive marketing and sales activities or channels

Each item will be assessed based on its return on investment, the experience it provides to your team and clients, alignment with business goals, and potential for optimization. This exercise will help you identify where to cut costs, where to reinvest, and where to double down for growth.

There are strategies for coding your books to generate more insightful reports, and as always, we include a high-level grading system to guide your evaluation.
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4. Cast a more strategic (not larger) net. Workshop to publish July 2nd.

We review all evaluations to identify clients and services that demonstrate stability or potential for growth during a downturn, and ensure that these align with the company’s budget. Each exercise is used to build a strategic, actionable plan.

In this blog post, we’ll provide case study examples to help you apply your grading results to your business. We’ll walk through:

• Top- and low-ranking clients
• Top- and low-ranking services
• Valuable and problematic budget items

The team will confirm the findings and establish a high-level game plan for each key discovery.
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5. Take all these lessons and execute a plan to work smarter, not harder. Workshop to publish July 9th.

Once you’ve developed how you'd like to tackle top- and low-ranking clients and services, we’ll explore the most effective marketing tactics to create, execute, and support a plan. We’ll cover methods for conducting faster quarterly reviews of your strategy and making timely adjustments.

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If you like the concept of this series of workshops but lack the time or leader to run it, reach out! We provide strategic business consultations to those in the infrastructure space. Email alyce@wonderstruct.co for more information.