Six Signs Your Business Needs A Spring Cleaning.

Open the windows and let all that stale air go whoosh. There’s a lot of creepy, cruddy build-up crowding our attitudes, beliefs, behaviors — and probably our bottom lines as well, courtesy of sitting inside and stewing all winter. We’re living with a year’s worth of sludge that rates a serious scraping.

When it comes to your business, it may be time to start fresh. And for some, it may be time to scrub it completely.

Here are the Six Signs Your Business Needs A Spring Cleaning:

Your business is in a ‘soiled’ category.
Many businesses were built on the assumption that our world economy would be forever in 20th century growth mode. Starbucks is a vivid example of this mis-guess. Dubai, in fact, is looking like another one. Then there are the products smudged by environmental, cultural or humanistic factors, from Hummers to plastic bags to fur coats. Is yours a service business based on ‘guilt-inducing’ services people can no longer afford or have cut back on? Does your product dwell in a consumer-unfriendly category? Could you, should you, make it greener?

Clean-up: The chain Massage Envy is cleaning up in this stress-packed environment versus pricey (empty) spas by offering low-price massages ($49-59), memberships, convenient hours and locations. Former poster-children for luxury fashion, the style mavens at UrbanDarling created a Purge, Merge and Splurge program that promises not only to help you spend your clothes dollars more wisely but also simplify your life. Smartly, this new ‘invest in you’ positioning taps into the two key trends of simplicity and frugality. Plus, this show of empathy assures reluctant clients ‘we get it.’

You’re stuck. (Under thick layers of cloudy thinking).
You know who you are, that guy with the cobwebs covering his ears. You’re convinced that if you just ‘wait it out’ maybe ‘things will go back to normal.’ But even the most optimistic of experts, from economists to psychologists (we’re leaving the politicos out of this equation) believe that many of the consumer changes in progress may well be permanent. Yes, there is a certain amount of pent-up demand but increasingly today is the ‘new normal.’

Clean-up: Now is the time to power-listen to your customers. Survey, interview, chat, do whatever it takes to connect with your regulars and then listen hard. If yours is a face-to-face business, take your best customers out for lunch, invite them to a town-square type meeting and ask for opinions. Follow the conversation about your industry or product category already in full swing online via Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook and relevant niche sites. You need to get a realistic sense of what’s happening. Resistance is futile, dude.

Call in the Merry Maids.
Yup, we’re lone wolves, mavericks, solopreneurs and renegades. But perhaps some of the crud is coming from the sweat and swagger of always going it alone. It may be time to switch from me to we. You may know best when business is booming but times like this call for additional brainpower.

Clean-up: The solution? How about a Board of Advisors? If you don’t have one already, tap into the wellspring of genius around you and for god’s sakes, pick their brains. Make sure you have assembled a balanced group with a combination of backgrounds, specialties and personalities. The secret to an effective Board is to choose experts rather than networkers. You don’t need schmoozers. You need supporters who will speak their truth.

Buzz is fogging up your brain.
In a world where breakthrough tools like HARO, pitchengine and Twitter make buzz-generation easier and more fun than ever, it’s possible to spend hours everyday pursuing reporters and social media mavens. Often these efforts are successful — at least in terms of seeing your name and words in black-and-white. And occasionally, you’ll land the right mention in the right media and voila! your business is booming overnight. (This is also known as The Oprah Effect.)

But here’s the caution: Make sure your buzz-generation efforts actually result in real business. Like customers. Sales. Products. All those non-buzzy words. I don’t mean trying to calculate ROI, which has eluded most traditional and neo-PR pros these days. But with all the do-it-yourself PR tools today, it’s all too easy to spend too much time chasing buzz and thinking it’s always relevant to your bottom line.

Clean-Up:Allocate a certain percentage of your day to buzz. Peter Shankman sends HARO twice a day, so plan on at least skimming it for potential. Update your social networking sites, follow up on blog comments. Be very strict with your time.

Your brand identity looks dingy.
If you haven’t re-evaluated the look and feel of your brand’s identity for years — business cards to collateral materials to website to your business profile photo — it might be time to reassess. What may have been perfect when first created may either feel dated or be inadequate for your communication needs today.

Clean-up: Optimizing Social Media sites with professional photographs makes a big difference in impact. And I don’t mean those stiff, fold-your-arms-across-your-chest business pictures that Colbert so brilliantly lampoons. Find a photographer like the Bay Area’s talented Monica Michelle, who specializes in bringing out what’s naturally fascinating about you. And don’t neglect the power of pimping your Twitter Profile: an interesting and polished Twitter background (@hughbriss) will immediately increase your Follows the right way.

Your MyFax Messy Office Contest Facebook Page has 31,218 Fans.
The first step is admitting you are powerless over the contents of your messy office. If you can’t do it yourself, call in one of those de-cluttering experts or maybe one of those portable pods hauls the whole thing away.

Clean-up: Pine Sol. White vinegar. Lemon oil. Baking soda. These are all your friends. So are the spring-fresh new non-VOC paints. So is getting out of the office altogether and working in your favorite cafe, on the train to Timbuktu or at the beach.

Guru’s Note: The Guru has just launched a rollicking Spring Cleaning by ripping up the office carpet with a handy boxcutter and throwing it out the window. Next step: a ‘greener’ office via natural cork floors, which will make me feel squeaky clean and freshly virtuous.