Charles Green, author of the excellent (I just finished it) Trust-Based Selling: Using Customer Focus and Collaboration to Build Long-Term Relationships, recently blogged some ideas for trustworthy and future-thinking ways small businesses can act during difficult economic times.

In Top Ten Ways for Your Business to Deal with a Recession, Green offers up strategies that capitalize on this kind of thinking:

• Don’t fall prey to short-termism
• Do well by doing good
• Meet transactional opportunism with relationship strategies
• Be there for others now, and they will be there for you later
• We remember those who helped us when times were tough
• Now’s the time to prove you’re trustworthy–worthy of trust.

While not every item on his Top Ten list makes sense for mediators in small or solo practices, many of them do. I particularly like #3, #7, #8 and #9.

Have a great idea for staying on course during a recession? I invite you to share it in the comments.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MediatorTech.com.