OK, so we are officially in a recession. How does your small business survive it? There is no shortage of advice-givers. Just do an on-line search using the key words "small business survive recession."

As you review the advice, three primary themes emerge: sell more, spend less and pay more attention to customer service. Good advice, but listed in reverse order of importance. Much of your success at surviving and even prospering in hard times depends as much on who carries out these strategies as on how they are carried out.

Let’s apply some historical context to the people in your office. Unless they are over 30 years old, odds are they’ve never managed a business in serious down times. Dot-com bubble of the early 2000s aside, the last major recession of the type we may be facing was over the three-year period from 1979 through 1982 in the wake of the Iranian Revolution and the related oil crisis. Or to put it in another context, it was when Ronald Reagan first moved into the White House. People born then are just now entering their 30s.

If you are old enough to remember "stagflation," you may be able to provide your business the management skills it needs to get through this recession. But for a significant number of small-business owners and managers, a prolonged economic downturn is an alien environment. Those who have never managed in anything but a growth economy are in for a bumpy ride.

Let’s look at the three recession survival strategies and review good or bad ways to carry them out.

Customer service. A recession is when many businesses learn the real truth of the axiom that it costs more to recruit a new customer than it does to keep an old one. There are many definitions of customer service, but I would define it as "helping customers realize that they receive full value for money spent at your business." The erosion of customer service begins when a business redefines it as "fooling the customer into believing that they’ve gotten what they paid for."

Compile an inventory of your repeat and most loyal customers. In a recession, these are the ones you want to keep coming back. Analyze your customer base to learn which ones are the most profitable. Give those customers special treatment. You heard me. Give them special treatment. It’s called customer service segmentation. You spend the most on those who generate the most profit for you. Find out why they keep coming back, then use that knowledge to persuade newly recruited customers to join your base of repeat customers.

Sell more. Sadly, a lot of business owners interpret this to mean mold the bait ever more skillfully to conceal the hook. A business’ advertising (what there is of it) becomes sly wording and coy exclusion. This approach hardly ever leads to repeat business and customer loyalty. Yeah, you get them once but they don’t come back. Or you have to devote time and energy to dealing with a customer complaint. That takes your time away from building your customer base.

In a recession, consumers are busy analyzing the difference between "needs" and "wants." Is what you sell a need? If it isn’t, how can you make it a need? Or can your business develop other products or services that meet consumer needs?

Spend less. Don’t cut outreach to your loyal customers and potential customers. Generally, this means advertising. Double it. In a recession, customers look to get the most out of every dollar they spend. Develop and protect a solid reputation for helping them do just that.

Contact Tom Collier, president of the Better Business Bureau of Southern Arizona, at tcollier@tucson.bbb.org or (520) 888-5353 or 1-800-696-2827 toll-free outside of Tucson. The BBB of Southern Arizona serves Pima, Cochise, Santa Cruz, Graham, and Greenlee counties in Arizona and all of the state of Sonora in Mexico. The office is at 434 S. Williams Blvd., Suite 102. The website is: www.tucson.bbb.org. Collier’s On Guard column appears the first week of each month in Inside Tucson Business.