Business
Why good businesses shouldn’t fear recession
Published by Jessica Weisman-Pitts
Posted on November 4, 2022
5 min readLast updated: February 3, 2026
Global Banking & Finance Review®
Company
Published by Jessica Weisman-Pitts
Posted on November 4, 2022
5 min readLast updated: February 3, 2026
By David Kean, author of three international best-selling books: Catalyst – using personal chemistry to convert contacts into contracts (Piatkus 2021), How to win friends & influence profits (Marshall Cavendish 2009), and How not to come second (Cyan 2006).
By David Kean, author of three international best-selling books: Catalyst – using personal chemistry to convert contacts into contracts (Piatkus 2021), How to win friends & influence profits (Marshall Cavendish 2009), and How not to come second (Cyan 2006).
“The marriage of imaginative flair for business creativity and the diligent application of process is a match made in heaven to drive growth.”
It’s no secret that the UK economy is in deep trouble. A botched mini-budget, consequent u-turn, and change of leadership leaves an uncertain economic background for businesses.
In fact, the UK is the only economy in the G7 which has not recovered to its pre-Covid levels. It remains 0.2% below where it was in the last quarter of 2019. And with mortgage rates rising we are, by common consent of economists, heading into a proper recession in this final quarter of the year.
This could be good news.
Recession is good for business. Or rather, it is good for good businesses.
This is just as relevant for the agency market, as it is for any other business. Recession weeds out weak agencies and eliminates the lower levels of competition. Recession rewards smart leadership and disciplined behaviour. Recession tests the health of a business, makes it necessary for a business to be fit, to get in shape. In all these ways, recession is a spur to sustainable growth, rather than the surface growth of a rising economic tide.
Growth, however, must be earned. It comes from the imaginative flair of business creativity harnessed to the diligent application of process. One, without the other, will not yield growth.
So what can agencies (and other businesses) do to weather the storm and emerge stronger?
This requires a set of skills wholly different from the passive and sporadic approach most firms take in good times when the tide is rising for everyone. In a recession, you truly become the master of your own destiny – your focus is outbound, not inbound, and you need to understand the client and market buying behaviours to inform how structured sales processes and sales conversations work. The first step to recovery is to stop denying anything is wrong.
This approach is at the heart of Catalyst2, a new joint offer between Catalyst and Waypoint Partners.
Catalyst2 is a growth accelerator programme for scaled agencies who need to significantly grow their top line revenue to meet and exceed their growth aspirations. Designed as an end-to-end sales transformation programme, Catalyst2 aims to provide agencies with a tried and tested sales process, and the right skills, to be able to proactively identify, develop and win new business at scale.
The programme has four distinct phases run over the course of 6-9 months: assessing the current sales proposition, building a tailored value-led sales proposition, upskilling relevant teams to implement the new process and embedding new ways of working.
At Catalyst2, we believe that if you create the best players and train them better than the competition, you play smarter. If you have a team of experts behind you, who keep you honest, keep you disciplined and help you learn better techniques, you will produce scalable, repeatable, and sustainable results.
A recession is a significant decline in economic activity across the economy that lasts for an extended period, typically visible in GDP, income, employment, and retail sales.
Business strategy refers to the plan that outlines how a company will achieve its goals and objectives, including how it will compete in the market.
Sustainable growth is the ability of a business to grow without negatively impacting its resources or the environment, ensuring long-term viability.
A sales strategy is a plan that outlines how a business will sell its products or services, including target markets, sales tactics, and sales goals.
Financial management involves planning, organizing, directing, and controlling the financial activities of an organization to achieve its financial goals.
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