If you don’t know who those people are, you have bigger issues going on than just the economy.  Some management has no idea what its people do day-to-day.  Find out what your people do – and not just their role or job title. In fact, find out as much as you can about your people’s skills beyond their work.  One company, through several rounds of layoffs, let go of the last person who was familiar with the design of an electrical component still in production and being sold to customers.  This is stupidity at its best. Your thought workers are the essence of your company.

Consider Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas. Prior to starting his hamburger chain, he was in the fried chicken business. Thomas turned around four failing Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants, introduced the famous rotating bucket of chicken sign, reorganized the famous chain’s menu and sold the franchises back to the company for a cool $1.5 million (if that doesn’t sound like much, keep in mind that this was back in the 1960s). His departure to start his own place was a friendly one, but imagine what he could have done for KFC had they offered him incentive to stay.

Then there’s Michael Bloomberg. Before becoming mayor of New York City, Bloomberg and 61 other partners at investment bank Salomon Bros. were laid off as part of a corporate merger. Bloomberg turned the $10 million severance he received from the proceeds of the company’s sale into his own $20 billion business, financial information giant Bloomberg LP. Wouldn’t you like an entrepreneur like that in your idea department?

Of course, not all workers have the potential to make your company better. Removing truly weak links can only strengthen the structure. But accidentally do away with the best and the brightest, and be prepared to watch your competition grow stronger.

You should be looking at liquidation auctions for your industry, surfing Craigslist and eBay for equipment and generally bargain hunting constantly. In the meantime, don’t forget about human capital. Great employees are getting pink slips left and right simply because the companies they work for are going under. Your company is only as good as the people who run it – this is the time to make their losses your gain.

Of course, growth isn’t just about your assets; it’s about your product. But at the first signs of economic slowing, many firms seem to forget that, instinctively scaling back marketing to lower costs. That’s exactly what most companies did during the Great Depression – all except for Proctor & Gamble, that is. To the initial chagrin of its shareholders, P&G actually increased its advertising campaign and expanded into a brand new territory known as radio. Its creative ads, known as “soap operas” (sound familiar?), were such a smash hit that P&G doubled it’s radio budget every two years during the Depression and by 1939 sponsored 21 programs, essentially creating the modern radio industry. P&G bet that Americans would keep buying household goods during the Depression, and they figured branding was the only way to differentiate their products from other companies’. It paid off. When tough times ended and Americans wallets expanded again, consumers stayed loyal to P&G.

It might feel counter intuitive to push for growth when business is slow, but this is when the time is ripe to grab more market share. If you actively manage business while your competitors bury their heads in the sand, your company can shine.

You don’t have to be a low price leader to focus on efficiency.  Apple Computers isn’t thought of as cheap in any sense of the term.  But they’re very efficient at producing new, innovative, appealing products very quickly.  They push products to market quickly, and then, as Guy Kawasaki says, they “churn, baby, churn”. Maybe even more important, they never stop. Just three weeks after Apple introduced its groundbreaking iPhone, it was back with a shuffle version.

So what around you is inefficient? You don’t have to be a CEO or manager to initiate process improvement.

Two years ago, LA Unified School District made the national news when their custom $95 million payroll system failed to properly process paychecks. I’m not going out on a limb by asserting that payroll processing is not LAUSD’s core competence.  If your company is not in the business of providing payroll services, why do you have a full-time payroll staff? Does that distinguish you from the competition? Or if you’re not a software company, why do you employ a team of developers? Hire us, or another software consulting company with expertise in software engineering, an environment and structure centered around developing excellent software, and let your management team focus on your core business.

If you think your ancillary service teams are critical to your success, could you spin them off as a separate company? Are they so good that they could compete with other companies and win?  If they are that good, why haven’t you spun them off yet!?  If they’re not, why do you hold on to them?

Instead of struggling to cover your company’s low value, high cost operations, why not outsource? Case-in-point: Hansen’s Natural Soda. You’d think they focus on beverages, right? But Hansen’s is really in the business of marketing. They have two main products – a line of natural sodas aimed at the health-conscious and a line of high-sugar energy drinks aimed at young adults looking for a jolt, two pretty distinct demographics. Rather than deal with costly operations and distribution (and labor associated with them), Hansen’s purchases its ingredients and bottling supplies and lets other beverage plants make its product while it focuses on their image. As a result, Hansen’s was able to reach sales of $988 million and a profit of $170 million in 2008 with less than 1,000 people on its payroll.