5 Ideas for Benefiting from the 2008 Economy

What the future holds for business in 2008 is anyones guess. One thing is for sure surviving and thriving in 2008 may prove to be a great challenge.

Here are 5 ideas that you can use to ride the wave of change. Focusing on all aspects of your business, maintaining a positive attitude, and inspiring high level of performance from your employees, are some of the keys to success.

Keep Your Eye on All Your Assets

In robust economic periods some of us just used cash flow management to run our business. Today it is essential to effectively monitor and manage all our assets, cash, inventory, fixed assets and the very important assets that don’t appear on the balance sheet, our customers and employees.

Motivate your employees with incentive compensation, reward productivity and innovation. Be aggressive in eliminating non-productive personnel.

Treat you customers like gold, reach out and communicate with them. Make sure you understand their needs and desires. Don’t hesitate to drop low margin or problem customers. Remember the 80-20 rule, 80% of your profit comes from 20% of your customers.

Get the most of all your productive assets, dump those that are not.

Reduce Costs without Cutting Quantity or Quality

Wholesale cost cutting can do more harm than good. Strategic cost reduction can improve your bottom line without deteriorating employee moral or the quality or quantity of your products or services.

Now is the time to negotiate better prices from suppliers, shake things up. This may mean finding new vendors or strengthening relations with existing suppliers. A promise of a continued relationship is deserves lowered prices. Auction sites on the web like eBay or liquidation.com can be great sources for quality goods at great prices.

Cutting fluff in areas like company parties, rich expense accounts and the purchase of commodity items from phone service through office supplies can be of great benefit. Trimming back on marketing, advertising or technology can be disastrous.

Cut costs but do it wisely.

Get your Financial Information in Order

Having clean financial information, which accurately reflects your business’s true position, will enable you to chart a path to success. Without this you are flying blind.

Accurate financials that are easy to audit and verify are invaluable in developing strong bank relationships. They may make the difference between success and failure when it comes to opening new credit lines or financing purchases.

This information can help you to really understand your cost structure and understand where you can improve your margins. Ask yourself how much does it really costs to deliver a service or make a specific product. But be careful when eliminating low margin products or services sometimes lower-margin products are the winners in a downturn if they are in steady demand.

Once you have accurate data in your business management system, turn it into powerful information with custom reports and alerts with Crystal Reports or KnowledgeSync.

Have a clear picture of where your company stands; make your business profitable even if this means reducing it size.

Inspire and Motivate Your Employees

Open communication and clear goals will move your company through these potentially rocky times. No need to pull any punches employees appreciate an honest statement of where the business stands. Clear goals and plans expressed in a positive and optimistic voice will keep your people inspired and looking forward to success.

Employees, most of them, want to do a good job and contribute to their company’s survival. To help them along give your employees the tools they need to succeed like training, business technology tools, or simply the authority to make independent decisions.

Share profits, even if they are small, with all employees, from top brass to the lowest level staff.

Embrace Technology to Achieve a Competitive Advantage and Protect It

Businesses that have deployed the right technology to create competitive advantage stay strong in difficult times. This does not necessarily mean spending a lot of money. In fact a well planned technology investment should show ROI in months not years.

A simple inexpensive tool like an e-mail spam blocker can reclaim days of productive time. Customer Relationship Management software, smartly deployed, can become a tool for building enduring customer loyalty. Integrated supply chain solutions like EDI can allow you to increase volume and reduce labor costs in one shot.

Don’t neglect security in the form of internet virus protection, intrusion protection and reliable off-site backups.

For total peace of mind look at NetUp by SWK managed network services with 24/7/365 system monitoring.