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By Christopher J Tipler
For many Australian businesses the last three years have been tough and 2012 is not ending on a buoyant note. Capturing profitable revenue is a slog in the face of hesitant customers, greater import competition, wage pressures and relatively high (but falling) interest rates. The Board wants more and wants it soon. We prune and cut, but revenues and margins follow us down. We start wondering what else to do; the team has run out of ideas. Everyone is working hard - too hard - and there is a sense of fatigue. We contemplate more radical moves. Maybe we need to rethink our business model. Maybe Division X needs to go. Maybe the team, or some of the team members, is not up to it. Maybe we should bring in the consultants. Maybe it‘s all too hard! Maybe, maybe, maybe.
I have participated in many profit improvement programs over the years that create lists of things to do. I suspect the last thing you need right now is another list. So I am going to offer something more fundamental here; a set of four related ideas that might enable your business to break through to a consistently better bottom line. Two of these relate to marketing and two to operations. These may provide you with some food for thought over the Christmas break, and perhaps with something to get your teeth into in the New Year.
Marketing 1: taking a disciplined, quantitative approach.
I am constantly surprised by how few businesses have a good quantitative grip on their market. What I mean by this is a clear, accurate, understanding of how the market segments in both customer and product terms, and where the business sits in each PMS with respect to sales and market share. The diagram below outlines the very first requirement of effective selling – knowing how to think about the market and where to focus your efforts. Read full article.
Business Spectator recently interviewed Christopher J. Tipler on the topic of ‘Releasing The Untapped Energy In Your Business’.
Throughout the interview, Tipler shares his knowledge of a range of strategic errors made by small and large organisations, which are littering today’s business landscape.
Tipler asks listeners to think about how they are meeting the reasonable needs of the people who work for them and explains how businesses can improve their relationships with their employees.
How Aussie Mittelstand can solve our manufacturing crisis
By Christopher J Tipler
Every day now, our manufacturing sector shows more symptoms of a potentially terminal illness. Called Dutch disease, it is the malaise caused by a high, commodity-driven, exchange rate. Across the sector jobs are rapidly disappearing. Our car industry teeters on the brink, as does aluminium production. Employment is being scaled down in steel products manufacturing, textiles, aircraft engineering, and so on.
No one knows what to do. Business leaders blame the trade unions and the dollar. Our government’s propose ‘solutions’ that will be little more than life support for desperately ill patients. The free traders look on smugly – to them it is all part of an inevitable transition to a service-based economy. Read full article
Getting value from your professional services providers.
By Christopher J Tipler
The professional services industries in Australia are enormous, employing around 400,000 people. The combined revenue of accountants, lawyers, IT and business process consultants, consulting engineers, management consultants and advertising agencies exceeds $80 billion each year. That, of course, is $80 billion of costs to businesses and governments.
This is an area of frustration for many businesses, concerned about the high cost of purchased professional services, ambivalent about the value they receive, and uncertain about how to get these costs down. Some service providers, particularly the accountants and lawyers, are often deeply embedded in the business because of the essential transactional and statutory services they provide. Others, particularly the management consultants, are less essential but they are adroit at winning the next job and always seem to be hanging around with the meter running. Read full article
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