Reinvent Your Company

The New Years is upon us. Did your company meet its goals this last year (2008)? Is your company going strong or is it under distress?

Looking at projections for 2009 and most of the ones that people have shared with me are either not so good or pie in the sky. Job shops are not getting the final ok on projects to proceed. Schedules are being pushed back for a couple of months.

You first task is to evaluate your business to get out of the self-fullfiling prophecies. All gloom and doom makes for more glom and doom. Instead take out a fine tooth comb and go through your business, Make sure everything is headed into the right direction and the same direction. Don’t let little fiefdoms crop up in your company. You need to be looking at processes and people wondering how to do it better. Can one person work on two different machines? Look at lean manufacturing, lean accounting, lean marketing, lean what ever it is you do. Benchmark yourself so you can know if you are in fact doing better. This is not just about making things so thin they don’t work anymore but more so about getting a handle on which operations are making you money and which ones are loosing you money. You’re seeking to reduce waste, reduce inventory, and simplify your service or manufacturing process. If you have 3 different products or services put down the costs and profits on paper so you can see them in black and white. Allocate sales costs, labor overhead and all other items involved in the process. In the end this might mean you totally reinvent your business.

If you feel overstaffed maybe as distasteful as it is, someone might have to be let go. You can always rebuild using temporary help.

And last unless you have no choice, don’t cut the marketing budget. This might seem as ringing a bell to get business but cutting marketing and advertising is the wrong thing to do when things get slow, when more than ever you need your name out there.


Larson note: When times are tough the tough get going. Be lean and mean but not so lean as to wear down your valuable people.

Howard Larson
Larson & Associates
Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition
Making good businesses great and great businesses even better
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