Managing hidden expenses
This article was written by Ed Hatton for Entrepreneur Magazine (South African edition), as the My Mentor column published in March 2016 and is posted here by their kind permission
The costs you don’t get invoices for
A potential customer walks away without buying after a bad experience with one of your employees. Your deliveryman cannot find the address so he returns with the customer’s order. Inventory at the back of the storeroom lies unused and unsaleable. A manufactured item fails a quality check and has to be remade. Clerks spend large parts of the day reconstructing lost information. These and many other failures cost your company a large amount of money, and yet the cost is almost invisible. These are the intangible costs for which you do not get invoices. They are typically a substantial part of the total costs of running a business.
Intangible costs include overstaffing, overtime, overstocking, excessive transport costs, scrapped material, excessive rent and loss of profit from lost customers and lost sales which should have been made. Few raise alarms or are subject to intensive cost cutting drives, simply because unlike direct costs nothing highlights their existence. To illustrate this point image a scene where every lost sale generated an invoice for the loss of profit. There would be a predictable response to improve competitiveness and service, but the lack of visibility of lost sales makes this response unlikely. The loss of profit is as real as the cost of wasted stationery, but seldom gets as much attention. Continue reading
Need a quick profit boost?
Five ideas you can implement quickly and inexpensively
All businesses need an occasional profit boost and very few would have the luxury of saying they were already making more than they dreamed of. Here are five relatively painless and inexpensive strategies to improve your business.
- Sell more to your existing customers by cross selling. Cross selling means you sell products in your range to customers who now only buy other products in your range. They may be buying products which you carry from your competitors and this is often because they do not know the extent of your product range. It does not matter that you have explicitly told them about other products in newsletters or advertising, they may not have noticed. Do this by listing your known customers, and then making a matrix of what they buy. You should have this information in your sales analysis. If there are too many customers, take a selection of maybe 50 or 100. Assuming you are sure they could use your other products, make a series of individual direct approaches by e-mail, messaging or in person. Offer trial periods, initial order discounts or anything to get their attention
- Stop throwing things away. Unless your organisation operates on very lean principles, chances are that you are throwing a lot of valuable stuff away. This will include packaging material scrap, damaged, stolen or obsolete goods, operational time, space, managerial time and a whole lot of other stuff. Start a ruthless campaign to cut down on waste. Pay particular attention to wasted time like idle time waiting for some needed thing to happen, wasted time making things which will have to be remade and wasted time in inefficient processes. Also pay attention to scrap and rework whether you are a manufacturer or distributor. Check the scrap bins and figure out ways to stop throwing away stuff you paid for. If you don’t have the right systems or training to manage that then buy them, it’s cheaper in the long term.
- Target a competitor. Pick your weakest competitor (you do have up to date competitor analysis, right?) and attack yheir weaknesses and cash cow customers with special offers, top rate service, better technology or whatever your business has which makes it different from and better than your competitors. (You do have a clear and distinct statement of your differentiation and advantages, right?). If you cannot do this chances are you either do not know what your competitors are doing or you have no clue why your customers buy from you. In which case fix that quickly before your competitor reads this and you become the victim of this strategy.
- Adjust prices up or down. Do this only on products where a small price change can mean a large change in demand (price elastic products). Often these are small items, consumables, service contracts, add-ons, some fashion items and minor luxury goods. The ideal is to identify a number of high volume price elastic products. Make a guess what would happen to sales at a couple of price points above and below the current price. Then draw a spreadsheet to show what the total gross profit will be at each price point. You will often find the best strategy is to increase the price rather than cut prices. The total margin may be higher and the costs lower because there are less deliveries and other unit sale related costs. If the cost to you is likely to change with volume then factor this in. Test the theory by changing the price on a few items and make sure sales follow your projections before making mass changes. Try to increase some items and reduce others so you don’t look greedy or desperate.
- Get rid of the junk. You probably have customers and products which are not profitable and suppliers and staff you support because of loyalty despite the fact they cost you money. Supporting loyal people and suppliers is a wonderful thing to do but then view this as charitable bequests, do not hide it in the mainstream of your business. You don’t need to be cruel in offering money instead of work, but helping suppliers to become competitive and finding more suitable employment for people who have outlived their usefulness in your company restores their pride and gives them new opportunities. You can now monitor the cost of your kindness. Then kill or replace the unprofitable products, even if it hurts (Keep thinking of Kodak, at one time the world’s second best known brand, which could never tear themselves away from film and make the switch to digital). Politely discourage the bad customers or sharply increase prices of the stuff they buy so at least you make some money from them.
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