You can improve your company’s bottom line by keeping a sharp eye on the needs of your customers and by improving your business processes.
1. Benchmark revenue and overhead percentages to the leaders in your industry. Determine what is needed to pursue the best in your industry.
2. Think of every product or service that your company sells as if it were a separate business. Does each one contribute to profitability? Identify profit centers. Keep the winners and lose the losers.
3. Develop a cost accounting system to determine exactly what it costs you to deliver a service or product. Costing has to be comprehensive.
4. Listen to your employees’ complaints about tedious tasks. Their ideas may result in eliminating, modifying or outsourcing the work.
5. Enter into strategic alliances with your suppliers or customers to market each other’s products.
6. Identify the key positions within your company that have contact with customers. Put the right people in those jobs.
7. Find new uses for aging products and services. More reasons to buy mean more revenues for your company.
8. Establish an advisory board of key clients.
9. Give your customers what they want. If you’re meeting a need or desire, they’ll buy – and pricing won’t be their main concern.
10. Conduct a customer satisfaction survey annually.