If your customers are uncomfortable with the concept that you need to make a profit then you need new customers.

Everything in business has a cost associated with it.

Surprisingly, when you remind your clients that you need to make a profit they tend to jump to your defense. They seem almost embarrassed that they may have pushed you too hard on price.

Never fear being open about how you make your money. Transparency is appreciated by thinking people.

Leave the smoke and mirrors, sleights of hand and nasty surprises to others.

There’s nothing confusing about a great product or genuinely good deal.

Month after month the emails kept coming, month after month their client list appeared to grow with the addition of yet more well known industry players.

How on earth were they doing it? What was their secret? A new model, an ingenious approach, brilliant sourcing from a virgin territory?

There was no secret. They went bust.

The problem was, during the period in which they traded, their activity caused a general dip in pricing across the industry because search engines delivered adverts featuring their products to large numbers of people.

There you have it! See all the people who complete polls saying they place service above price, well guess what, some of them lie.

Competition is the essence of trade. It’s how things get better. If you fear competition you ought to give business a wide berth. But business is about making money, not just once or twice or occasionally but every time.

There are no special tricks, secrets or clever work-arounds when it comes to profit. You buy it for 1 and sell it for 2. You maybe selling knowledge, you maybe selling boxes of stuff. Either way, profit is sanity, turnover is vanity – as the old saying goes.

Making money is hard to do, especially when the internet encourages people to make unfair comparisons or to be lured by false economies.

What irony. All this information, the speed, the convenience and yet it’s never been harder to know if you’re getting a genuinely good deal.

We believe that the best value is to be found in strong commercial relationships where both parties display loyalty and a desire to improve.

Having lots of suppliers and spending hours trawling the net for a better price certainly does come at a “good price”!

From books to music, hotels to footwear, you name it and someone has rated it. But just who was that ‘someone’? and how can we be sure their opinion was unbiased or fair?

You see, the problem is that just about anyone can say anything about everything nowadays. Sounds cool right? All that freedom of speech, all that transparency, all that democracy.

Well in theory the information free-for-all we call the internet is a wonderful thing.

Unless that is you’re a small family hotel picking up the pieces having watched your business being destroyed by the inaccurate rantings of a couple mad anoraks with nothing better to do!

Just how many terrible tracks have been lauded by a seemingly ecstatic fan who bares a striking resemblance to the PR junior in the record company’s A&R dept. And how many marvelous book reviews have been written by the publisher?

On-line, all is almost certainly, not what it seems.

So maybe the star rating system is a relic of the early internet. Maybe reviews and comment should only be considered if made by someone you know or have reason to trust.

Just as voters have become disillusioned with politicians, savers with banks and readers with journalists, it’s probably the case that users are beginning to take the impartiality of star ratings, along with unsolicited comments and reviews with a large pinch of salt.

Is “chaos” the new evil empire?

Yes, global trade is more fluid than ever, circumstances can change quickly, but the levels of debt circulating in both our own economy and those of our nearest neighbors will weigh heavy for many years to come.

Many UK based businesses have been structured to enjoy the heady days of sustained 2-4% GDP growth. Our economy began to grow in 1992 and didn’t stop until 2008.

Levels of overhead have a nasty habit of tracking sales. But it’s not just costs which bloat during the good times, the emergence of dubious business models help to pump up the bubble even further.

So in some cases, simply cutting costs isn’t going to help a business survive, the only solution is a fundamental review of what the business is and what it does.

Managing a business in a sustained growth environment demands one set of skills, reorganising it to survive years of low growth in a multi-speed global economy is a different challenge altogether. This period of UK economic history is surely going to sort the men from the boys.

Marketing departments spend money. Some of what they do could be classed as discretionary or non essential. But a business that doesn’t take marketing seriously will die as quickly as one without real sales people. Therefore, marketing departments need to get very good at making their financial case.

Digital marketing offers the silver bullet. Clicks can be quantified. But does it flatter to deceive in the B2B environment? For some it does not, but many will have to pay to wait and see.

One proven method for reducing costs, whilst maintaining or in some cases adding value, is outsourcing. It’s easy to demonstrate savings when you push low value, costly tasks, onto others better equipped to deliver a cost effective solution.

Human resources are expensive and inflexible as are property leases. It simply does not make sense to be paying a skilled wage for an unskilled job or premium office rents for the storage of goods.

We offer a service which allows you to outsource the management of your marketing collateral. Contact Jonathan Lee for more information.

You’d be amazed how little you know about your suppliers. Now of course you could blame them for not telling you. But the likelihood is that they did, but you were just too busy to notice or forgot.

Setting some time aside to talk with suppliers is often very profitable. Why?

Market intelligence. Suppliers supply lots of companies like yours. They get to see trends, they have a feel for the market.

Networking. Suppliers know a lot of people. They know a lot of people like you. The slightly annoying sales guy, the one you love to ignore, well he could save your skin one day!

Innovation. It’s good to push your suppliers to develop new ideas. Be proactive, challenge them on something other than price. You’d be surprised how innovative suppliers can be if they see you are genuinely enthusiastic about developing something new.

And people need to make a living! If you think it’s cool to drill suppliers down on price to a point where they’re hardly making ends meet then you simply don’t understand how business works. Profitable suppliers are better suppliers for longer.

Of course there will be problems, remember your business has problems too. But how those problems were solved will tell you everything you need to know about your supplier.

So never treat your suppliers like dirt. Work with them. Look to build a long term relationship.

Who has done the key work in the process of creating a demand for your products or services? and are the right people getting the right share of any consequent success? Why bother with another stellar idea if you weren’t rewarded properly for the last one!

“Order taking” is not “sales”. They wanted a small one, but you persuaded them to buy a big one! That’s sales.

Selling generates extra, order taking is just sales administration. So, only pay extra for extra.

And what is “account management” exactly? Is it sales or PR?

If in reality it’s a PR exercise, just a case of touching base once in a while and making sure everything is tickadeeboo, then remunerate the role accordingly.

Proper sales people, the kind who actually create new business, are like gold dust. Rare and valuable.

But a conversation about what and with who? Oh and what if the conversation heads off in a direction that doesn’t suit your business?

Read any on-line newspaper or broadcasters site and you’ll quickly find a torrent of reader comments listed below each article. Some are valid, reasonable and well expressed irrespective of their position on the given subject. Most though, amount to ignorant rants from partially informed individuals desperate to let off steam. For some, it’s a case of hit the laptop or kick the cat!

It’s telling, that most people who comment on-line hide their identity. Unlike those who write the articles, publicly placing on record what their views are, the majority seem unwilling to match their confidence. Somehow you just know that many of those who ‘talk a good game’ on-line are unlikely to display such assertiveness when face to face.

Content creators are addicted to audience participation. But is there a danger that this addiction inadvertently creates the impression that everyone shares the same opinion as a relatively tiny number of empty vessels? What’s the more important figure, 6 comments or 600k readers?

Having an open relationship with your customers, suppliers and staff is no bad thing. Creating forums or channels for reasonable discussion can offer a fantastic return. Feedback helps to improve products and services. Seeing improvement, as a result of feedback, breeds loyalty and confidence.

But where do you draw the line in terms of openness? At what point does a genuine desire to engage your audience degenerate into chaos?

The magic ingredient is good intention. People may think you’ve developed a dog of a new feature, or they may resent your new pricing model but if you’ve a good reason or conversely if they have a point, and both parties maintain a high standard of courtesy, a perfectly safe and fruitful conversation can take place.

It comes down to what kind of people do you want to serve, buy from or employ. With social media, you eventually get the audience you deserve.

So in a way, the seemingly unlimited freedom of expression bestowed on us by the internet can be self defeating. Unless a forum or channel is well policed with high behavioral standards on all sides it will quickly become a distortion of the truth and as such offer no genuine value to anyone.