Business owners (and most definitely the small ones) are facing interesting times of late; for one I don’t buy into all of the information that is being pumped out by either the Government, the News Papers and some of the Gurus.
It’s like this Branson or Trump are not on the TV moaning about how difficult it is, and nor are Sainsbury’s or Tesco putting out negative statements. But of course Dixons are.
Now I know that the larger retailers are in a pretty good position and electrical groups are having a pretty torrid time. Given that sales are only off 10% (Dixons quote this week) I find it hard to believe that the local management at some of these stores are not able to increase or at least maintain sales in this or indeed any other market.
You all know in order to survive you have to get creative and add some value in order to maintain the business.
Come on you know the deal by now.
Many of our Financial Services clients and business owners in other areas are increasing sales, just by focusing on the real issues; adding value and making the most of the available technology. Oh and stopping some of the stuff that does not work.
I do not want to focus on the negs though, more to give you some food for thought.
Peak Oil – has it come and gone, what is the future going to be for all of the stuff we have taken for granted. The events in Japan kinda prove that Nuclear is not going to be a viable option, not really, if we want to preserve life as we know it (please don’t email me this is not a debate about the options for Power world wide).
The BBC had an interesting few comments on this matter last week and the link to the podcast is below.
We do need to find more ways of reducing costs and to maximise on the energy we have and consume.
A great analogy in the podcast made me think a lot about how we do things (and for our firm we have taken on board a lot of this already, and encourage our customers to do the same).
Without going into detail, the story is this.
We are not paying the true cost of Power/Fuel and it is going to get more expensive.
Lets say your Company Car will run for 30 miles on a gallon of fuel and this is around £5.50 per gallon.
Now lets say that you drive you car some 30 of miles run out of fuel and have to pay 2 ‘minimum wage workers’ to push the car back to office.
The cost of which would be what £160 including NI and the other bits we have to find.
The true cost of that energy is somewhere between £5.50 and £160.
Now that in itself is scary, and I am not sure that the true cost is that, but lets face it.
Having 3 sales staff running around the county, in a 3 Series or similar, doing stuff that could be done just as easy with technology has to make sense.
With Blogs, Email, Video, Live Screen Sharing and other methods of communication, a slight change to the process has to make sense if businesses are going to survive in the longer term change has to come, it makes sense now.
Now I know I have a vested interested in telling you this however most of our clients have been doing this for some time and it makes sense. And with Oil going one way it makes even more sense.
The Link is below.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/worldbiz
“over a barrel” 31/3/11
Richard Smith
“its been a long time coming” – Sam Cook ‘Change is gonna come’