Optimize your business
Is your business all it can be?
Lean and mean?
Not an ounce of fat?
Higher profit margin than your competition because of higher efficiency and lower operating costs?
Is your business more like a high-performance supercar that can blow the doors off most cars on the road, and still get 35mpg, or an H1 HumVee that can barely manage 8mpg, downhill… with a tailwind?
Today the auto industry is even maximizing the gas milage on their sports cars–not long ago the bastion of wretched excess.
Today, horsepower is more abundant than ever in addition to squeezing more mileage out of every gallon of our increasingly costly resource.
At first glance you might wonder why anyone wanting a fire-breathing sports car would give a rat’s grass skirt about gas mileage?
Well let’s say your sports car gets 30mpg (not bad, eh?) and has a 15 gal. gas tank. That gives you a 450 mile range before coasting into the next gas station.
If the new model of your car gets some refinements that increase efficiency so you now get an extra 3.3mpg– but still get the same horsepower, now those 15 gals. will take you 500 miles– plus you essentially have the money you would have spent on that extra gallon of gas, which is more than enough to get a cup of coffee so you’ll stay awake driving the extra 50 miles.
It works the same way in business.
Every dollar you save by improving efficiency is a dollar you don’t have to spend looking for more sales.
Or, if you put that savings into developing new customers, you get twice the bang for your buck.
Very few businesses–if any, are running at absolute maximum efficiency. Businesses of all sizes have some fat to trim. Many have even allowed an air of cockiness and arrogance to infect the business.
For example, a friend of mine once worked for one of the largest pet supply companies in the US. He found a way to make a simple improvement on their web site which would result in an instant $20,000 savings. Was he rewarded? Nope, he was ridiculed and laughed out of the management meeting.
This should never happen… NEVER!
What do you think that experience did for his morale? Apparently not much, since he was snapped up by another company where his efforts are rewarded, and he’s now making his new employer piles of money.
How many $20,000 incidences did they need before it got their attention?
How about your attention? If you’re walking down the street and see a penny on the sidewalk, do you pick it up? It is free money after all.
Not worth your time? How about a quarter? A dollar? $20?
Would it get your attention to increase the profit margin of your business 1%? You might not think so, until you keep in mind that there are major retailers who are making a killing making a 2% margin. They would sell their favorite grandmother to make even an extra .5%.
You might think of your business as a pretty frisky sports car… but you could be accidentally driving with the emergency brake on.
Let me take a look, if I find that you are, I promise I’ll let you know, and I’ll find a way to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
If you’d like to find out how your business can be improved, click the Email me link and put “optimize” in the subject field.
