Tag Archives: cost

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How to Increase Profit and Wages Simultaneously

All business leaders today are looking for ways to decrease costs, while increasing productivity and profit. Many businesses today are taking a one time profitability boost by reducing costs at the expense of the employees.

Cost cutting always seems to be the first action taken by companies as they try to increase their profit. I understand that some businesses are in trouble and this may be their only recourse. However, many businesses rely on this cost lever rather than looking at all the other options available to increase profitability.

Henry Ford

Most people know that Henry Ford was quite famous for piloting the assembly line factory and for increasing the productivity of his factories. But did you know that he was able to simultaneously increase profits while decreasing production costs, increasing productivity, and increasing employee’s wages?

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How to Boost Your Business with a Powerful Tool!

Every now and then you come across tool or a process that provides a ton of value in a simple and effective package. This tool or process is easy to understand, easy to integrate into your existing systems, and it provides an extraordinary level of value to you and your business.

The EAC – ITD chart is one of these tools. You need to leverage this tool into your business! Download it from the Business Tools tab on my website.

The Tool

I originally built this tool as a method to track project health when I was responsible for overseeing a large portfolio of projects. It is a simple little graph that tells you right away if your project managers really understand their projects and if their projects are going to meet the organization’s financial expectations.

So, what is it and how does it work?

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REMOTE

Office Not Required

This week’s book review is REMOTE by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson.

REMOTE defines a business model that embraces a structure where employees do not work from the traditional corporate office. They can work from home, from Starbucks, while traveling, or pretty much anywhere that has high speed internet! It is full of great examples, ideas, tools and techniques to make the “remote employee” model work for any knowledge based business.

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Lead, Sell, or Get Out of the Way

The 7 Traits of Great Sellers

This week’s book review is Lead, Sell, or Get Out of the Way by Ron Karr

Karr explains his time-proven and successful sales philosophy in this book. Essentially, salesmen need to be leaders and sales leaders have five beliefs:

  1. You have everything you need
  2. You can improve any area of your life that you choose
  3. Everything is possible
  4. Preparation maximizes your potential
  5. Customers come first

These beliefs enable the seven essential traits of a sales leader:

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The Cost of No Change

We have all experienced a situation where a potential client refused to purchase our product or service because they were happy with the status quo and afraid of change. Basically, their fear of change outweighed any concerns and frustrations that they were experiencing with their current way of doing business.

Until we are able to convince the client that what we offer can add more value than pain, we will typically have a hard time selling anything.

I ran into a great example of this about five years ago when I bought a Bluetooth keyboard for my iPad.

I had been using my iPad for doing a lot of writing while traveling on business. The iPad was light, very convenient to pack and perfect for doing some simple document editing or article writing. When I bought the iPad, one of the sales people was trying to upsell and get me to buy a wireless keyboard. At that point I saw this as simply an upsell attempt. I had not experienced any of the pain of trying to scroll and type on a small screen.