Ever Wonder How You Can Maximize Your Trade Show ROI? Last week, Econsultancy.com posted a useful article on “10 Tips For Selecting the Right Industry Trade Show“—excellent tips if you’re attending as a consumer. But if you’re attending a trade show to promote your product or service and get new business, trade shows can be [...]

There is no entrepreneur or senior level executive I know of that hasn’t experienced serious stress during the course of their business career. Certainly there are times when the pressure builds and builds and builds – forcing executives and line personnel alike to struggle just to keep up!

Stress causes all kinds of problems – more often than not compromising the individual’s ability to concentrate and get work done. Certainly the costs of neglecting stress in your business can be very high. And, strangely, stress is sometimes overlooked as a health and safety issue by small businesses. Yet the unexpected absence of just one member of staff can affect productivity, and efforts to secure cover can be costly and time-consuming.

This is doubly true during a busy season – including the Holiday season whether your company markets to the seasonal market or not.

I don’t have to tell anybody in business that competition today is stronger, more aggressive and less sensitive to the impact it has on local competition. We only have to look at category killer stores (BestBuy, Frys, Lowes/Home Depot) together with big-box stores (WalMart/Target/etc) to get a sense of how different today’s marketplace is from that of even as recently as 20 years ago.

The difference is most heavily felt with retailers whose cost of product they buy from vendors is significantly higher than that of their mega competitors. How big a difference? It can be as much as 20-30%. This explains why clients and friends in business often say that “X competitor” is selling product at less than I can buy it from my vendors”.

Growing profits today is no longer just a “nice thing to do”. It is now critical today in an era of escalating expenses e.g. benefits, insurance, energy, cost-of-goods-sold, labor costs, etc. It is unlikely that even the savviest business executive/entrepreneur can successfully impact these new facts of doing business without a strategy/plan to do so.

Expenses can be chopped but, typically, only over a period of time e.g. you can’t chop fixed costs quickly. Even “variable” expenses are subject to short or long term commitments e.g. insurance costs, benefit costs, facility costs, etc.

So what does a company need to do today to bring the costs back under control?