Can Twitter work for the Smaller Business?

When I started using Twitter I had two objectives. One was to see how Twitter functions as a social media marketplace and the other was to get a sense of how smaller businesses could use it as a channel to market.

Despite the hype around it Twitter still seems to me to be a niche product. That is based on the composition of its members. It reminds me of all those speed networking events that were so popular, their limiting factor was that it was predominantly sellers who attended and what we really need is buyers. I don't pretend to suggest that Twitter will die out as speed networking has but it does suffer from this phenomenon of too many sellers.

There are some areas where Twitter is well suited. The B2C environment for one, and there is certainly anecdotal evidence that companies have generated real revenue from Twitter and those providing digital products have found it a regular source of new business. It is however fair to say that this is not a quick win, it does take time and effort to build up a reputation and presence on Twitter. Mostly however its time; for those who are involved in delivering digital services, this is not an issue since using online environments is their natural marketplace. For those offering physical products and services it's a more challenging environment. However, if you're selling into the B2B or SoHo markets then it can still be an effective route. Essentially the fact that you can readily communicate with the decision maker and that the sales process is simple and short means that using Social Media Marketing (SMM) works well and having good visibility on twitter will certainly generate interest.

At the other end of the scale major corporates' have the time and resources to dedicate the man hours necessary to regularly insert their message and build that vital link of trust with their customers and prospects. So you can see many of the worlds largest businesses using Twitter including, Dell, Ford, etc. Dells assertion that it obtained $1million in revenue from Twitter has been well publicised. We must however accept that larger businesses already have an advantage since they've built a level of "trust" around their brand long before Twitter came along and they leverage that advantage further now.

One should not forget also that Twitter is more attractive to business because postings are necessarily short and unlike Facebook, You Tube or MySpace is text based. Interestingly this will make it more readily adopted by the professional in a higher age group and therefore more suited to today's decision makers.

The more difficult question is how "Fred Bloggs of Bloggs Joinery" can use Twitter. B2B business is not necessarily well suited to Twitter and many owner managers don't have the time to devote to develop a network, and quality is still as important as quantity. This is ignoring the import question of whether they "get Twitter" which is likely to be a major hurdle in itself. I have spoken to a number of small business owners who just don't "get it" and have subsequently stopped using it before they really had a chance see what it could do for them. So what options are open to them, well firstly assuming there is sufficient marketplace on Twitter for their product (something that is seriously open to question), they could encourage all their staff to join Twitter and use a collection of voices to build up a following or secondly, outsource. This may seem an extreme step or even heresy in Social Marketing, but to me it's an inevitable consequence of how social marketing works. SMM agencies will naturally develop enormous power simply by having several clients each with several users promoting several products. With that infrastructure its becomes almost inevitable that they would harness all the voices from all the clients to cross promote each new product growing in power and effect each time they add new clients. The next logical step is to dispense with real voices and create surrogate voices after all it's relatively easy to create persona's which people can use as templates. If true it would completely undermine the concept of Social Media Marketing as we know it.

These are surprisingly radical conclusions but supported, I think, by strong logic. I dont presume to know that this is true and I'm looking to you to tell me what do you think? Let me have your thoughts.

Laurence Ainsworth www.exigent-uk.com

UK/possibly Global - Cambridge Who's Who Invitation A Scam??

I thought I'd share this with you not only as a warning

on a possible scam, and I'll let you decide on that one; 

but also because its explained in such a pleasant 

and engaging way.

Latest Social Network Rankings – Worrying Times for MySpace

Compete.com has just released its traffic survey on social networking sites. The biggest climber by far is Twitter shooting up from 22^nd in 2008 to 3^rd in 2009. Interestingly the biggest looser is Bebo.com dropping 9 places to 14^th.

Myspace continues to exhibit a decline having hit a peak in 2007 and fallen 1% in 2008 and a further 13% in 2009. This must be a worrying trend for its owners and suggests, despite its obvious popularity, that it is somehow not meeting the needs of the new internet generation. It may be that it is a victim of its own success and that it has never quite managed to capture the imagination of users outside of the US. This is supported the fact that Facebooks' growth is now almost exclusively driven by users outside the US and its US subscriber numbers has also stagnated. Perhaps more worryingly for MySpace, is its drop in marketshare as a percentage of the top 25 social networking sites from 61% in 2007 to 33% in 2008, which perfectly illustrates that it hasn't enjoyed any of the 61% growth in traffic for the top 25 as a whole.

It clear that MySpace is in a difficult position, and if it doesn't to something soon it will find its position further eroded as other sites enjoy continued growth at its expense.

Find us also at www.exigent-uk.com

Googles New "AJAX" Search Invalidates All Non Google Keyword Searching

I discovered this article on Twitter. If true it is very worrying and puts Google potentially in the same position as Microsoft vis exploiting its Monopolistic position.

In short if this is being rolled out by Google all non Google analytics programs will be rendered useless. I like many people use non Google sites to look at keyword analysis and keyword searches and its probably the most important items I track.

This article puts it much more sucinctly than I ever could... read the full story @ http://tinyurl.com/c5uv8e

Find us also at www.exigent-uk.com

Why You Must Increase Marketing in a Recession or How Recessions Destroy Sales Metrics

I have of often read, and had heard many a pundit declaring that in a recession you must reduce your marketing spend. Based on my experience with previous recessions I have strongly opposed these views. I do have to say, that it is often very difficult for businesses to maintain their sales and marketing spend when times get tough. However, as you will see, the impact of a downturn in the economy plays havoc with established sales and marketing metrics. The effect of this should be to demonstrate clearly that in fact a company needs to increase its sales and marketing activity if it wants to survive a recession.

Philosophically this has always made sense, as for at least as long as we are going on a downward curve, there are more sellers than buyers. Those buyers, because they are short of money, will spend less on purchases to help them balance their reduced income. What I have tried to do is to quantify the effects of a recession on sales activity. I have made some simple assumptions which are as follows:

1. To continue trading the company needs to achieve three sales in a month.
   
2. Its success rate from prospects to sales is 33%.
   
3. To get a meeting with a prospect requires ten cold calls.
   

So in a normal sales environment our simple model would deliver this:

Phone Calls	to	Prospects	to	Sales
100	0.1	10	0.3	3

Essentially what we are saying is that you need to make 100 calls to get 3 sales. Now let's assume we get some softening of the economy and things get more difficult so instead of getting 3 sales for ten prospects we only get 2. So to keep up our 3 sales per month we now need 15 meeting. Because the conditions are a bit tougher it gets a bit harder to get meetings and we now need to make around 16 calls to get an appointment. Suddenly our model looks like this:

Phone Calls	to	Prospects	to	Sales
250	0.06	15	0.2	3

 

The result is that we now need to make 250 calls for our 3 sales.  Lets now go one step further and accept we're in a full blown recession rather like we have now. Our success rate is half what it is in normal times (These new metrics based on the evidence from some of my clients and further anecdotal information) . You end up with figures that look like this:

Phone Calls	to	Prospects	to	Sales
400	0.05	20	0.15	3

You can see that the implication in this simple model is quite devastating. It clearly impossible to go from 100 call per month to 400 overnight if at all or in the longer term find a regular 20 prospects per month. Typically sales will go down; just how far down depends on how well the sales team is managed and the local market (sector) conditions. Many companies would soon exhaust they’re prospect list at that level of calling, which partly explains why it doesn’t happen.

So how do we protect ourselves in these difficult times? Well first of all, don't panic! Secondly, before you go rushing off to contact people, you need to understand where you are. What I mean by that is you have to have some of information about the current performance of your sales and marketing activities. Your baseline should be to understand what your current sales of metrics are. If you don't have that information one simple way of creating some is to take the total number of bids, quotes, proposals you have made divided by the number you have won.

Also, make your marketing accountable, that is critically analyse the return on investment you get from your various marketing activities. In some cases this will be easy, for example if you use yellow pages or Yell.com you have their invoice which tells you the cost and you should be able to work out how much business you got from that investment. In simple terms than if your return is less than your investment, stop it. Stop it now if you can. If you can't, stop it as soon as you can. With those more fuzzy situations where you spend time and effort rather than cash you can still assess where you get the best or least reward for your effort.

Only now that you have this information in your possession should you go out and up your marketing and sales. This simple exercise will have done two things; firstly it will have told you what your baseline is which will enable you to understand your effort to sales ratio. Secondly, it will have identified your most productive marketing channels. You now need to go out using those channels and communicate with your best customers, your good customers, and then the rest of your customers to identify sales opportunities. From here you need to move it into new business development. Choose your best channels first as they are most likely to deliver the quickest results. And set yourself targets for activity to see what your new sales metrics are, and if you can, pursue them relentlessly.

It will be tough in the early days, but if you stick at it while others fall by the wayside you will have created a stronger sales and marketing base to take you into the next upswing.

Find us also at www.exigent-uk.com

Twitter for Beginners

I have recently started to use Twitter, and being a relative novice with blogs, I wanted to see how easy it was to use and why people would want to use it. Essentially it appears you can use Twitter for two reasons, firstly; for purely social objectives or secondly; and more commonly as a way of promoting your business your ideas and your brand. The easiest way to describe Twitter is that it is text messaging on the Internet. You only have 140 characters to post a blog so there is an art in itself in getting your message over with this limitation. To quote Winston Churchill "I don't have time to write you a short note so I will write to you a long one". With such a limited number of characters you do have to think quite clearly about what you're saying, which in itself is no bad thing.  

So I'm assuming, as I do, that you want to use Twitter to build up your network and promote your business here are a few tips on how to get started. Firstly, I would say that Twitter is incredibly easy to use. But before you start you need to decide on your persona. That is to say do want your tweets to be of a personal nature or of a business nature. Perhaps we should look again at it in a slightly different way and ask yourself the question do you think that some of your personal messages would be inappropriate for your business contacts two receive, if you think the answer is yes then you should open two twitter accounts. If the answer is no, or probably no, then one will be sufficient.  

Getting started is easy once you have signed up get your home page and hit settings. Let's not worry about pictures and suchlike at the moment, and concentrate on settings. The most important section is the one line bio. Give some thought about what you want to say, as potential followers will read this bio and use it to decide whether to follow you or not. A poorly written bio will not encourage followers.  

Right, we are now ready to go. So what do you say, at this point it's a learning curve for you so just try a few different posts to see how comfortable you are with them. The most important thing is to be yourself, remember this is not a 5 minute wonder, potentially you'll be using this medium for years to come. To build up your network you need to find some people to follow, and you need some followers. The best way to start, if you can, is to connect with some of your friends who already use Twitter, that gives you a place to start.  

Go to one of your friends pages, and on the right hand side you will see the word following and underneath that will be a number of mini pictures, choose one at random and click on it. This will take you through to that person's home page, read their Bio and if you like it, just below their picture you will see a radio button which says follow. Press it and you are now following that person and they are part of your network. Repeat this process as often as you like and you will quickly build up an understanding of those individuals who are of interest to you and those who are not. The current etiquette is that if you follow somebody, they will for the most part follow you back.  

For the first few days, don't worry too much about growing your network, your best spending your time understanding how Twitter works. You'll get a sense from reading of the submissions and from that you should start to understand the best way for you to communicate via Twitter. A couple of other ways to speed up building your network is to use something called "Twitter local", download it and use it to identify people close to you who are on Twitter. Follow them and as you are local they are more likely to follow you back.  

Contact me on www.twitter.com/laurenceexigent. If you refer to my blog I'll guarantee to follow you back.  

Find us also at www.exigent-uk.com

The 5 Stages of a Sales Call

You might be a business owner or self employed or someone who through force of circumstance has moved into sales and has had little, if any, formal sales training. This blog article will give you a structure to work from which will help you be more successful in sales. 

First a bit of Psychology, when people meet for the first time, there is always some stress particularly for the potential buyer. Stress levels which start at a high level at the beginning fall throughout the call only to rise to a peak again during what we all know as "The Close". What this 5 stage approach does it to try to make this psychology work in your favour to improve your chances of making a sale.

Stage 1. The Ice breaker

This stage relates to the first key minutes of the meeting at this point stress levels are high and we need to bring them down. It's a conversation which takes place between the two parties but which has nothing to do with business. It helps to establish ease and rapport before the business meeting proper starts. It literally breaks the ice. Obvious isn't it, well why do we often not use it. Well it's that word stress again which pressures us to get on with it, and don't you know it - when we rush straight into the business content we're less successful. What do you talk about? Well look for clues, people tend to publicise what they're interested in, even if they do so unconsciously. So if you see lots of golf pictures on the wall, guess what; he likes golf, there's your starter for ten.

Stage 2. The Opening

As it suggests, this is the start of the business portion of the meeting, it's a series of opening statements which should outline the agenda for the meeting, make sure you always have one. At this point you won't know what specific issues your prospect faces so you have outline the list is issues that a typical prospect for your product or services might face and relate that to the specific benefits that your company's product or service provides. This is the most talking you should do at the meeting.

Stage 3. Qualification or Questioning

By now and in a few short minutes by following these simple steps you'll have managed to reduce much of the stress levels, both you and your prospect will feel more comfortable and they will be ready to discuss the issues surrounding their business. There an old saying in sales which goes "you have two ears and one mouth use them in that proportion", basically and especially during this stage only ask questions and let your prospect do the talking. Qualification is a much undervalued part of the sales call, but if you don't qualify properly and understand your prospects issues and rationale you've dramatically reduced your chances of a successful close. This section is by far the longest and should represent at least 75% of the time you spend with your prospect. Don't at any point during the qualification stage offer any solutions; just make note of the issues and problems raised and how your solution can solution can help. Start with easy questions like "how did you start your business?" and "who do you sell to?"or "why did you buy this machine?" Then ask more searching questions once you've uncovered some issues like "why is that a problem for you?" or "what are the implications of not addressing this problem?" Having gathered your information and understood his problems we go to...

Stage 4. The Close

It's the term that strikes fear into the hearts of many sales people, just the mention of the word has probably increased your heart rate and you're not even at a meeting! So as we enter the close our stress levels really start to spike. One of the side effects of high stress is that we have a tendency to talk too much and frankly just babble. 

This is a real danger because by talking too much we let our prospect off the hook and leave without a sale. So as we move into the close keep calm, try to deliberately talk a little slower, then sum up the qualification session by identifying each issue and how you can help. You then ask for the order and stay quiet and you stay quiet until your prospect answers. Don't worry if it takes what seems like an eternity for him to respond it's only likely to be 5-10 seconds, and remember your prospect will be feeling just as much stress as you. If you start speaking first you'll have lost; the conversation will avoid directly the issue of purchase because you'll have given your prospect a chance to talk anything other than the most important - will he buy.

Stage 5. The Consolidation

Congratulations you've held your nerve, you've asked for the order and you've answered a couple of objections and he's said yes. So what do you do next? Well you could run around waving your arms in the air saying Yes! Yes! - but that's probably not the right thing to do. 

Let's look at the stress levels, they've collapsed you've both taken a huge sigh of relief and there's a great tendency to get out of there just as fast as you can. Don't. Stick around the consolidation stage is there for you to allow the prospect to be comfortable in his own mind that he's made the right decision. There is something called "buyers blues" which relates to circumstances where after a purchase the buyer becomes disillusioned with what he's bought. It often manifested by the unexpected cancellation of an order. The Consolidation is designed to minimise this, you need to find a reason to stick around for 10-15 minutes, if you can, get him to fill in some documentation relating to the sale, alternatively if you haven't already suggest a look around the factory or site, your intention here is to get them back into their comfort zone, I've even suggested a celebratory cup of tea.

So there you have it, a simple five step model for being more successful sales, happy selling!

Find us also at www.exigent-uk.com

If You wont take advice from me, What about from "The Sage of Omaha"?

This article is by the legendary Warren Buffett, whose simple homespun philosophy has made him the worlds richest man. His company Berkshire Hathaway has a price per share of a staggering $100,000 per share, thats right, $100,000.

This article demonstrates, if ever we needed reminding, that there are opportunities for us, even in the darkest of times.

New York Times Article by: Brad Holland Times Topics: Warren E. Buffett


THE financial world is a mess, both in the United States and abroad. Its problems, moreover, have been leaking into the general economy, and the leaks are now turning into a gusher. In the near term, unemployment will rise, business activity will falter and headlines will continue to be scary.


So ... I’ve been buying American stocks. This is my personal account I’m talking about, in which I previously owned nothing but United States government bonds. (This description leaves aside my Berkshire Hathaway holdings, which are all committed to philanthropy.) If prices keep looking attractive, my non-Berkshire net worth will soon be 100 percent in United States equities.


Why?


A simple rule dictates my buying: Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful. And most certainly, fear is now widespread, gripping even seasoned investors. To be sure, investors are right to be wary of highly leveraged entities or businesses in weak competitive positions. But fears regarding the long-term prosperity of the nation’s many sound companies make no sense. These businesses will indeed suffer earnings hiccups, as they always have. But most major companies will be setting new profit records 5, 10 and 20 years from now.


Let me be clear on one point: I can’t predict the short-term movements of the stock market. I haven’t the faintest idea as to whether stocks will be higher or lower a month — or a year — from now. What is likely, however, is that the market will move higher, perhaps substantially so, well before either sentiment or the economy turns up. So if you wait for the robins, spring will be over.


A little history here: During the Depression, the Dow hit its low, 41, on July 8, 1932. Economic conditions, though, kept deteriorating until Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in March 1933. By that time, the market had already advanced 30 percent. Or think back to the early days of World War II, when things were going badly for the United States in Europe and the Pacific. The market hit bottom in April 1942, well before Allied fortunes turned. Again, in the early 1980s, the time to buy stocks was when inflation raged and the economy was in the tank. In short, bad news is an investor’s best friend. It lets you buy a slice of America’s future at a marked-down price.


Over the long term, the stock market news will be good. In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497.


You might think it would have been impossible for an investor to lose money during a century marked by such an extraordinary gain. But some investors did. The hapless ones bought stocks only when they felt comfort in doing so and then proceeded to sell when the headlines made them queasy.


Today people who hold cash equivalents feel comfortable. They shouldn’t. They have opted for a terrible long-term asset, one that pays virtually nothing and is certain to depreciate in value. Indeed, the policies that government will follow in its efforts to alleviate the current crisis will probably prove inflationary and therefore accelerate declines in the real value of cash accounts.


Equities will almost certainly outperform cash over the next decade, probably by a substantial degree. Those investors who cling now to cash are betting they can efficiently time their move away from it later. In waiting for the comfort of good news, they are ignoring Wayne Gretzky’s advice: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.”


I don’t like to opine on the stock market, and again I emphasize that I have no idea what the market will do in the short term. Nevertheless, I’ll follow the lead of a restaurant that opened in an empty bank building and then advertised: “Put your mouth where your money was.” Today my money and my mouth both say equities.


Warren E. Buffett is the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, a diversified holding company.

Qualification, Qualification, Qualification 4 critical steps to successful selling

Fed up with closing too few sales? Keep coming up against surprise objections? Use qualification best practises to improve your close rates.

The qualification process in sales calls seems to have fallen out of favour recently and there’s an almost unnatural preoccupation with “the close”. Whilst there’s no denying the importance and the sheer pull of closing. If you don’t qualify properly “the close” will tend to become a painful and an increasingly fruitless experience. Simply put; by qualifying better you’ll close more business.

Step One - Do Some Planning!

Now before you roll your eyes and think to yourself “here we go again”, do you really think that this article sprung miraculously out of my head just as it sits on the page. No of course not; I planned out what I was trying to achieve working on the structure and presentation before I put a word down on paper. You know your product or service; think about what questions you’ll need to ask to properly qualify your prospect. Take a prepared crib sheet of questions if it helps.

Step Two – Understand your prospects issues and their consequences

Too many untrained sales people on hearing an answer that indicate the prospects needs their service or product rush straight to “Well Mr prospect our XYZ thing can solve your problem because it does....”. Don’t do it, just resist that temptation. Back to bit of Psychology, we all have problems, how do we deal with them? Mostly by putting them to the back of our mind and closing the hatch on them. That way for the most part we can try to ignore them. What you want to do is to keep asking questions such that this problem you can solve is unlocked from the back of your prospects mind and the full horror of it is brought home to him. This is best done by asking him questions about why it is such a problem and what the consequences are if it doesn’t get fixed. The more questions you ask like this and the more your prospects talks about it, the bigger his problem becomes and the more valuable your solution will appear to be.

Step Three – Act as a (responsible) journalist

Your prospect will in all likelihood, not have the answers to all your questions so he’ll “guess” some of the answers. Your problem is you won’t always know when he’s guessing. Furthermore there will be some issues which he will not want to talk about so he’ll adjust the truth to make his responses more palatable (at least to him). To identify this you need to be able to ask for the same information in different ways rather as a journalist does by using separate sources. This is an important but largely ignored part of qualification. After all you don’t want to find out that the critical information on which your subsequent sales pitch rests is based on either guessed or incorrect information.

Step four – Summarise your prospects needs

You’ve now spent a large portion of the meeting (say 40 minutes in an hour) uncovering the consequences of his problem. You should now be able to list a number benefits that your solution will offer and demonstrate how it’s going to take all that pain away. You can now head for “the close” with confidence, but that’s a subject for another time.

A recession provides opportunities as well as challenges

Many small business owners are experiencing a downturn for the first time; and what a downturn to start! Nevertheless there are a few simple rules that they can follow which will help them survive and even thrive in this most difficult of business environments.

In describing what can be done I've employed the analogy of a football team which simultaneously has to employ both good defensive and offensive strategies to win.

Let's look at those activities that are defensive in nature. These will protect their client base against other competitors and will assess the fitness of their organisation. Secondly, there are those activities that can be considered offensive, in an attempt to win more business or win more customers.

Defensive actions can be split into external facing and internal activities. Externally they need to be looking to strengthening and at the very least maintaining their relationship with their best customers. Obviously this can be initiated by phone calls, but must include more face to face visits, and more overt proactive activity which can be in the form of newsletters, emails or calls. Also its worth considering particularly in the service industry whether you can get you clients on some sort of regular payment plan. Inevitably this will mean that they start paying for service in advance, making it much more difficult for them to be poached by competitors. Moving out to the next level of customers they need to be undertaking similar activity. Clearly less important customers warrant a lower level of investment but once you've categorised your customer base all those you want to retain should benefit from increased sales and marketing activity. The priority is clearly best customers first, the least important customers, last. Customer importance should be related to the opportunity of income growth as well as the amount of business you currently get.

Internally business owners should be reviewing all their business and management processes. My experience is that for most businesses their internal processes are at best passable, but very often for SME's they're hand crafted and reliant upon the knowledge of the current personnel to make them happen making them clunky and often counter intuitive and hence very inefficient. If we treat the recession as a get fit regime, then we need to be removing the inefficiency from all our internal processes to get to the cost of production down and increase gross profits. So review all internal processes from sales and marketing to credit control and it will be possible to quickly discover where the business is inefficient and free those improvements across the board to extract additional profit for the firm. This is not an easy process as people are resistant to change. It requires conviction and dedication to implement these new processes but the results can be staggering.

Let's turn now to offensive actions. Most of these activities relate to business development. The business needs to organise, systematise and implement regular sales and marketing campaigns in its chosen areas. Initially it will meet increased competition as all savvy business in their market will be doing the same. In addition struggling firms will be attempting to stay afloat by "buying" business. This classically leads to a situation when revenues come under pressure and marketing costs rise. Successful businesses resist the temptation to slash sales & marketing budgets as that creates a vicious circle of decline. However, as the recession bites, those firms who can't manage the fitness regime will fall by the wayside reducing competition and opening up more new business opportunities for those left.

For those businesses with a strong constitution, there is also the opportunity to grow by acquisition. There are bound to be a significant number of businesses that would be only too pleased to run into the arms of a competitor rather than face extinction. As an alternative build up a relationship with some local insolvency practitioners who may provide opportunities for cheap acquisitions post failure.

http://www.exigent-uk.com/
Exigent consulting has been providing specialist advice to small and medium businesses since 2002. Its founder Laurence Ainsworth has successfully managed businesses through the recessions of the early 90's and 2001-2.

Grumpy Old Man on Behalf of Sissies!

I was looking through the multitude of information and articles that stream across my desk - mainly because I have this butterfly mind and its much easier than concentrating on one thing; when I came accross this article

Downsizing is for Sisses: Putting My Money Where My Mouth Is! by Jim Gilbert

It was to me like putting a red rag to a bull and I just couldn't help myself here's my reply I think I'm right well I would wouldn't I


"Hi Jim,

Sorry, I have to say what a load of old twaddle!

Layoffs aren’t for sisses, making redundancies is a very unpleasant thing to have to do. Neither is it done through lack of imagination, its done through lack of other alternatives. Most business turnarounds require an element of crisis management, where the company, and this is where I agree with you, has through poor management allowed their position to deteriorate to the extent that they need external help to keep it from going under.

Under these circumstances in 9 times out of 10, the company has insufficient cash resources to maintain and support its current debt burden. Whether that be salaries or payment to creditors or bank loans. In simple terms in this situation no self respecting creditor is going to wait for payment on the chance that you might be able to increase sales at some indeterminate point in the future such that they can get paid. In most cases a creditor will demand some concessions from you for its continued support. These concessions are typically proof that you have cut down your expenditure. In most businesses the largest single variable cost is labour. Therefore that is where you have to go to find the savings to allow the business a chance to succeed.

In any turnaround two things typically have to happen; firstly the need to reduce your cost base and secondly you need to try to increase sales. This in turn is crucially dependent on two things; firstly the relative competitiveness of your product or service and; secondly the state of your marketplace. At the risk of stating the obvious if you are in banking you are unlikely to want to substantially increase your loan book in these highly volatile times.

Having said all that, I had to agree that too many businesses do not explore the sales and marketing opportunities available to them. This is particularly true in the smaller business sector where owner-managers have built up a business based on the fact that they are good at what they do, rather than because they are good at running businesses.

Rgds Laurence Ainsworth
Exigent Consulting
Business Turnaround Specialists since 2002 "

Lets suck it and see

Well this is my first attempt at a blog.

I'm hoping to balance information with humour and the odd rant to reflect how I cope with being a small business attempting to establish itself in a highly competitive market.

I'm happy to answer any questions on issues for the smaller business where I can and - have some fun.

So feel free to attack what I say or why I say it after all theres nothing worse than no response.......

Happy Weekend