How to benefit from the high price of oil.

July 31st, 2008

The price of oil is down — a little bit. It’s about $125 per barrel as I write this, which seems much better than the $140+ prices it was fetching a couple of weeks back, but only in comparison to those prices.

If you’re in the oil business, these prices are very good news: Exxon Mobil just announced profits of $11.7 billion for the past quarter. And if you’re in a fuel-intensive business like airlines or trucking, these prices offer little but pain.

But what about the rest of us, caught somewhere in-between? How can we benefit from this historic shift in petroleum prices? Here are just a few quick suggestions of my own:

  • If you’ve been looking for an excuse to sell flex-time or teleworking to the top brass in your company, there’s never been a better time. Besides the general benefits that accrue to happy telecommuters, there’s the added morale boost that you’re saving these workers on gas money.
  • You can promote camaraderie and teamwork by helping organize — or simply encouraging — carpooling. This could be as simple as putting up a cork board in the breakroom and then sending out one all-hands e-mail.
  • You could lobby your local transit authority to locate a bus kiosk or the like near your facility, thereby permanently increasing the appeal of your location to bus commuters.
  • If your business has anything to do with energy efficiency, even indirectly, you’ve never had a better market backdrop for putting forward your value proposition.
  • Ditto if your business offers anything that helps people to virtualize work that has typically been done physically. This could be anything from online training software to teleconferencing equipment to efficient delivery services that save customers the trouble of driving themselves.
  • If you’re in operations and have longed to make real improvements in overall efficiency, you’ve never had a better moment to sell your top brass on the virtues of investing in equipment or processes that will save energy in the long run.
  • . . .

What would you add to this list?

~

(Image by creativebob4u.)

Category: Energy, Innovation & Entrepreneurship

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to the RSS feed so you can receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

2 Comments so far

Seth Gottlieb July 31st, 2008 12:25 pm

Even if you don’t make tools to virtualize work, you can start to use them. Travel for face to face meetings is expensive and time consuming. This might be little push that makes distributed collaboration a viable alternative (especially if the people you need to meet with all work out of their homes as well).

Tim Walker August 2nd, 2008 1:30 pm

Seth — Now that I think about it, consider how working to save money (i.e. gas) can also help you to save time, for example by not commuting, by not traveling to an event you can attend virtually, etc.

We like to think that money is our most precious resource, but in fact it’s time, time, time. Time is the one and only resource that we can’t get back — and it’s just possible that high fuel prices might help us think in this direction.

Leave A Comment