Do you want to make more money?

August 26th, 2008

Then stop doing the things that aren’t making you more money.

Sure, that’s simplistic — but if it were easy advice to follow, everyone would already be doing it. And sometimes, simplistic is good for getting us to think about what’s really meaningful.

You can profit from things that make you money directly:

  • Hiring extra salespeople.
  • Adding another production line.
  • Retooling your Web site to make it easier for people to buy from you.
  • Using more efficient equipment, or better-priced vendors, to lower your overhead.
  • . . .

You can profit from things that make you money indirectly:

  • Lowering phone response times in your call center = happier customers likelier to do more business with you.
  • Promoting a positive corporate culture = happier employees who get more done and stick around longer, lowering attrition and H.R. costs.
  • Pursuing savvy p.r. and social media strategies that help you find out what people are saying about you (feedback that can help you change in the right direction), and help you to better interact with your customers (promoting their loyalty).
  • . . .

But you can’t profit from things that make you money neither directly nor indirectly:

  • Long, pointless meetings where one or more people bloviate to (a) hear themselves talk, (b) practice CYA, or (c) both.
  • Perks for the sake of perks, or for the sake of stroking egos that would be better served with challenges.
  • Dithering about the color of the bikeshed and other rudimentary decisions.
  • Remember back when Lucent owned a golf course? Seems relevant to mention.
  • . . .

What examples can you give of common practices that can’t make money for a company either directly or indirectly? Feel free to state the obvious, and feel free to comment anonymously.

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(Photo by AMagill.)

Category: The working life

1 Comment so far

Elliot Ross August 26th, 2008 7:27 am

Too Many ideas! Although as a business tech manager they are skewed towards technology (mis)investments

1) Boom & Bust - spend only when “broken” you pay too much and all at once - long term planning with less spend at “once” reduces the hit to earnings

2) Lack of Vision - allows the equivalent of “urban sprawl” - leading to unnecessary complexity and brittleness. complexity causes instability, instability causes breakage, and breakage causes downtime and costs money.

3) Lack of Execution - Maybe it is because of my technical background. But I have found that suggesting, recommending, or hoping that a broken process would fix itself, or that the implementation of a business solution would materialize by itself never worked for me.

What did get it fixed or implemented was focusing on the current issue, looking at deliverables for short, medium and longer term, then seeing how we were meeting them.

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