In 2005, Thomas Friedman wrote an interesting article titled“It’s a Flat World After All” along with a best seller book entitled “The World is Flat”. The title is “a metaphor for viewing the world as a level playing field.” The world may be flat due to all the technology and globalization, but in business we cannot allow our companies to run flat.
If your revenue is running flat to last year you have a problem!
Even though one of my clients believed all was okay with flat revenues as she said, “we are not going backwards.” Her problem was that her expenses were impacted by inflationary increases. The effect of this caused a reduced profitability.
What are the causes for the revenue to be flat?
Questioning yourself about your products, your services, your pricing, your values being offered, your differentiation value, and finally what about your marketing and advertising? She did not have the answers until we drilled down into each of these functional areas of her company. Several issues surfaced, and I could see a number of opportunities which could generate increases in the revenue line with minimum impact to her expenses.
She indicated to me during the Strengths, Weakeness, Opportunitites and Threats (SWOT) exercise that she used to aggressively approach her client base to continue to upgrade their appraisals to keep up with the ever-increasing price of gold and diamonds. She stopped marketing this service because of the the expense of reaching out to her clients.
Elanstrategic developed a unique direct mail piece to her 3,500 clients. The results of the mailing brought clients in twice; once to drop the jewelry piece off for evaluation and a second time to pick up their jewelry with the updated appraisal. This also gave my client an opportunity to present to the customer a new and trendy piece of jewelry. Her revenue increased due to Elanstrategic’s new marketing approach.
