The most important profit centre
Peter Drucker often condensed seemingly complicated concepts into pithy quotes of the blindingly obvious. One I came across the other day is "There is only one profit centre that counts - customers" It seems this statement of the obvious is often lost in the razzle...
Customer churn and the quality of sales
One of my clients is in a pretty difficult spot. Having lost a major contract, simply on price from an offshore based competitive supplier to his supermarket customer, he finds himself in the position where his overheads will eat him alive quickly without very painful...
A fine line between flattery and robbery
If imitation is the best form of flattery, domestic FMCG suppliers, the few left, should be very flattered indeed. Any lingering doubts about the pressure being applied to them by the two retail gorillas should be blown away by this video from ad agency Mumbrella,...
FMCG duopoly under pressure?
It seems that new ACCC chief Rod Sims is getting serious about the reality of the power of the two major supermarket retailers. At the same time, Andrew Reitzer MD of Metcash is giving the ACCC a headache over his presumptive execution of the purchase of Franklins...
Net Cash Consumption
This is a simple measure I try to foist on all my SME clients, the Monday morning "NCC meeting". It is just as important to larger businesses, but my clients are mostly SME's. It involves a meeting of the key cash sensitive executives, (generally the MD, Beenie,...
Amplification and social media effectiveness.
Following on from yesterday's post, on quantifying the value of social media, a couple of further thoughts. Like any activity, it is crucial to undertake activity utilising social media in the context of achieving an objective, a commercial activity of any type is...
Tools to quantify the value of the web.
Finding ways to quantify the impact of investment on-line has become a real challenge for management. A dollar spent on line is a dollar not available to be spent elsewhere, so the need for a quantitative base from which to compare apples and apples is substantial,...
Hamel on Jobs
Of all the eulogising about Apple and Steve Jobs that has been published since his death a couple of days ago, almost predictably, the best one in my humble view comes from Gary Hamel who looks at Apple through his lens of Strategy. Hamel thinks about the development...
Easy cost reduction
A while ago I helped a mate move flats. He had only been there about 5 years after becoming a "bachelor" again after his family grew up, but the significant amount of clutter accumulated was unanticipated, and surprising. All sorts of proposals, manuals, brochures,...
Innovation by combination
Innovating a business model usually is about finding ways to put elements of a service delivery together differently, these days it is usually also about combining technologies to deliver an outcome that would have been impossible without both the technology and the...