Move your margins

 

Move Your Margins

The definition of insanity is to do what you always did and expect something to change. Change occurs when you make change. Too many businesses believe their margins are already at their best and that they have looked at every possible option to make improvement. We have found this to rarely be the case.

Chances are you can make major changes in your margin by making small changes in the business, pricing strategies, calculation of cost of goods sold (COGS), and accurate assessment of employee costs against products. It is likely simple, though that doesn’t mean it will be easy. There may be opportunity to raise prices or even charge for areas you’ve been giving for free. It’s all worth considering, even if you believe you’ve considered all of it already.

A few things to consider:

Where might you be giving a service away for free? Engineering and consulting are often given away by businesses. When you decide to make this service a priority and charge for it, you start to de-commoditize your business.

1. How accurate are you accounting for actual employee time spent against the cost of the service? We have seen countless examples of service businesses who give away exponentially more design time than they’ve accounted for.
2. Where can you de-cluster your pricing?
3. What is the core product you can place a premium price on?

One of our favorite parts of business consulting is to help give businesses a new set of eyes on their P&L to identify ways to help make positive movement. Why not explore how you can get more with what you’re already doing? The worst thing that can happen is it stays at it is, so there is no risk in looking at it.