Inside the Minds Stuff - Inside the Minds. Managing for Profit. Leading CEOs on Key Strategies for Increasing Profits Exponentially in Any Economy

Overhead reduction . In three months you wont be able to effectively impact revenues enough to enact even a 10% increase in profit, but you can still cut expenditures very quickly. Think pruning, and profits will eventually rise to the surface.

Existing customer promotions . The key here is to find a new or existing product that a large section of your existing customer base is not buying from you and give them a short- term incentive to buy it from you.

Slight price increases . Wherever possible, try raising prices slightly in some areas. When combined with cost cutting measures, a 3-5% price increase on goods and services will be palatable to most customers. To soften the delivery, implementing an additional level of service for those customers is a crucial step.

Market penetration . Add sales people and focus them on deeper market penetration in the applications in which the company has the most domain expertise. By securing more market share for existing products and software applications, the company should then be able to increase profits at a higher rate than revenues.

Reach out to Customers . I would offer referral fees and discounts to existing customers to act as references for their industry peers and trading partners .

Reduce Expenses . First, I would renegotiate my lease; its a big expense item, and the real estate market has come down significantly in the past two years . The advantage of this option is clearly that it would have no impact on employees or customers, but it wont exactly yield a vast reduction in overall expense either. The next step would probably be voluntary pay cuts ( myself included) for all employees . The motivation for doing this is to maintain the support of the company and to save someones job.