Beware of Cost Cutting Tactics that may Sacrifice Quality Service

Cutting costs or future profits?
Are you cutting costs or future profits?

In today’s economy many businesses are cutting back. You are under pressure to lower fixed costs of doing business, while maintaining or improving profit margins. This is an incredibly challenging, and taxing, endeavor and the choices you make will most likely have a greater long-term effect on your business than you may realize today.

Simultaneously, now more than ever, is the time to shine in your clients and prospects eyes!

Too often, business decisions are made in haste due to immediate economic conditions which, though temporarily decreasing costs on a weekly or monthly basis, actually cost the company far more in the long-run.

The key to success in business in these challenging times is not be to do or spend less necessarily, but to get more “bang for your buck” without sacrificing quality.

Sacrifice is “the surrender or destruction of something prized or desirable for the sake of something considered as having a higher or more pressing claim.”

Losing quality of product or service to curtail costs is essentially placing a greater price on short term savings than the value of future client loyalty and your company’s reputation.  Look very carefully at the impact any and all cost cutting strategies may have long term.  If at all possible, incorporate strategic marketing into your decisions utilizing cost effective tools readily available today.  The return you may find by intelligently and decisively controlling your company’s costs while marketing effectively, may far outweigh the savings you will find by targeting “the usual suspects” in cutting overhead.  But no matter what you do, no matter how tight things become, sacrificing quality will prove detrimental to your business.

In upcoming posts I will be reviewing several tools and techniques that you may find beneficial in increasing your marketing capabilities while fixing, or even decreasing existing costs.  Every day, quality companies are releasing products to market that afford its users great opportunities to inexpensively reach their clients and prospects, or to decrease costs related to remote staff communications and presentations.

Even when my firms are customizing OTS (“off the shelf”) tools for clients, we try not to re-invent the wheel whenever possible depending on our clients needs.  This approach has allowed us to test drive several tools that have value and I look forward to sharing them with you.

In the meantime, stay focused on maintaining and enhancing quality, and don’t be shy to proudly market your successes.