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Women in Business
The credit crunch means it's time to batten down the hatches - or some of them. Geoff Tyler explains why sailing into difficult trading times means a running tight ship.
So. We're in a recession. Yes, I know that at the time of writing the powers that be had not confirmed it - two quarterly periods in succession of negative growth (why can't they say contraction?) - but people's attitudes to parting with their hard-earned tell it all. Upmarket supermarkets are losing out to bargain basement ones, shoppers have found that the price premium for free-range and organic is a turn-off after all and businesses of all types are wondering how to keep attracting customers.
 As a businesswoman you may well by now be feeling a trifle two-faced - looking to cut your own costs while hoping to persuade your customers not to cut theirs, not in your direction at least.
The silver lining is that it is when our backs are to the wall that we are most inspired to come out fighting. Necessity is the mother of invention. (How's that for a metaphor mixture.)
I cannot help you much with the costs peculiar to your business other than to produce what must be an obvious list:
- Haggle like mad with suppliers - they are fearing the recession, too.
- Use your invoice payment period to the full.
- Search every part of your production process for cost saving ideas.
- Do the same with your office procedures - especially eliminate replication, for example of making records, filing and producing emails.
- Bring to the office what you do at home - look for better energy supply contracts.
- Look for alternative finance deals - banks and their kin will still negotiate if you're a sound bet.
- See if the local authority will agree you pay too much in business rates if business has turned down.
- Look at every overhead activity you have and justify its worth to yourself - corporate entertaining, travel, posh stationery, employee fringe benefits, salesforce, marketing, publicity.
Those last three items are most likely your most costly apart perhaps from the production process itself if you are in manufacturing.
In salesforce management you always need to be hard as iron. During better trading times it is tempting to extend a bit of latitude to the poor-ish performing sales type simply because you know he or she has kids and a mortgage to support and some kind of tragic past. But this is business, softie, and you have your own family, mortgage, overdraft, etc. to support as well as those of your better performing employees. You and they are the more deserving. You can afford no dead weight now, not one ounce.
In marketing and publicity, cost cutting is more difficult because the candidates for the chop are not all so obvious.
For example, that full colour glossy new brochure you had printed - the one twice the size of its predecessor. Does its extra cost actually bring in more business? Have you been able to attribute sales increases in the past to its introduction? Have you tested customers' opinion of it as a source of information and a means of getting your product/service sales message across?
I think I could count on my fingers the number of times clients of my publicity business allowed me to undertake such an exercise and I'd soon lose count of the times when printed matter was more an ego trip for the MD than a useful tool for the sales people.
Where marketing and publicity blur - some say blend - is another difficult area to cut successfully and an easy area from which to rob yourself of something that was working well for you.
Cont. on page 2.
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Major government initiative set to change the face of women’s enterprise in the UK
- Women-owned businesses access less than 3% of all procurement opportunities in the UK
- First annual ‘Get Connected’ conference, 31st October 2008
WEConnect (Women in Enterprise Connecting to Contracts) is a new government backed initiative aimed at connecting women with multinational corporations.
WEConnect works to break down the barriers faced by women-owned businesses in securing corporate contracts. Although 16% of UK businesses are women owned, less than 3% of corporate and public sector contracts go to women business enterprises.
Sue Lawton, Director of Development for WEConnect, comments: “An increasing number of women are turning to entrepreneurship as a way to fulfil their ambitions and create a new kind of workplace. However, many female entrepreneurs break out on their own only to face huge challenges in gaining fair access to procurement contracts.”
WEConnect aims to put WBEs in touch with key procurement contacts in the corporate sector, providing supplier diversity and giving large corporates the confidence to purchase from women-owned businesses which have achieved the WEConnect certification.
Based on a successful US prototype the scheme has already signed up a range of major business names as corporate supporters; Citi, Accenture, Goldman Sachs, Hewlett Packard, Pfizer, Credit Suisse Securities (Europe) Ltd, Cisco, JP Morgan, Marriott, New Technology Steel, Microsoft, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch and Mastercard UK.
WEConnect are holding their first annual ‘Get Connected’ Conference on Friday 31st October, hosted at the Merrill Lynch Financial Centre, central London. The conference is aimed at both procurement leads and women business owners.
Delegates will hear from UK and US multinational corporations about how their procurement process works, including Glenda Stone, CEO of Aurora and co-chair of the ‘Women’s Enterprise Task Force’. There is also the opportunity to hear from women who have gone through the certification process, connect with regional and national policy makers and find out how government is backing WEConnect as a key part of its new Enterprise Strategy.
See http://www.weconnect.org.uk
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