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12 ways to increase your profit

Do you know the 12 key levers you can toggle to increase your margin and make more profit? If not, then maybe you need to talk to us. We love making our clients more profitable.

You don’t know what you don’t know

As the diagram shows, there are three main areas you can focus on: Cash and margin; Growth; and Capital utilisation. There are various levers within each area you can use. Want to know what they are and how to best use them?

In our experience, most businesses are only aware of a few levers, and don’t really understand how to effectively manipulate all of them to make a massive difference to their profit. The trick is pulling the right levers in the right order, and aligning your efforts to support whatever change you make. Let Seegrow help you make the optimal choices.

Profit comes at a cost

Some of your choices might look easy but beware the law of unintended consequence. We’ve worked with a client who had been hellbent on sales growth, only to find themselves losing money fast. They hadn’t factored in what it would cost them to generate the revenue they thought they’d capture. Nor had they considered competitor reactions. If you don’t integrate your strategy right across your business, you run the risk of things blowing up in your face.

What do we do?

We’ll walk you through our Profit Improvement Model step by step, workshopping options in all 12 areas. We’ll also model the impacts and work with you to develop a constructive risk/benefit analysis, so you can decide which levers to pull.

Sometimes the simplest thing to do is raise your prices, because every dollar you raise them by goes straight to your bottom line. To do that successfully, you may need to realign your value proposition. Let Seegrow show you how to increase your margin, improve your value to customers, and make more profit with the least possible risk.

What have you got your competitors haven’t?

Sounds like such a simple question, but believe us, it isn’t. If it were easy, your business would be killing it. Are you? That’s probably why you’re reading this. You’re struggling for answers on how to outcompete the opposition.

Hope is not a strategy

If you can’t concretely articulate your distinct customer value, then how do you expect your staff or distributors to effectively sell your product when they can’t easily convince customers to choose your business over the competition?

Don’t fight the wrong battle

In our experience, we’ve found many companies push the wrong message to the wrong customers. They’ve chosen the wrong attributes and values on which to compete. It’s all too common. Fortunately, we know how to fix such problems.

The Value Curve is a tremendous tool when applied correctly. So many businesses are ‘me too’ because they don’t understand how to differentiate themselves. The Value Curve is all about defining where to compete and where to avoid. Use it right and you’ll likely have a major insight and see where you need to re-focus your business. That’s going to mean change and that’s seldom easy, but helping you restructure your value to generate more profit is what we’re here for.

What do we do?

In a half-day workshop, we’ll pull apart your offering, and show you what’s not working and why. We help you re-design your special niche with a unique combination of value that unlocks profitable growth.

We’ll realign your offering and messaging to the most appropriate and profitable target markets. We’ll show you how, without spending a fortune, or taking forever, to rapidly shift your focus and grow.

How do you generate profit?

Funny as it seems, a lot of businesses aren’t that sure how they turn a profit. We’re not talking accounting here, but how the company transforms inputs into products and services - and thus into profit. Let us show you how.

Want to know what’s really going on?

Properly understanding your own Internal Value Chain, its weaknesses and its strengths will open your eyes. Let us show you how. We’ll peel back your business onion, layer by layer, helping you see what’s happening inside your business. You’ll quickly see:

• What’s working

• What’s not

• What to fix

• In what order

Suddenly you’ll see why all your efforts to fix things up never deliver as you hoped. Now, instead of conflict, you’ll get agreement. Instead of miscommunication, you’ll find clarity. Instead of confusion, you’ll discover alignment.

How do we do that?

We use the Internal Value Chain to put your team on the same page. Instead of being in conflict because of unrecognised misalignments and misunderstandings, we enable everyone to see the big picture the same way. And that leads to shared agreement on what needs to change to drive improvement. The way we use this tool has been utterly transformative for many of our clients.

What do we do?

A half-day workshop is ideal for getting the big issues out in the open and everyone on your team on the same page.

We’ll help you identify and prioritise action areas, develop specific strategies with your team to address each problem area, and then integrate everything into a structured growth plan designed to profitably grow your business.

Where is your profit disappearing to?

Where you sit in the value chain is a critical piece of the business puzzle you must figure out.

So we’ve put a twist on this tool too. We don’t just show you where you sit in the value chain and the forces impacting your business, we show you how it’s possible to reinvent your external value chain to shift its centre of gravity and leverage activities more in your favour.

Escape the profit squeeze

For most businesses, profit is squeezed between suppliers and customers. All too often we’ve found clients stuck doing things that add value but no profit. Typically, they’ve missed opportunities to shift activities to partners who can do a better job for less. Or it’s the opposite case. Either way, we can help you analyse and de-risk your options to reinvent your value chain and increase your profit. We know where to look and the questions to ask.

Choosing wisely

Reinventing your position in the value chain isn’t a decision to take lightly. Yet if done properly, it can be an enormous source of opportunity, growth and profitability.

Realigning your external value chain usually means rearranging your internal value chain too. It can have far-reaching implications across your business, so let us help you make the right decisions to boost your profits.

What do we do?

It can be a complex task to unpack an external value chain. Our approach uses a half-day workshop to map the value chain and look strategically at your weaknesses, threats, and opportunities. Only then do we look at your capabilities and strengths to determine your viable options to alter your place in the value chain.

We’ll undertake a detailed value mapping process, followed by a forensic look at risks and mitigations, including financial modelling. In short, we’ll create a powerful new chain reaction to reset your growth and profit trajectories.

What’s your greatest challenge? Your people

You know managing people is hard work. A French philosopher once said, ‘hell is other people’, while Stalin’s view was ‘no people, no problem’.

If it’s that hard already, how will you go about changing the way your people work to deliver a new strategy? Change is even harder if you don’t deeply understand the culture you already have, or the pitfalls to avoid in changing it to improve performance and profit.

Who are you?

So many businesses struggle trying to be all things to all people. Instead, they need focus. A successful business has a core mindset running through the organisation, otherwise, people are always conflicted about the right way to do things. Ask yourself, is your culture hierarchical or open, focused internally on integration or externally on differentiation? Is it designed for control? Or flexibility? Is it stressed about getting stuff done now, or building a long-term future? These questions and many more need solid answers and internal alignment.

Implementation is the key to success

You must comprehensively align your supply chain, product, and value proposition to your customers’ needs. Of course, you must do the same internally with your people. That means correctly aligning people, culture, structure, and systems to your strategy. Let us show you how to integrate it all to improve your performance and profit.

We are skilled change managers when it comes to growth. We understand getting the strategy right is only part of the mix. We know you must have people with the right mix of skills focused and incentivised to do the right things. If not, you won’t capture the value you’re seeking.

What do we do?

We’ll analyse your culture, structure, and business performance through a few different lenses and models. We’ll work with you to build the culture that fits both you and your business, ensuring you turn strategy into success.

Our ’Hit Industry’ framework is a brilliant tool to help you decide what kind of business you want to be. That singular decision will identify the culture you need to deliver a winning value proposition to your chosen customers at a higher profit.

Are you making the best decisions?

Running a business isn’t easy. You make decisions all day long, but are you optimising those decisions and maximising your opportunities?

What about when change becomes imperative? Maybe you’re stuck in a rut you can’t escape. Or worse, find your company in a life-or-death struggle. This is when you most need to make great decisions based on solid logic and creative thinking.

That’s where our Strategy Options Matrix comes in. We eliminate the guesswork by giving you a proven framework to lay out your options and integrate your choices.

Integration and alignment are key

The secret is to make smart choices in a structured and integrated fashion, so you get positive feedback loops, not escalating clashes. Our strategy matrix helps ensure you don’t end up putting contradictory approaches into action.

A good strategy translates into enhanced productivity and higher profit. That’s why you need to know where to focus your efforts, and why. Our matrix approach ensures you have an active and deliberate purpose for every choice you make across your business.

Get the most bang for your buck

When we walk you through our Strategy Option Matrix, you’ll instantly see where you’ll get the best longer-term outcomes, how to maximise resource productivity and profitability that’ll deliver quick wins and sustainably grow revenues, cut costs, and drive profits.

It isn’t as hard as you might imagine. It just takes discipline. As we say to all our clients, it’s better to face up to the pain of discipline than live with the pain of regret.

What do we do?

We’ll workshop our way through the Options Matrix with you and your team. How long this takes depends on how many unique product/service groups you have.

We’ve found it’s a quick process once the broad elements of the overarching strategy are in place. The right options suddenly become logical and obvious, because we’ve done the work together to put the correct foundations in place. Once you can see where to go, then it’s so much easier to grow.

Is your business model delivering profitable growth fast enough?

Value either migrates to your business or away from it. You’re either growing, or you are shrinking. So your business model design is almost the most important choice you will make.

How do you generate profit?

What business are you in? Who is it designed to serve and how? Why you are in this market and not another? Do the decisions you made back when still make sense today?

Solving this existential question for your business comes down to the classic five questions: Who? What? Why? Where? How? The profit-generating ability of your business rests on you getting these meta-level decisions right. Would you rather struggle along as you are, using outdated thinking? Or challenge the choices you’ve made and move forward with a new and clear strategy to win?

What’s missing? What needs to disappear?

Customer needs and markets relentlessly evolve, so you must make hard decisions about reallocating resources and priorities to create the ideal combination of greatest customer utility AND maximised profit. You need to see change as your friend, not your enemy. If you can adapt faster than the competition, then you win.

You don’t need to be a major company or have deep resources to do this successfully. Designing and successfully implementing the right business model has nothing to do with company size. Let us show you how to focus your business model by designing a superior way to meet customer needs and make more profit.

What do we do?

After reviewing your Internal and External Value Chains, as well as your Value Curve, we’ll map out some options and then work with you to evaluate the optimal choices for your business using a risk/reward framework.

After that, it’s time to lay out a plan to deliver your value migration decision. That may be as detailed as a Business Plan, or as simple as an action plan with key activities, responsibilities, and milestones. It all depends on your circumstances and goals, on how much and how fast you want to grow.

Why do you charge the prices you do?

Pricing is one of the most important, and least understood, business decisions you must make. Do you know if you are leaving money on the table, or extracting the best possible combination of sales volume and profit? Probably not. If that sounds like your business, then perhaps it’s time you talked to Seegrow.

Don’t lose at the margin

The funny thing about price is that it’s rarely the most important factor in the customer’s buying decision. Yet so many business owners use price as their primary lever to drive sales. All cutting price does is drive down margin, which you then must make up for on volume. An example: if your gross margin is 40% and you cut prices by 10%, then you need 33% higher sales to generate the same gross profit. That’s some ugly math we advise you avoid.

Better pricing decisions make you more money

It’s a simple truth that the higher your prices, the higher your margin. But how do you achieve higher prices in a tough and competitive market? It’s easier than you might think, if you know how to go about it. Do you want to know how?

There are so many factors you can use to influence price expectations. Unless you’re selling a pure commodity, we can show you how to re-focus your sales on value that can be generated in many ways at little or no cost.

We can also help you get a handle on your discounting. So often we see clients throwing money away trying to buy sales through discounts. And once a customer gets one, they always want them. Let us show you how to get off the discount treadmill and put profit back in your pocket.

What do we do?

We’ll help you identify customer pressure points, realign your marketing to address them, and show you how to reduce the impact of price on the buyer’s decision.

Building a pricing strategy depends a great deal on your industry and competitive position. There’s no ‘one-size-fits-all’ magic bullet, but there are smart moves that can make a big difference. We’ll help you get a strategic handle on your approach to pricing, provide more value to customers, and drive more profit into your business.