Well, when’s the last time you put your budget on the scale? Just like our bellies, our spending can start to grow over time without much notice, and we don’t know how bad it is until something exposes it- like being invited to the beach, or a meeting with the accounting department!

In our recent “Ultimate Recession Planning Toolkit,” MSP outlined several great ways to get your business’s budget- especially marketing- into shape for the coming economic downturn. We give you specific exercises that can trim the “holiday fat” and get you ready for anything- like the following advice about advertising during a recession:

• Temporarily switch media: In order to stay in the public’s mind for less, look into moving your budget from TV to a less expensive medium like radio, print or in some cases the internet.
• Buy in Bulk: Find out what kind of discounts you can get now by making a large purchase before your budget shrinks.
• Negotiate Long-term Deals: Media outlets will feel the pinch as well, and will be looking to make money. If you prepare by saving now, you can meet with them to lock in a low price for a long-term contract.

So go check out our advice on the heavy lifting, stretching and other activities that’ll get your balance sheet all sexy for the beach season, er, recession.

“Does your Marketing Budget Make you Look Fat? Five Exercises for a Leaner Organization“

Clip coupons. okay, not exactly coupons, but find good deals on business services. Everyone from Costco to Microsoft is catering to the small-to mid sized business market. Make those companies win your business by comparison shopping. This idea is great when you’re talking telephone or cellular phone plans,suppliers, or even interest rates on company credit cards.

Increase your prices. Not everyone can do this. But if you can back up your price increase by better products, service, and quality, you’re likely to keep your customers.Most people are accustomed to the idea of getting what they pay for. ( i have herd the advice of increasing your prices 10 percent per month until u lose 10 percent of your business. Then stop. You might try it again when you  improve your products  services. The concept is interesting and it may have some value for your business.)

Be clear about your payment terms. From the get-go, institute a consistent and firm payment process. Most customers appreciate your professional approach if the way you do business is clear. You may consider letting your clients make payments over time, but the cost of having customers who pay late is significant, not only on he cash side but also on time spent on collections.

Ask for more business. Do your clients and past clients know about all the services you offer? not only should you educate your customers annually bout what you offer, but also ask for more business. Chances are, you’ll get it.   

We’ve always been big proponents of the Balanced Scorecard
and believe it should drive overall strategy. It is an excellent management
tool, and many organizations say the scorecard is the foundation of their
measurement and management systems. In fact, we created our online strategic
planning system, MyStrategicPlan,
based on the Balanced Scorecard framework. By setting goals in the four key
areas that all organizations must excel in to succeed, you create a balanced
and holistic strategy.

• Financial
  or mission: When you provide value to your customers, you achieve your
  financial or mission goals.
• Customer:
  If you want to generate additional revenue, you need to provide value to your
  customers.
• Internal/operational
  process: In order to provide value to your customers, you must have the
  internal business process to create that value.
• Employee/people
  (centered on learning and innovation): In order for your business processes to
  function, you need people who are skilled and knowledgeable.

Maintaining this same kind of focus is also key for each perspective. You should develop at least
one long-term strategic objective but no more than five for each area. If you
develop too many at the beginning, your plan may become unwieldy. Likewise, sharing
too many goals with your people can often be as dangerous as sharing no goals.

Don
Moyer, writing for the Harvard Business Review, likens this effect to peanut
butter, “The more you spread it, the thinner it gets.” He suggests choosing a
single, clearly articulated objective or a goal relatively narrow in scope that
can be easily distilled. Consider an objective that embodies your
organization’s central purpose or a goal that focuses on meeting a higher
standard for a single product. Either of these can be well-defined and
measurable and serve to galvanize an organization.

For example, Business Health Services needed to either cut costs or cut jobs. One area for cost cutting was reducing its costs to transcribe doctor’s notes and other medical documents. At the time, the company was paying 16 cents a word, but through the help of an outsourcing broker, it was able to locate a vendor in India who would do it for 11 cents. Add on the 25 percent premium that the broker gets, and the company now only pays 11.5 cents a word - a $7,000 per month savings.

Is outsourcing in your future? Here are some guidelines to determine whether outsourcing is the right move for your company:

• You need a higher level of expertise than you currently have, or you only need that expertise periodically.
• You have a set of activities or functions that need rapid change.
• Departments or functions are performing subpar when compared to others in your company.
• Outsourcing is cheaper without a decrease in quality.
• You need better performance but lack the resources to do it yourself.
• You have a non-core area that’s giving you a headache.

Check out the National Association of Software and Service Companies (www.nasscom.org), India’s trade group, for help with outsourcing.

Execution is
the process that turns strategies and plans into actions in order to accomplish
strategic objectives and goals. Execution of your plan, ideas, strategy, or
project is arguably as important, or even more important, than your strategy.
Ruthless commitment to executing critical actions moves anything from words on
a piece of paper to actions that drive business growth. Sadly, the majority of
companies do a miserable job at execution. An article in Fortune some
years ago highlighted that nine out of ten organizations failed in the area of
execution for the following reasons:

• 60 percent of organizations don’t link strategy to budgeting
• 75 percent of organizations don’t link employee incentives to
       strategy
• 86 percent of business owners and managers spend less than one hour
       per month discussing strategy
• 95 percent of a typical workforce doesn’t understand their
       organization’s strategy.

A plan, any kind of
plan, provides a leader with the roadmap it needs to pursue a specific
strategic direction and set of performance goals, deliver customer value, and
be successful. However, this is just a plan; it doesn’t guarantee that the
desired performance is reached any more than having a roadmap guarantees the
traveler arrives at the desired destination.

Here are four
different areas that will help you execute anything flawlessly:

# 1: Getting set up for success Before you start the execution process,
evaluate your plan for action and implementation. Identify the specific issues
and choices your strategic plan should address. A plan is only as good as the
information on which it’s based.

#2: Coach for performance Act like a coach and use the plan as your
framework to guide your team to high performance.

#3: Commit to effective meetings. Schedule regular meetings to report on
plan or project status. This is critical to making the numbers and achieving
company strategic goals.

#4: Hold everyone accountable – including
yourself
Accountability is key to successful execution — hands down. If you and your
team don’t have to report to anyone on your progress, the plan may find itself
further and further down your to-do list or at the bottom of your stacks of
paper.

You don’t need to
have perfected these, but just make sure that you’ve given all the areas equal
consideration. You don’t want to look back six months from now, and wish you
had identified some big issues that are now threatening your success. If you’ve
identified some red flags, assess if they’re huge obstacles or small ones. If
they’re big, get them out of the way before you execute, even if it means
pushing your timeline out for awhile.

At a monthly meeting, the company starts by defining a series of actionable items based on the monthly reports. From there, action plans are developed and reported back on the one-page summary reports.

The CEO feels the benefits are usually quite substantial. After all, when action items are consistently elevated, department heads know they’re responsible for implementing the items as efficiently as possible (that’s called work peer pressure). The department heads appreciate this process because it raises the bar for everyone and keeps their staff focused on the right things.

• In the general administration area, the newspaper’s invoices only offered one method of payment, when there were actually three ways to pay. The publisher immediately revised the invoices to include all options. The cost to the company was next to nothing as they were computer-generated. Decrease in delinquent accounts: 40 percent.
• In the human resource management area, the organization’s high turnover rate made customers question the viability of the newspaper. The publisher instituted a more rigorous hiring process that included a third-party skills and personality assessment to make sure theat the right people were "on the bus."
• In the area of technology, the newspaper didn’t have an online renewal form. This feature was quickly added, which allowed subscribers to maintain their subscriptions with a click of their mouse instead of calling, faxing, or snail mailing in their renewal forms.

Don’t these changes seem obvious and straight-forward? It’s easier to see the errors of others or after someone points them out to you. Well, it wasn’t until the publisher used the value chain that he realized where the links were broken. The organization’s core product is highly regarded in the community, but the supporting activities were hindering business growth.

The sheer quantity of all this information is unprecedented, but so is the complexity of working with it. Yet, despite its volume and disparate nature, this data is potentially useful to business because the computing power necessary to merge, manage and make sense of it also has been advancing and becoming more affordable…forward-looking companies are positioning themselves ahead of this information curve by moving quickly and down two parallel tracks: increasing the company’s ability to gather and access new forms of data while simultaneously building organizational capability to use that data for insight.

Modified thoughts from Glover Ferguson, Sanjay Mathur and Baiju Shah