When Decisions Lead To The Cemetery

There is no way to ignore that only sales keeps your business structure stable! 

Structure in business is the stable and growing income:  it decides where you work, with how many people you are allowed to build your organization and how their personal life style will be.

I was just reading an interesting article this morning about the cracking structure of many newspaper and magazine companies.  Main factor:  their clients are dying, literally!  They have sales losses of 43% to 54%.  Some newspapers already quit printing some of their editions.

Fact:  their online readers aren´t paying yet.  There was no active adjustment.  And even worse:  new clients aren´t following up because the method of gaining information has changed.  The only German newspaper and magazine company which did not suffer any decrease at all (less than 2%) is in the Bavarian area where the economy is very stable so readers still buy their products.  It´s an exception.

And it´s tradition which is being challenged now!  Many journalists lose their jobs these days.  The struggeling companies follow different online strategies:  some print the same they offer online the same day, others only offer 15% online of what is being printed and one doesn´t offer any newspaper-content online at all.  It´s impossible (is it?) to control the behaviour of the customers.  Some face the fact that soon they have to decide to accept a future on a cemetery.  Not only the journalists will offer their expertise differently soon (any strategy?), more companies will have to close their doors.  Their only joker is that you cannot control the print media.

Online prints are controlable – by those who are interested in its value.  Print media itself is independent of any controlling from the outside.  But, it does control all that´s been printed so the reader won´t get lost in a jungle of wildly spread information.  Each joker has a logical opposite side!

And I am sure soon there will be a company with a certain program which will offer some control over the online information jungle, which will sort by topic and date all the data about “X” into the drawer or call it “topic edition” with the title “x” on/for the same day.  Such a service of a company will structure the online info for those who aren´t familiar with the Huffington Post and some other few successful online newspapers.

But not only newspapers nowadays look over the fence of a cemetery – every company or department which is losing sales is confronted with the challenge to decide for the zero sales choice.  The sooner, the better.

I myself was in the role of such a decider in 2009.  The sales of product “y” dropped so low that one of our production plants decided to stop the deliveries in hope to activate positive price negotiations. Which never happened.  I was forced to talk with my boss about this step in terms of the economical background due to this situation.  Deciding to enter a cemetery is never joyfully nor fun.  If one side gets badly effected, mostly both sides will suffer.  And then the broker is unemployed.

The Decision Making aspect is a big part of your business strategy.

There is no recipe to follow but a vage prognosis of the next mega-trend and only time will tell how long this trend will last.  Another generation?  How old will this generation become?  At least its the numbers of customers and followers who decide about trends and future.  And in the 21st. Century they decide about product-prices with new and unknown pressure.

One thing never changes:  it´s the customer who pays.  The customer demands the price.  Fact.

BE A DECISION MAKER.  BECOME OUTSTANDING.

rita jaskolla – Leadership Architect –