How to Grow New Business

The Rio Tinto / Stern Hu bribery trial in China is a reminder of one way of growing a business that may have risky consequences.

A better approach would be the traditional method of ensuring you have great products (or services) at reasonable investment and back them up with responsive customer service.

With the basics covered, increasing sales involves promoting your product and highlighting the benefits of dealing with your business over your rivals.

To grow profitably it's best to focus on your complementary services and product quality and deep knowledge in your chosen field. Building credibility involves contributing to your industry and associates and providing useful advise to your customers and prospective clients.

Seminars, Trade Shows, Newsletters and other useful communications are great ways to educate your marketplace about your expertise in recommending and implementing your time and money saving products or services.

Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM) systems are excellent in managing your promotional activities and measuring the success of each campaign so that you can successful replicate what works well and ditch what doesn't.

More information: Axsapt

Are Your Manual Systems Up To Spec?

Changing over to a new accounting system is often considered a good way to improve cash flow and profitability. For example, tighter stock control and better forecasting will result in lower stock holding costs as just enough stock is held to avoid stock outs and reduce the incidence of stock shrinkage.

Great in principle, but before implementing a new software system, you should ensure there are adequate internal controls in your manual systems to complement the software systems. Examples include:

• Transport registers and security checkpoints at the warehouse gates
• Cheque and cash received registers

Segregation of duties is also important with medium to large organisations. This is where the custody of assets (stock, cash, debtors, fixed assets etc) is a separate function to the authorisation of transactions involving these assets. Examples include:

• sales order takers and stock control
• cash receipts and sales invoice/credit
• cash payments and creditors control
• payroll and human resources

Other areas that will reduce risks include:

• Providing "blind" Stocktake Sheets and Cash Count Sheets i.e. without expected values
• Surprise cash counts of random tils and petty cash
• Random stock counts of specific product lines or location.

Axsapt Business Software Consultants can help you identify the potential risks within your business and recommend appropriate changes to your systems (both manual and computerised) to reduce those risks.

More information: Axsapt