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When you need to take some immediate actions that will help your company’s bottom line quickly, these are some actions you can initiate to cut costs and boost sales today. You do not have to wait to affect the bottom line. You can do it today so get started.

Begin these actions today and start improving the company’s bottom line:

• AC/Heating waste: Assign specific people to turn off or drastically turn down AC and heating equipment at night to cut down on energy usage, especially in offices and portions of your company’s buildings that are uninhabited large time periods of the day.
• Energy usage: Assign someone or more to turn off all space heaters, overhead lights and other equipment, small and large in unused offices or warehouses at night.
• Sell your empty truck miles: Go to the internet and fill your empty returning trucks with paid freight. Haul partial shipments (LTL or less than a load).  You will find freight back haul and LTL internet boards that advertise loads every day wanting empty trucks to take small or LTL paid loads.  Do not allow your trucks to return to your facility with something helping to pay on its way back home. Consider giving your drivers an incentive for helping to procure any backhaul.  You want them on the telephone every day demanding backhauls before they return to your facility to reload for the next shipment.
• Off brand office supplies: Make a second person question and review the office supplies that are bought. Insist on buying very few name brand items.  Demand off brand items be purchased.  Make your office supplies vendor give you a list of their cheaper substitute items to buy. Limit the number or types of items that are being purchased.  Make supervisors approve of their employees’ purchases. You do not want 27 colors of highlighters, expensive legal pads, etc.
• Calculate your net profit before accepting purchase orders: Make your estimating department declare what your company will earn BEFORE accepting customer purchase orders. Declare what your estimated net profit % will be before accepting and signing off on new customer sales orders. Make your sales manager sign off on estimates prior to accepting customer orders.
• Check all new incoming sales orders for any changes to terms: Every incoming sales order should be checked to make sure the pricing is the same as the quote your firm gave, freight and taxes are unchanged, due dates are acceptable and the customer’s payment terms are acceptable and not different from that quoted. If there any problems, do not accept the purchase order and call the customer’s buyer to make the necessary correction.  Many companies send their purchase orders via email and they are never reviewed to find discrepancies with the original quotes.
• Clean up orders before shipment: Do not allow any incoming orders to be taken without written pricing covering freight and taxes.  Avoid arguments with customers by doing the proper job upfront at the order desk. If necessary, do a final check within shipping prior to the release of outgoing orders in order to make sure everything is in place for final billings to the customer (over or under shipments approved, delivery date confirmed, delivery address acknowledged, purchase order received and correct from customer, pricing approved, freight terms correct, sales taxes declared and at correct rate).
• Ask vendors for revised quotes: On a potentially large bid opportunity, you want your best quote in front of a potential customer.  Before turning in your bid, call your outside vendor to get their best price for this unique large opportunity.  Tell the vendor his lower price will be reserved just for this bid but you need them to get their pencil out so the overall opportunity is not lost.
• Quotes unfinished:  Determine how long a quote should take to respond to a customer. Set the turnaround time in stone and measure the department’s performance.  The estimating department does not leave until all quotes are turned in to ensure quick response to new potential customers. Report quotes unfinished and their age every day.
• Bill shipments quickly: Determine how much time should lapse between the time a shipment goes to a customer and when that invoice is billed to the customer (i.e. internet billing, invoice cut and mailed, invoice cut, scanned and emailed to the customer). Report the dollar value of all shipments not billed, reasons for each billing delay and their ages every day.
• Employee assignments at day-end: Assign employees a checklist of things to do before leaving for the day.  Pick up trash, clean work area, gather up supplies that are to be used again or are recyclable, stack material neatly in the plant, put tools back in order, ensure all parts have been reported to QC, all material used is reported to inventory, turn in material usage sheets and report any machinery problems to the production supervisor before leaving.
• Assign minimum daily sales calls: Assign a minimum number of sales calls to be made every day by each sales person to be done before they leave for the day. Ask them what they are doing that someone else could do so they can sell. Ask them every day and teach those around sales to continue this tradition.
• Daily brochures and handouts: Have your truck drivers give all customers company brochures announcing new products, new services or new features that our company now offers. Drop them off on all new delivery routes or stops.  Ask your quality control department to hand these out to visiting customers during audits.  Ask your production personnel to have them available in the plant or in your warehouses to pass out to visitors.  Include all departments in selling.
• New customer mailers: For every new customer set up during the day, research the names and addresses of all associated sister divisions and branches.  Mail brochures offering corporate discounts to those locations and buyers. Have the sales person tell the new buyer he can most likely get a further discount from your company if he can get his company’s other buyers to also place orders with your company.
• Mail targeted advertisements every day: Make sure to mail 20, 30 or 100 new advertisements, brochures, discount coupons or whatever mail that will gain new customers or will entice other potential customers to call for a quote.  You pick the number to target every day but do it consistently no matter what. Make it a daily habit. Make sure your mailing inserts and brochures are up to date, relevant to the market, interesting to the potential reader and finally provoking enough to cause the recipient to call your firm.  Place stickers on the outside of your mailers to invite them to read the inserts and make it easy to call you anytime.
• Ask new callers how they heard about the company. Find out why customers called your company.  Write down the reason stated by new callers when they call looking for a quote. Was it from a conversation they had with someone?  Was it from literature from our company received in the mail?  Was it from a sales call made by our sales person?  Was it from a referral by our current customers or vendors?  If there is more than one answer, identify the main reason they called. We need to acknowledge referrals and reward them.  No matter what, find out what causes your company to obtain new customers.
• Ask sales people what keeps them from selling: Poll the sales people as to why they cannot sell and do it every day.  What stops them? What procedure do we have that stands in the way of getting new sales orders?  What keeps them from finalizing and receiving a customer purchase order?  What procedure or department does not work or hinders that sales person from getting new business?  Has anything happened in the market that dictates that our company must change to respond to the market?  Anything that has happened that will change our ability to get new orders or get orders out the door?
• Ask receiving people about returns: Find out what products are being returned every day.  What is wrong with our products that the customer determined they were not worth the cost or did not work as portrayed by our sales people?  Ask the receiving people every day what has come back and the reasons for the return. (i.e. wrong color, bad finish, incorrect parts shipped, parts do not work, ruined product shipped to customer, delivery was late, product failed under the customer’s QC plan, etc.)
• Ask employees who holds them up every day: Ask every day where the employees see the largest waste in your company. Ask about wasted products, effort or time performing daily tasks or the normal workload.  Ask what can be trimmed, reduced, cut and  what actions currently being performed do not work. Ask what department seems to be running without direction, which company departments are constantly behind, holding up work flow, stopping billings, slowing shipping, etc. Ask the question because every employee will most likely have answers that are not yet known.
• Ask employees what about the company can be improved: Pass out slips to all employees to find out what they think needs to be improved within the company. Invite them to cover anything they want but get their ideas back at the end of the first day. Let them talk about anything.  They will fill your ears with plenty of items to work on challenging the company, some of which you were unaware.
• Add approval levels for spending: If you need to cut your costs, assign a senior level of manager to approve spending in the purchasing department before monies are committed.  Give him instructions for now that he is to stop any discretionary spending that does not support sales or production in some direct manner.  His instructions should be to buy only critical items in order for sales and work flow to continue. If he has problems with understanding this, he too may be part of your company’s overall cost problem.
• Most overtime worked: Find out who worked the most overtime yesterday and why. What was another alternative that was not considered before having a man work 16 hours in production?  Who was working and why? How many hours did they work?  Was there any possibility that they could have gone home on normal time and finished the job the next day?  Who determined for the employees to work 16 hours?  Did the customer pay for this?  Did anyone ask the customer this question?
• How many failures in quality control today: Ask how many product failures were detected during the day and request the reasons. Any particular operators, shift, set of machines, specific difficult products?  Any trends noted?
• How many customers were angry today? Ask the receptionist about any angry customers?  Ask if there were any and how they were handled.  Does that receptionist know for a fact that the customer was handled with courtesy and got his question answered or his problem solved?  If the receptionist does not know, follow this up to find out the procedure and how it worked within the sales department.  If it did not work for the customer positively, assign the sales department to contact that customer to ensure he is satisfied with everything that happened subsequently to his order.
• Review your list of offsite records and destroy those records outside the legal limit. If you keep company records offsite, print a complete listing of the boxes they hold and get rid of those outside the legal limit. Boxes containing tax records need only be retained for a set number of years.  Customer purchase orders and contracts are to be retained for a set number of years. Find out what these legal limits are and destroy all boxes outside those parameters.   This will immediately cut your storage bill at this outside facility.

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