Business Monitor


If in doubt, don’t


A


t first sight this looks entirely right. To waste time, to delay action is surely to waste opportunities to sell more, to miss out on new customers. In fact, itʼs not so cut and dried. There are genuine benefits to doing nothing or, at least, doing nothing yet. Hereʼs a simple example. Being the first entrant to a new market looks like the best place to be. Actually, being second or third is more profitable. The early entrants spend a lot on marketing so the third guy doesnʼt need to. The third guy knows what the market wants. The third guy can undercut numbers one and two from the off and customers do like ʻbest priceʼ.


Make business decisions We all ought to be brilliant at making business decisions, because we make decisions all the time: do I buy this house or that one? Do I buy or lease my new car? Do I choose tea or coffee and a dozen others of like ilk each day. But the fact is that most of us defer decisions as much as we can. A key benefit in putting off a decision is to be sure you have all the important information. Test drive every car that you might buy, wear out shoes looking at houses. Apply the same thinking to your business. Why should you stock product x? Why does product y justify your continued support? Whoʼs giving the best marketing back-up in product sector z?


An entirely virtuous statement to a sales rep is, ʻyou will have to have a top class reason for me to change my regular suppliers or how I present


| 22 | February 2019


productsʼ. They might have such a reason – good reps donʼt even walk through the door unless theyʼve got a decent proposition to make. But youʼre not going to do a deal that day, are you? The longer you work that rep, the lower the price gets or the better the package.


Delay your decision


So delaying a decision gives you more chance to make a good choice. At the same time this might be simple prevarication. You delay because you donʼt want to do whatever it is at all, but you donʼt want to admit it. One important factor in the whole issue of decision-making is what demands time and thought and what doesnʼt. When choosing your coffee in Starbucks you decide in seconds, when buying a car you spend many hours spread over weeks or months. As far as I can establish there is no equation that tells us how much time to spend per pound of expenditure, which might help the terminally indecisive to choose. (It might help get a few of them out of my way at a busy bar, too). You would doubtless like to know how many people prefer embroidery to print, 100% cotton to a fabric mix and so on You have your own stats but you could hardly call that a scientific sample. It is a scientific fact that, faced with a complex choice, most people make poor choices. That can include experts – note how many investment trusts continue to attract new money despite poor performance over many years – and you donʼt need to be cynical about commissions payable because they all do that.


“Time and I are a match for any two” (Philip II of Spain). Writers of business advice books would be horrified. They’d be on Charles Dickens’ side: “Procrastination is the thief of time”; their mantra is far closer to ‘do it today’ and other variations on the theme. Curious? Marketing expert Paul Clapham elucidates.


There is too little research conducted into printwear, so I doubt that anyone – ideally an independent body or person – has researched the market and demonstrated that stocking one brand in each sector is the most effective way to grow sales and profitability – because you attract the best discounts and the best marketing support. Or, indeed, has that been proven to be hogwash? I know of a large pet retailer who did exactly this with petfoods, stocking only the Pedigree brand. He increased both turnover and profit from the sector. Might the same work in printwear? To an extent it already does work. How many readers hold stock of more than one brand per product sector? It demands some courage and your suppliers have to be supportive, not just at the outset but long term, but itʼs one route to more profit.


Choice is expensive When Aldi were first getting established in the UK, their CEO was quoted in the Times saying, ʻchoice is expensiveʼ. That applies to the seller and his customer alike and itʼs clearly true. Three choices of a given product means three deliveries, three stock- checks, three repsʼ visits, three orders, three sets of returns etc. All of that is stealing your time away from talking to customers, making sales. It also cuts back your chance of achieving volume discounts.


So the rule of thumb is simple: if in doubt, donʼt. Doing nothing might be a bad decision if you end up missing the commercial boat, but rushing in where angels fear to tread is far worse.


www.printwearandpromotion.co.uk


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