Giving someone the sack

We've recently gone through the unenviable process of having to cut one of our team members loose. It's a tough job but you have to be certain that emotions don't come into your decision of whether or not to keep them on, after all, it's just business.

The concept to keep in your mind is that in order to create a world class team you need to get the right people onto the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and then get the people on the bus into the right seats.
If you can do that then you can drive the company wherever you desire!

Focus in a Recession

In difficult economic times such as when a recession hits, if you're sales are taking a serious knock because of lack of spending then you can turn your focus towards the public sector such as the police and fire department.
These departments never have their budget cut because of economic difficulties and so they are a perfect customer to deal with when the rest of the economy goes pear shaped.

Info to Trade Customers before Launching a New Product

We've recently had a supplier of ours launch a new version of their product. They decided to not keep us informed of the new product.
Because the previous version had sold well we bought a lot of stock to get the lower price but this was just before the press release was sent out about the new version. Now the customers are keen to wait for the new version which leaves us with dead stock which we will have to discount to get rid of before the actual launch date of the new version otherwise we will not be able to sell them.

Discounting the old version isn't good for us as we earn less on each one and it isn't good for the manufacturer/ brand as everyone sees their products being sold much cheaper which leads to a lower perception of the brand (especially at a time when they are all over the news).

The lesson here is from a manufacture's point of view you should keep your main customers fully updated about new product launches even if it required them to have to sign a non disclosure agreement to keep it a secret.

Increasing your price

It is much easier to drop your prices than to increase your price. Trade customers will resist the increase and will prolong increasing their end user price as long as possible. Each customer will refuse to raise their price until everyone has done so, this is obviously because the end customer will buy from the cheaper supplier more often then not.
It is a difficult process to manage, one of our suppliers has been forced to increase both the trade price and subsequently the end retail price due to the USD strengthening over the past year which increased their buy price.
They asked us to raise our price but never put a deadline on it which they should have. We are a few months down the line now and are not happy to raise our price as there are still other people selling the items at the previous lower price. If they had been firmer and stricter they may have been able to avoid this problem.