What should be the focus? Should we increase our sales or cut our expenses? All of the marketing and self-development gurus tend to focus on increasing our sales, but other financial experts want us to focus on cutting costs and debts. Who is right and what should we do? Let’s look at the pros and cons of each:
Cut your expenses and debt: Being aware of our expenses and cutting unnecessary expenses is a smart move, along with reducing debts. However, cutting expenses will only go so far because you need to incur expenses to support your business operations. Reducing debts is also a smart move, but this should not be done to the detriment of using up all of your cash, otherwise you will go right back to increasing your debts.
Increase your sales: Every business should look for ways to grow their sales, as a business tends to naturally deteriorate over time. An increase of sales can and should lead to an increase of profits, but not always. Many times, a business will increase sales activity, but their profits may actually decrease, stay flat, or only increase incrementally. The main reason for this is due to the fact that a business needs to spend money on marketing, people, technology, and infrastructure to be able to support higher sales.
The optimum solution: Instead of focusing on either or, you should focus on both to some degree, which is what the most successful companies do. Instead of just growing your sales haphazardly, you should focus on growing your sales profitably. To accomplish this you will need to perform some simple math to make sure that you are focusing on profitable services and products and delivering them in a profitable way as not every dollar of sales is equal. Better profitability will also allow a business to have excess cash to help pay down debts and not get into more debt. Without a focus on profitability, a fast growing company will tend to have cash flow issues, and companies that focus on cutting expenses tend to cut themselves into irrelevancy.