Islands of Profit in a Sea of Red Ink
Why 40 Percent of Your Business Is Unprofitable and How to Fix It
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Top companies around the world turn to MIT's Jonathan Byrnes to figure out where the profit is. Using his systematic process for analyzing profitability, they can quickly determine which parts of the business are worth expanding and which are just a drain on resources. Then, using Byrnes's "profit levers," they can turn unprofitable business into good business and good business into great business.
We now live in the Age of Precision Markets, yet most of the management processes taught in business schools were developed for the prior Age of Mass Markets. Today's savviest managers are exploiting this disconnect. They're rethinking strategy, customer relations, operations, and metrics, and overcoming internal resistance to constructive change. They also reject such harmful myths as:
* Revenues are good, costs are bad
* All customers should get the same great service
* If everyone does his or her job well, the company will prosper
Byrnes reveals an uncomfortable truth: It's possible, even easy, for everyone to meet or exceed their budget targets and for the company still to have an enormous portion of the business unprofitable by any measure. But profit levers can flip everything around. For instance, several leading companies have utilized profit levers to increase their sales by over 35 percent in their highest penetrated customers, while others have reduced their operating costs- and their customers' costs-by over 30 percent One company described in the book raised its net profits by over 50 percent in a three-year period. The book is a practical, step-by-step guide to achieving these results.
Every business has enormous potential waiting to be unleashed; this book offers bold new strategies to help you find and grow those islands of profit.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The claim made by the author, a Senior Lecturer at MIT, wasn't gleaned from a study; rather, it comes from his own experience as a consultant, and the examples and suggestions in his first book are aimed squarely at managers. Byrnes finds unprofitability almost everywhere in accounts, order lines, vendors, sales channels, and products and blames corporations for focusing insufficient resources on the bottom line. Drawing from a monthly column he wrote for a Harvard Business School e-newsletter in the early 2000s, Byrnes offers managers tips on reestablishing a healthy profit, such as creating a profitability database, modeling a customer, creating an action plan, and institutionalizing profit mapping. Thirty-six chapters arranged in four sections (thinking, selling, operating, leading), and dozens of boxed "things to think about" and "lessons for managers" cover profit from the supply chain to the customer. While many of the best-known companies Byrnes references have a whiff of old news about them (Walmart, Dell, GE), case studies of lesser-knowns like Nalco Chemical and SKF Bearings may offer the dedicated reader more to take away.
Customer Reviews
Make your business more profitable
Jonathan Byrnes has an excellent knack for taking a thorny topic and making it both accessible and actionable. His key insight here is that a large percentage of any company's business is unprofitable by any measure, and that a smaller percentage is cross-subsidizing the rest. Jonathan takes you on a step by step path to identify the good business, grow it, and transform the chaff. He covers everything from sales compensation to finance. Highest recommendation!