Strategic Blog

Profit Leaks and How to Fix Them

This is a strange economy. Sales may be gaining momentum but in many cases, it seems that fat is beginning to creep back in to many organizations and tamping down profitability. Profitability can be elusive, and the level of profitability depends on ...

August 23, 2022

How to Combat Price Increases Caused by Supplier Consolidation

Margin compression is very real for most dealerships. As companies continue to consolidate, competition can be reduced, prices go up and a take it or leave it attitude can prevail with some suppliers - giving dealerships even more headaches to ...

August 16, 2022

How Leadership Can Make Profitability Improvements Stick

Many organizations’ profits are being challenged by compressed margins, growing expenses, flat sales and greater competition. As leaders, it is up to us to have plans in place to prevent that profit erosion and have the data, tools, reports, metrics ...

June 21, 2022

Sourcing Solutions to Improve Your Gross

A high-performing purchasing or sourcing group can make contributions to the business in a number of ways. Most people think of purchasing groups in terms of their ability to reduce costs and improve overall profitability and that is the probably ...

June 2, 2022

How to Create a Strategic Spend Map [Free Template]

Business leaders face many challenges and many opportunities every day. If leading your organization to reduced costs and improved profitability is a course you have chosen, developing an aggressive objective and an executable plan are essential ...

May 10, 2022

Why Dealerships are Overspending (And How to Cut Costs)

There is no question that dealerships are focused on cutting costs. We see it in our business, we heard it at NADA and we talked with suppliers at NADA who were honing in on that message as well. Cut costs and track the reductions…a great objective ...

April 26, 2022

Is Your Cost Reduction Tactical or Strategic?

Most business organizations find themselves involved in cost reduction initiatives from time to time. To sustain an organization over the long term, cost reduction efforts need to become deeply ingrained in the business structure itself and that is ...

April 11, 2022

How to Make Profitability a Priority

Is improved profitability really a priority for most organizations?

April 7, 2022

How to Make an Ineffective Spend Strategy an Effective One

The implementation of a Spend Management Vision – a dedicated function within an organization is very common in most large organizations. While most organizations that have a Spend Management Vision and Department realize the benefits and ...

March 15, 2022

The Key to Creating Sustainable Profit Improvement

Most organizations in the U.S. and Canada are decentralized in their purchasing approach. What that means is various leaders, managers or employees within departments are charged with managing selected expenses, including the periodic shopping, ...

March 7, 2022

How Benchmarking Can Reduce Costs When You Don’t Have Time to Quote

For those of you who have done any sourcing over the years, you know the best way to determine truth in the marketplace is to develop a well-designed request for quote (RFQ) and run that quote with three to four qualified suppliers. But a quote is ...

March 2, 2022

167 Dealership Options to Reduce Costs

COVID was a 2 x 4 to the head in terms of getting our attention and showing us how quickly a business can go from something amazing to pure survival mode. During early COVID times management teams were scrambling to gather information and executing ...

February 18, 2022

5 Tips to Revolutionize Your Expense Management

Many organizations have engaged in some form of cost reduction at one point or another. Most cost control actions are short term….designed to quickly reduce costs in some proportion to the corresponding decrease in revenues. But once they’re no ...

February 9, 2022

8 Best Practices of Highly Effective Purchasing Operations

All organizations have a purchasing function within their operations. Some organizations centralize their purchasing activities with one group to leverage spend, reduce costs and drive economies of scale. Other organizations decentralize their ...

February 9, 2022

How Contract Management Reduces Costs and Risks

Pop quiz time: How many supplier contracts does your organization have? Where are your contracts located? When do those supplier contracts expire? Which of the contracts will automatically renew? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, you ...

January 31, 2022

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