Cut Costs Not Corners: A Practical Guide to Staying Competitive and Improving Profits

  • 2h 46m
  • Colin Barrow
  • Kogan Page
  • 2010

Cost cutting is an issue for every manager and executive at every level in every company, large or small, public or private sector. Junior managers who are proactively tight on cost are learning good habits for the future, ones that will bring them recognition and advance their climb up the organizational chart. The HR department is now staffed with tough cost managers dealing with the most difficult cost category, people. Marketing departments now focus on how to get higher returns from less spend.

Cut Costs Not Corners has a coherent and structured approach to cost cutting as a permanent activity, combined with guidance on the practical steps to take and powerful international case studies. It covers strategic and tactical cost cutting options such as analysing space needs, buying technology for less, selling off redundant assets, reducing credit risk, reviewing distribution methods, sourcing new suppliers or consolidating existing ones, advertising for less, changing the route to market, travel and utility savings, minimising finance and tax costs, crisis measures - freezing recruitment, delaying pay rises, sell and lease back assets - keeping budgets rolling and using a daily cash flow model.

About the Author

Following a career in business where he held senior staff and line positions, including that of managing director of a substantial manufacturing enterprise with multi -plant and multi-country operations he was Head of the Enterprise Group at Cranfield School of Management, a leading European Business School, for ten years. He has been a visiting professor in universities in the US, Europe and the Far East. For five years he was a non-executive director of a high tech venture capital fund, has sat on Government task forces and is now strategic advisor to a number of business owners.

As well as his own books he currently writes freelance, ghost writing and 'Anglicising' books for American authors and lectures extensively on business topics.

In this Book

  • Introduction
  • Whose Cost is it Anyway?
  • Kill Bill I—Reduce Capital Expenditure
  • Kill Bill II—Make Working Capital Work
  • Max up Margins
  • Trim Overheads
  • Minimize Finance and Tax Costs
  • Cutting Costs in a Crisis
  • Staying Lean and Mean