Interested to know of any concerns you have – A seemingly simple question?

We were contacted recently by the constituency office of our local MP asking a seemingly simple question “interested to know of any concerns you have relating to the future of your business, both due to issues affecting you nationally, as well as locally.”

I say ‘seemingly simple’ as we all know, as SME owners, the number of things that can, and do affect our businesses, is myriad and largely interconnected. Ranging from changes to local car parking rules all the way up to tax and employment law each and every one, at the moment, seems to have a negative impact or at the very least cause significant changes within your business.

The general feeling is that customers at all levels have less confidence. This can be borne out by projects taking longer to receive the official go-ahead to, in some segments, real difficulty in raising prices as the fear of losing customers to cheaper and, in most cases, inferior alternatives is palpable. Knowing that the product you are choosing is likely inferior, but trying to justify spending a little extra for the better alternative, is something that we have all experienced recently. Just walk around any supermarket and see this battle acted out in front of any shelf in any aisle.

So in answer to the question “any concerns you have relating to the future of your business” we can say – confidence. Consumers need to feel secure in their jobs to be able to spend a little more so that the company producing can charge a price that gives them a profit to then invest in more staff and increase production, which brings more employment. Right at the moment we do not have that confidence and now await potentially more bad news in the upcoming budget.

We as SME’s do still have some advantages over the bigger competitors in our respective markets, namely size. With the ability to more rapidly change either company direction, product offering or product ranges and even sales focus we can be quicker to exploit a newly opening market niche. While always advising against simply reducing prices instead focus on selling benefits, sometimes a sensible cost swallowing or a temporary reduction, rather than a price increase is called for and smaller inventory numbers makes changing prices much simpler for the SME.

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