What Is Happening In The Big Wide World? (Feb 2008)
There seems to be a lot of soul searching going on, with everyone talking themselves
into an inevitable bear market and as one of my esteemed colleagues reminded me, in
a bear market you only listen to bad news.
Now must be the time to look seriously at your marketing strategy. If things are going
to be tough in a shrinking market, it is more important than ever that you perform
better than your competitors, I don’t mean by this that you need to spend more on
advertising but I feel there is a need to review the direction of your business. It is vital
to take time to identify your customer base, and direct your marketing accordingly. It
will be harder to win sales, so an extra effort will be required.
One of my concerns is that this government seems to be spending more and more of
our money in bailing out what must have been unexpected situations. The other
concern is that I am not sure they have a sensible economic strategy for UK Plc. They
are still trying to contain inflation when it is quite clearly getting out of hand, at the same
time there is a fall in economic activity. So how will the Governor of the Bank of England
stimulate growth through lower interest rates without fuelling inflation?
I suspect we are going to have to learn to live with inflation again, so don’t forget to
increase your prices whenever you can.
I also believe the government is getting itself financially into a mess, so how will it
balance its books; I suspect tax hikes must be on the horizon. The current amendment
to capital gains tax, smacks more of the old retirement relief provision, so be careful, it
will only affect those assets sold at the same time as the main business but it should help
us save some tax if we are selling our businesses on the first £1 million of our proceeds.
- Bill Ballard
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