Five Ways to Succeed in The New Reality
28 Construction Equipment Distribution www.cedmag.com November 2009 Product Support The past couple of years have been a very humbling experience for many of us. The economy is in a shambles, the equipment sales are down drastically, parts sales are off as more machines are idled and even labor sales are slipping. Dealer-ships have cut personnel (in some cases dramatically), and employees have had to take pay cuts and be furloughed, too. It is a scary time. One thing is very clear to me, though, and I am quite certain of this: Strong sales sure hide a lot of sins and inefficiencies. And another thing is that we will never get those inef-ficient years back. Remember 2007? For many of you it was your strongest sales year ever, your highest profit ever. Remember that? Did you realize it was based on a house of cards? It was based on debt we leveraged our assets to astronomical proportions. I remember when The Associates was sold from Ford and the average portfolio of an Associates customer was $7.50 of debt for every dollar of assets. I thought then that the ratio was obscene. Little did I know. I believe you have heard me quote from a book titled, The Trillion Dollar Meltdown, with the following: The worldwide Gross Domestic Product in 1980 supported $3.70 of debt for every $1 of GDP, and in 2005 that debt was $30 for each dollar of GDP. That is completely unsupportable. This is the main cause of our current problem. There are some other unfortu-nate truths that people seem to be overlooking. This is not the great depression revisited. This recession is running pretty much in line with the recent four or five recessions: the length of the negative GDP, the high unemployment rate (even though government changed how it was measured in 1981) and many other economic indicators. Now I am no economist, that is certain, but I think the incessant beat of negative news, Responding to reader feedback from recent CED `Aftermarket' columns, the author elaborates on his recommendations for aggressive, intentional product support outreach. By ron slee Five Ways to Succeed in `The New Reality'