metalworking fluids Archives

Three ways to profit by working it smart

Improve margins; increase machining performance Effort is money and in that regard, for a large segment of metalworkers, things can seem like they’re all conspiring against you. If your business is cutting, milling, turning, grinding or drilling metals you know the devil is in the details—often at a microscopic level. Yet to remain competitive, your business must run the gamut from maintaining you...
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Give your sales strategy a huge leg up!

Dive deep for more customer insight. The purpose of your business is to create customers. In fact, it is the customer who determines what your business is. Obviously customers are crucially important to sales efforts. But don’t we need to understand more about what makes them tick? Don’t we need to know more about the perceptions that ultimately drive their opinions and decisions? Would it help i...
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Business development requires bravery.

Who’s not afraid to stand up and reach out? It’s tough staying objective. Especially when it comes to your own business. It’s much easier to let the Vision go fuzzy and accept the deceiving, but compelling, comfort of the status quo. This form of comfort is a disease and it is never good for a business that wants to grow. Among many of the problems, comfort sustains an atmosphere that is suffocati...
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Lessons from a successful dictator/CEO.

“If you don’t ask, you’ll never get ” and 39 other tips. There’s one very positive trend in the economy right now. The number of small business bankruptcy filings has been dropping an average of 19 percent* year-over-year since the floor fell out from beneath us in 2008. Sure, there are fewer startups but I have a hunch that we’re getting smarter if not more careful about how we run our industrial...
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3 Elements of strategy you must have to succeed!

If you don’t know where you’re going, any old way will do. If your company is not working on surviving you have to be focused on growing, excelling and achieving goals. That’s a fact. Because, invariably, when we take our eyes off the target we usually miss. In other words, if you don’t get everyone rowing in the same direction, you’ll soon be working survival again before you know it. It can be a...
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7 Lesson package on efficiency and other survival skills.

New source for inspiration and wisdom will surprise you. Survival mode is a familiar place for way too many business managers. It’s not a place you want to visit often or want to be in very long. Once in it though, you want nothing more than to be out of the woods in a hurry. But what if reaction speed just isn’t your strong suit. In this post, I introduce a short new book that focuses squarely on...
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A four-step prescription to help you drive markets

Create impact where it matters most. In my previous post I suggested that in order to gain the greatest insight we must “look broadly outside the industry.” Well here’s an example by way of a comparison of the metals industry to, of all things, the airline industry. I discovered some striking similarities as well as some interesting common ground. The exercise illustrates how, by simply having mor...
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Clues to building your future roadmap lie outside the industry

21 “sight bites” to help you find your way Like you, I am way more interested in 2011 than I am looking back. I want to know what we can expect this year—both the good and the bad. So please, “just give me the facts.” And like you, I need to know if we’re on the right track. Will our customers continue to be focused on the same things like reducing costs; and minimizing the environmental impact of...
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Drill deep to see the new face of market demand

Embrace the differences that will drive innovation If you want to know what’s driving business, you have to drill down deep. Of course, demand drives customer orders and, as it follows, your customer’s customer orders and so on. But when you finally get to the bottom of it, you’ll see a new face of change—a nonconforming consumer that’s younger, and more powerful than any previous generation. He ...
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How a word like “metalwork” could spell online success

2 big ways to enhance Google-search “pretreatment” How well is your website working for you? If you’re not getting consistently good search engine rankings, your audience is not finding you when they need you most. It would be well worth your time to take a hard look at your entire online strategy. Start with a view from 10,000 feet. What if the addition of a few key words at the top level increas...
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