If you’re a small business or entrepreneur you can bet your bottom dollar that the high gas prices are impacting you. It possibly will be your “bottom dollar” too!
Regardless of what the politicians are telling us, and although whether you deliver your products to the consumer or not the price of fuel is impacting you. It’s impacting your business for the reason that it’s impacting the buyer – your clients.
In a recent survey done by the National Retail Federation during the last significant gas prince increase, they state, “Whether gas prices pose a fiscal or psychological concern clients are affected regardless of income.”
Some interesting stats show that from the amount of adults nationwide 16.4% delayed a major buy such as automobiles, TV, or furniture. Dining out has been diminished by 25.2%, 31.2 % reduced vacation travel plans, 17.3% are investing less on groceries, and 23.7% are investing less on clothing.
That equates to the fact that restaurants, travel agencies, motel/hotels, vehicle dealers, furniture stores, and retail clothing stores are all going to be suffering from gas prices. If any one of those listed is the business you’re doing, then your bottom line of profits is absolutely affected. The attractive part of everything that is that it didn’t matter if those polled were in the $50K+ revenue bracket or less than $50K, the results were the same.
The only distinction appeared to be that adults in the age bracket of 45-54 years of age had the highest percentages but with the same effect. Let’s say of the 25.2% of adults that diminished dining out, 28.6% of them were in that age bracket, and so on down the line. The survey also remarked that 70% of the clients of that age group were affected by higher gas prices.
As you might have guessed, when these survey figures were broken down by region the West was higher in all classifications than the NE, Mid-West, or Southern regions. Still only 5.7% of us have increased carpooling.
It’s a fact, whether we like it or not, that every penny spent on gasoline is a penny kept from retailers. seeking beyond just the retail industry, what about the service business. The cost of doing business for a repairman is going to expand as the expense for gasoline increases, and ultimately his prices will recapture that expand. It doesn’t matter whether he’s doing electrical, roofing, renovating, plumbing, anything service drives up to your residence is going to cost more in the long run.
Ultimately, as the domino end result goes into play, those who can least afford price increases will be the hardest hit. Seniors and retirees on fixed incomes just have to suck it up and bear the price increases. As the survey pollsters have told income levels didn’t vary results of measures, it still varies the skill to handle the domino effects. If income prevails stationery but prices rise, there’s absolutely an impact on those with fixed incomes.
For the entrepreneur to overcome the circumstance it needs some surely extreme formulas. going after are a few tips to keep your costs down:
• Order supplies online, anticipating a price expand, and have them delivered to you.
• analysis your rivals online and save the gas.
• Group doing an errand or two when they’re in the vicinity of a scheduled consumer meeting.
• Do more of your business by mail, email, or on the net. You can do just about whatever from paying a merchant to transferring funds from one bank account to another on the net, and you don’t use any gas. The only time you have to go to the bank is to come to a deposit.
• If you behavior business at Trade Shows and have to travel find alternatives to cut corners. Carpool to the airport with a colleague or even a close competitor. (You’re both going to be doing business at the same show anyway.) maybe, you can combine two trips with only one return residence after the second trip. maybe putting an advertisement in the Trade Show program can save you making a trip. (You could use that plan for the less crucial trade show.)
• Consider whether media publicizing for your business would be cheaper than what you’ve been doing in person considering gas prices.
That’s very few ideas to get those small gray cells working. on balance, as an entrepreneur you’ve done promotion on a shoestring before.
Radio Free Hub City 