Читать книгу Pricing Strategies for Small Business - Andrew Gregson - Страница 32

In Canada, knowing that the number of housing starts has fallen will lead you to the inevitable conclusion that demand for lumber, hardware, and fixtures will likely suffer. It will suggest that finding a new market is important or that you need to find a way to out-manouever your competitors.

Knowing that the number of road accidents rises in winter, stabilizes during the shoulder seasons, and rises again in the summer due to vacation travel has an impact on your auto-body and paint shop business, your cash flow, and perhaps on where you set seasonal prices.

Supply and demand also affects businesses for their labor market. In Canada, where the labor market is so fluid, it seems the whole world knows the spread between statutory minimum wage rates and the bottom rung. In a downturn in the economy, the newspaper classified help-wanted ads shrink, and wage rates first flatten and then inevitably go down.

Fluidity also impacts contract bidding. It is a corollary of this type of business that the price is tested on each occasion because someone is asking for bids and your bid has to survive that test each and every time. Bid success is an important “metric” or measurement in business to determine whether prices should move up or down in response to the demand from customers and the supply of competitors.