This article was first published in USA Today. The full article can be found in the printed edition.
Bob Fifer talks like a corporate raider. But CEOs tend to like him. How could they not? He’s just written a book titled Double Your Profits, a feat he claims is possible within months for just about any company. Jack Welch, the highly regarded CEO at General Electric, bought 125 copies and handed them out to senior managers. Welch likes the book’s takes on eliminating bureaucratic processes and setting aggressive goals, a GE spokesman says. Allied-Signal CEO Lawrence Bossidy also bought a small truckload of Fifer’s books.
Fifer, 37, is CEO of Kaiser Associates, a Vienna, Va.-based management consultant. His company published the book, which he calls “an exposé on how poorly run companies are in America.” He preaches an ethic of profits first, nothing second. He suggests starting each day with three lists. The first is ways to cut costs or increase revenue. The second is what’s needed to maintain revenue. The third is things others want you to do but have no value to your company. “Never start on the second list until you have finished everything on the first list,” he says. “Throw away the third list.”
His book offers 78 specific tips. Some seem impossible. For example, he urges companies to increase prices to customers and insist on price cuts from suppliers. Never mind that price increases are tough to make stick. What happens when both a manufacturer and its parts supplier try to enforce this strategy? Clearly, the supplier can’t raise prices while the manufacturer exacts price cuts. Still, in most cases the two never will meet. He says companies can get 15% price concessions from 75% of their suppliers just by asking. “There’s too much gentility in corporate America,” Fifer says.
