MGM Bankruptcy

Announcement from MGM: "On November 3, 2010, we announced that following the successful solicitation of MGM's secured lenders, MGM and approximately 160 affiliates filed Chapter 11 cases in order to seek Bankruptcy Court confirmation of a "pre-packaged" plan of reorganization. On November 4, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court approved MGM's "First Day Motions," which allows the Company to continue to operate in the ordinary course of business during the reorganization process."
What was wrong with MGM for the past few years. Here is one point of view i want to note:
"Part of MGM's problem has always been that many of its owners are financial players more focused on the short term than the long term..Being in the entertainment industry is typically a long-term play because of the nature of distribution and massive amounts of capital needed." - Clark Hallren - Wall Street Journal, October 28, 2010.
And here is my point of view. MGMs problems were not from yesterday. First came Kirik Kerkorian and his "great" move - to hire James Thomas Audrey, Jr. as a president of the company (the 3rd one for that year)What Audrey "helped" with for MGM to all these years he was a president: 1. Relocating the company's headquarter from NYC to Culver City, and closing hundreds of jobs. 2. Ordering the sales of MGM's most valuable collections, such as costumes and prop. 3. Planning for making low-budget films (under $1 million). OK, that makes profits, and MGM comes out of the bottom with $16 millions in 1971. But what nobody think about is - this is only for a short-term period. Yes, you made it JT, but on what cost - most of the inexpensive movies forced a wave of criticism. And what can you think about a company, if its own director don't respect its valuable history: "the buck had to stop somewhere, and it was with me. Nostalgia runs strong out here, so we were criticized for selling Judy Garland's red shoes. To us they had no value, and they had no intrinsic value." Well, at least he could say that another way.
Next comes Ted Turner, who bought MGM from Kerkorian, and after selling the MGM lot and lab facilities, he traded back the company to Kerkorian. Later on MGM, still with high debt, bought Seven Network and Metromedia's film subsidiaries. With even more debt the company bought 20% of Cablevision. Wrong moves, MGM, wrong moves. So what is the reason to see the MGM Bankruptcy now? They didn't focus well! If you do something, do it right. I mean you can't make class movies, low-budget movies, to have a TV channel, to own a hotel and etc., and to expect no problems at all.If something goes wrong, just sell it (remember what happened with IBM and their attempt to develop laptops). MGM was a brand for class movies such as "Gone with the Wind", "The Bond" movies, "The Wizard of Oz", and it had to stay that way. Why on Earth they had to spend millions of dolars on MGM-TV and low-budget movies??? MGM-TV was a total disaster - movies from past. Come on, we are in the 21st century - the era of 3D and reality shows. If you want to be among the competition, you can not rely on old laurels.

 DO ONE THING, BUT DO IT AT YOUR BEST!

Sources: Wikipedia.org, WSJ.com

B2B Marketing - The ABC analysis

Do you pay an equal attention on each of your customers? If your answer is "Yes", you are probably wrong! It is impossible to pay an equal attention on each of your custommers, and simultaneously to fillful each of their wishes - that cost too much! Probably, the big brands can allow such luxury, but don't forget that as big is one company as many clients it has. So the possibility to pay an equal attention on all of them is about zero.
Depending on the specifics of your business in most of the cases less than 50 % of the clients provide 80 % of your profits. The ABC analysis gives you the opportunity to temporary low the costs for customer service of these clients, that provide the other 20% of your profits, raising the costs for attracting potential customers
The method of determining how valuable is each of the customer for your business, is very simple:
Draw a table with two columns - in the first column add each of your clients, and in the second add the value of their purchases for the current period.Arrange the customers by starting with the one with highest value of purchases and ending to those with lowest ones. Based on that separate them in 3 groups: A, B, C.
Group A -Your "top" customers that give you a total of 50% of your profits.
Group B -Your "middle" customers that give you a total of 35% of your profits.
Group C -Your "bottom" customers that give you a total of 15% of your profits.
What is the percent of customers that bring you over 50% of your profits? In most of the cases they are less than 20%. These are your cash cows. You should keep them as the apple of your eye - they are the core of your business. DO NOT low the quality of customer service for these clients in any case! Remember the Pareto's law - 20% of efforts gives 80% of the result.  This means, that reducing the time and budget on customer service in Group C  about 5 times (from 100% now to 20% in future), the quality of service will drop down by only 20%. Even if you lose half of the customers in Group C, your profits will drop down by only 7.5 percent. It's expensive, but reasonable price to pay for releasing a 40%  budget of your Sales department. You can use this resources either to attract new customers or to increase the quality of service on Group A customers, in order to obtain even greater profits from them.
Furthermore, it is necessary to perform the ABC analysis not only in profits, but also in the volume of sales. As a result of this analysis you can define 9 groups: AA, AB, AC, BA, BB, BC, CA, CB, CC. 

Marketing Mix - The FIVE P's!

I am sure that every of you know about the Four P's of Marketing Mix - Product, Place, Price and Promoting. They are related with the Four C's - Customers, Convinience for the buyer, Cost to the customer and Communication. Ok then, what is the new? What is wrong with the Marketing Mix, created by Neil Borden back in 1953? Nowadays, with advance of technology and communications, social networking concept began to exert more influence on communication and people's lives. For information, Facebook has more than 130 millions users a day! And these people are sharing - their experience, thoughts, lives, and etc. People is the 5th P of the Marketing Mix, and Close contact is the 5th C!

So do not be just a company, which offer its products - be a person behind the company, the brand, communicate with your customers, answer their questions directly, not only via email, make forums, where they can discuss their opinion with your products, write a feedback, suggest new ideas and etc. Keep Close contact! That way your customers will say - yes, i like this company, because i know not only their products, but their personality as well!

10 steps for successful Business plan

What is Business plan? Why do you need it? How can you make your own business plan? I will answer all of these question in this topic.
Usually the purpose of a Business plan is to attract a new investors for your future projects or applying for a finance help to an organization or the Goverment. But most of all it is for you as well - making a business plan will allow you to determine your purpose and the needed resources for that. Make your finance balance very well, because the easiest way to be thrown out of the market is to have unbalanced financial assets.

What is the content of a business plan? - The main points of a successful business plan are:

1. Resume - This is a summary of the whole business plan within one page. If your goal is to attract investors, this may be the most important part of the plan. Summarize what you sell, what are your potential customers and how to win them for your cause, what is the market, what are your competitors and how you stand by them, what is your strategy, what resources you need and what is the expected return on investment.
2. Mission - In this section you can present the goals and philosophy of your business. Why is it there? How will you achieve success as part of a business system? What will be your company's contribution to the lives of customers, employees and neighborhood community?
3. Business - What are the magnitude and trends in this business, what are the success factors and trends for its technological development or state regulation.
4. Product - What exactly do you offer to your clients? How you stand out from competitors, what are your profit margins.
5. The Market - Here it is about who your customers are. What are their consumer habits and what are the main trends in consumption? What types of products exist and how they are positioned at different price levels. Describe what are your main competitors, their market shares and the specifics of their products.
6. Operations - This section deals with the daily conduct of business - who are your main suppliers, how to produce or offer your product or service, what is working time, etc.
7. Marketing plan - The main idea of your business are the customers that will bring revenue - how do you plan to attract them, what is your strategy and plans to promote business in your neighborhood or town. Do you envisage a special campaign around the opening? What is your pricing strategy, promotions or discounts which will offer to customers?
8. Managment and employees - According to most of the investors most important for business success is the management team. Here is the place to introduce the qualities and the biography of the head manager and his staff, and their functions as well.What staff you need, how do you plan to recruit and train them? Can you encounter difficulties in recruitment? Do you need highly skilled employees to train them, or you can allow to do this in short term period instead?
9. Fundings - What are the initial and ongoing investments you have to do and what funding you need. And also your forecast for a turnover and profits over the next 3 to 5 years. What is the level of sales you need to make net profit and how long it will take the investment to be payed back?
10. Main targets and deadlines - What do you plan to achieve and how you are going to do that?

SEO tricks and tips!

Here are some examples of what you have to do, when starting a new web site, or edit an existing one. I can't say these are all of the needed things you have to do, or that you will greatly go up with a high-rated by SERP web site, but it is sure, that these tricks can help you a lot, espesially if you are a newcomer to web marketing area. So, let me show you some of them:

1- Unique content for each of your pages.

2- Adding a fresh content once a week is a must to do thing - the crawlers like it.

3- Your title tag has to be related with your web site content - don't make the title too long - a maximum of 60-100 characters is enough.

4- Become a reporter - HARO is a nice web page for articles and discussions.

5- Get some links - It is hard, but this is an opportunity to reveal your true marketing abilities, by exchanging some links with other webmasters.

6- Be active in forums, don't forget to put your web page in your e-signature - DON'T SPAM!

7- Make your own blog. Try to add content frequently - don't add 10 articles a day if they are not related with your kind of activities - even 1 article a day is enough, but write information about news and happenings, related with your area of activities.

8- Get some eBay and AdSense links

9- Start an Affiliate program - it is a good way to sell your products on the Web, and in the mean time to increase the promotion rate of your products.

10- Use a viral marketing to promote

11- Make some videos of yourself and your products - reveal yourself to your clients!

12- Use the social networks - create a Twitter account for your company and a page in Facebook. If you are familliar with LinkedIn try there as well.

13- Post a link in Yahoo Answers

14- Get some RSS feeds for your web site and blog

15- Write free reports and white pages.