‘Focus on trust and look at the long-term’: How to boost your company's profits

Sometimes engineering excellence means more than just technical expertise – it can also mean keeping clients happy and improving your firm’s bottom line.

If you want to improve business at your engineering employer, an upcoming IMechE training course could be for you. The Commercial Skills course explains how to apply basic commercial principles to help you compete in a challenging business environment. 

Here are five practical tips to start boosting your company’s profits from course trainer Paul Taylor – sign up for many more. 

Find your position in the market

Are you going to specialise in a particular area of engineering? If you aren’t offering something different, then the only way to compete is price – and that just leads to everyone going to the bottom, and then you don’t make any money.

That makes life tough, so it is vital to find a differentiated position in the market where you have an edge, and to make sure you are consistently sending out the right messages to the market through the way you behave, understanding which contracts to go for and which not to.

Focus on trust

A critical part of differentiation is brand. Your brand, for many clients, is an emotional thing. If you understand brand, it can help you understand how your clients feel about your company. 

When you are trying to win business, how do you gain someone’s trust? Some of it is about influencing skills, but it is also important to focus on developing relationships, which are critical for winning business. 

Set and manage client expectations

Once you have won business, how do you make sure the customer is getting what they expect – and, importantly, feel that they are? People don’t think logically and tick things off, they get a feeling: is this company doing what I expect them to do?

A big part of managing the relationship involves limiting scope creep. You need to make sure you get paid for what you are doing without the customer taking liberties. Prevention is always better than the cure – don’t let problems arise in the first place by making sure you and the client are always thinking in the same way. 

Look at the long-term future

It is vital to understand the finances – the importance of cash flow, making sure you get paid on time (and the implications if you don’t), understanding the long-term perspective. Sometimes decisions that are good in the long term may have short-term negative financial impact. Profits might go down because you’re spending money on marketing, but over the long term they will go up.

One of the things people often cut to make this quarter’s profits better is training. But, of course, you don’t see the real effect of that this quarter – you’ll see it down the line when you don’t have the skills you need to compete in the market.

Actually do it 

All these points are important, but the key issue is you have to actually follow them; you have to make it happen. The final part of the course involves us helping you with checklists and scorecards, to ensure you actually do the things you know you should. 

Commercial Skills next runs online from 11-12 February 2027. Learn more, book your attendance or check for further dates.