Let Go To Grow: Escaping the Commodity Trap

7. Liberate Your Cost Structures

There are good revenues and bad ones. Good revenues build relationships and repeat business and come with healthy gross margins, often due to the firm's ability to differentiate products and services. This gives it both pricing power, and the ability to continuously cut costs faster than its competition, without hurting relationships and repeat business. Bad revenues are just commodity transactions that push the ecosystem toward even more price-cutting as companies fight for market share. The sell-off of cars in the early 2000s at zero-percent financing arguably falls into the former category, while telemarketing and mass mailings about "You have been pre-approved for a new mortgage" clearly fall in the latter, ...