You will hear five short recordings. For each recording, decide what way of improving profitability the speaker is recommending.

Thirteen
Sure, the relocation plan is attractive, but just look at the costs! And this just isn’t a good time to be spending that sort of money. Why not make the most of what we’ve got, instead of starting from scratch? Keep our present location, strip it down, and completely redesign and redecorate our existing workspace. I think we could be far more efficient without such a huge outlay.
[pause]
Fourteen
Well, I feel that we’re just not making enough profit to sustain the kind of growth we need. Obviously, production costs have increased, and I don’t think we’ve taken that into account nearly enough. Introducing a competitive pricing strategy wouldn’t mean that we couldn’t take inflation into account, and we should certainly consider this before the end of the year. Otherwise, we’ll find ourselves selling at below cost!
[pause]
Fifteen
Time equals money, and you just have to look at the amount of time we spend - well, waste -travelling from place to place to realise that this is costing us too much. We’re duplicating a lot of services and systems, which we wouldn’t have to do if we streamlined our offices. Operating from one location instead of four would lead to greater control, considerable reduction in costs and increased efficiency. Staff would appreciate it, too.
[pause]
Sixteen
I think that there’s a danger - we’re over-diversified and, instead of looking at our production processes and ways of automating them even further, what we should be doing is targeting our most successful lines and focusing on them, even if it means abandoning some lines altogether. What I’m talking about is specialisation - concentrate on what we know we do well and what we know will make money. And that’ll bring down costs, too.
[pause]
Seventeen
We’re relying too heavily on past success, without thinking about where we go from here. You can’t just rely on maintaining productivity. Prices of raw materials are rising, and our overheads are enormous - look at what we’re spending on buildings alone. In this business, you have to run just to stay in the same place. We’ve go to constantly improve, and that means getting more produced faster, and better.