Be careful what budgets you cut

For decades now, every time there has been an economic downturn, marketing and advertising journals and columns are filled with the dire consequences to sales and damage to brands when budgets are mercilessly hacked back.

And for decades, CEOs and financial directors have not taken the slightest bit of notice. So perhaps this story might just get their attention.

Picking lice

Once upon a time, not so long ago - well, it was yesterday in fact - an aged 49-year-old man sat disconsolately picking at lice trying to escape the folds of his ragged clothing that looked as if it hadn't seen a smidgeon of Omo for at least four years.
Passing cockroaches, completely disorientated by his body odour, scuttled away to hurl themselves at the nearest Doom can.

As he sat among the human detritus in what used to be an inner city park but which now doubled as an illegal taxi rank and bedroom to a motley collection of vagrants, he spoke out to an attentive audience of three pavement vendors, five street children, a moth-eaten Rottweiler, two Nigerian con-artists and a bewildered traffic cop whose motorbike had just been hijacked.

I was a CEO

"It's true, it's true, " he wailed, "only ten months, six days and three hours ago I was a captain of industry... a chief executive..."

"Ja bliksem, "interjected the traffic cop, "and I was Raymond Ackerman... now who saw that bastard who knocked me off my bike...?'

"No please, you must believe me, I used to run a company with 6000 employees and a really swank head office in Parktown, " said the wretched man, popping another would-be escapee louse into his mouth.

The two Nigerian conmen edged a little closer on the off chance that the miserable bundle of humanity, sitting on the park bench with his toes sticking forlornly out of the ends of his feet, might just be some eccentric millionaire checking out the other side of life.

Cut costs

"I tell you those widgets we produced were winners. We had everything from ISO 9000 to a bloody great SABS stamp of approval. We were going to take on the world. We downsized and cut costs. We were lean and mean and we were going to become world-class, come hell or high water..."

The word "water" triggered something in the old Rottweiler's feeble brain and he lifted his leg and almost managed to relieve himself all over one of the Nigerian's shiny brown brogues, had it not been for a street child who kicked the poor mutt in the nethers with such alacrity it would have got the pulses racing among any Bafana Bafana selector who might have been watching.

"I tell you we honed that competitive edge of ours so finely we were the envy of everyone. We stuck in a computer systems second to none... it handled the whole accounting function, it took orders, it sent out orders, it spewed out sales forecasts ... it was wonderful. It never went on strike or got sick, pregnant or belligerent and it never took leave.

Retrenchments

"We fired the whole customer service depart, cut the marketing staff by two-thirds and gave our human resources director a retrenchment package.

"Not only that but we had another computer hooked in to the telephone system and when somebody called all they had to do was follow instructions... you know... ‘For sales information, push 1; for after sales service push two; for account inquiries push three' and so on.

The two Nigerians decided he was more than just a few raisins short of a fruitcake and pushed off.

"Ah yes," he sighed. "Those were the days. We were so high tech we used to have meetings in falsetto.

"But alas, a lot of water has flowed under the bridge."

The Rottweiler jerked himself awake and with no Nigerian brogues to piddle on, he looked around desperately for a tree, a plant, even a lone blade of grass that might have escaped the firewood gatherers from a nearby squatter camp.

He eyed the street kids but the smallest and most crafty among them was waving a particularly lethal looking half brick in the direction of his already tortured nethers.

The old hound ambled away, his hind legs crossed in desperation. He lay down at the feet of the former chief executive and ever so quietly died of renal failure.

The traffic cop remained mesmerised. The last time he had heard such a tall story was a week when he trapped a kugel in BMW doing three times the legal limit in a built-up zone and then trying to get out of the fine by telling him that her husband had been very badly burnt in the stock market crash and that she was on her way to Stuttafords before it closed.

Medi-shop

Trying to understand things like "competitive edge" and "ISO 9000" was just as mind-boggling as trying to work out why somebody who was so badly burnt had to get medical treatment in a shop.

But nonetheless, he followed the gist of the conversation.

"So if everything was going so bladdy well, why are you out in the street on your arse and not driving around in a Merc and living in Houghton?"

The excu-wretch sighed again. A deeper, plaintive sigh.

"We were put out of business by some bloke who did some really strange, old-fashioned things like answer the phone himself, talk to his customers and advertise..."