How to Benefit from the Economic Stimulus

I hope you will join me on Thursday for my live webcast The Economic Stimulus Package: Impacts & Opportunities for Distributors. The webcast is being sponsored in part by Infor.

I developed this webcast because I could not find a straightforward, practical resource about this complex and confusing legislation. I will not be defending the bill. Instead, I plan to give you with a non-partisan, fact-based look at where the stimulus money will be going -- beyond creating the nifty logo shown at right.

Here’s my short to-do list for taking advantage of the stimulus:

• Attend the webcast so you can understand the facts – the good, the bad, and the ugly – about the stimulus bill. Visit the websites that I will identify in my presentation.
  
  
• Get lists of specific “shovel ready” projects to branch managers and sales people. Start making personal contacts to validate information and begin the sales process.
  
  
• Learn about the specific tax credits/incentives in the stimulus. Use these programs to develop marketing programs that will spur demand from your customers and/or your customer’s customers.

Let me give you a real-world example.

Last week, I interviewed a distribution executive running a 30+ branch company that has already built a stimulus action plan. He has looked at the actual lists of projects, broke it down by business unit and region (state/county/city), and then had his sales people work their contacts at municipalities and engineering firms to validate the list.

This effort is already paying off for his company. His team has built its own proprietary list of shovel-ready projects along with the estimated timing of funding the projects. As a bonus, his sales people have now identified new additional projects on the books that were not even on their radar screen.

The stimulus package is worse than it should have been, but better than you think it is. After you see my analysis, I think you’ll agree that distributors and their suppliers will be able to benefit from the direct and indirect spending by federal and state governments.

Nonetheless, the long-term impact on our country is still open to debate.