We have seen many economic changes over the course of the past year. Global recession and a need for conservation have been by-words. The price of oil has fluctuated dramatically and finally settled in the mid $70’s per/barrel.

Call for an Oil Change

Change the oil industry and all our problems will be solved was the battle cry across the nation and in government. We need new renewable, national energy alternatives to replace the high price of foreign oil.

Each call for change is a good thing. However, the call for change of drilling and pumping and processing crude all doesn’t always take into account all the other products that are created from our use of petroleum. We need to understand that oil based products are entrenched in the core of our society. Products like: golf balls, make-up,deoderant, lipstick, DVD’s, HDTV’s, even toilet seats, and thousands of other products including artificial limbs.

Less than half of every barrel of oil is used to create gasoline. There are over 6000 items made with petroleum, how many of them can you name? To see a list of 144 products read: A partial list of products made from Petroleum.

How the Recession has Affected the Oil Industry

There are many different ways the oil industry has been hit by the recession, and many of them one might not readily recognize. Did you know how many consumer products are actually manufactured from oil based products? Take tooth paste, soaps, lipstick, sports articles and many textile fabrics, just to mention a few. So if fewer sports articles are sold, the demand for production will diminish, which in turn affects how many people are employed both in production and retail. While a retail sales clerk at a sports store may not seem directly impacted by the recession in the oil industry, he in fact may just have lost his job because of it.

As in any recession, not any one facet can be seem independently from another. How, one might ask, can the loss of sales in the winter sport industry possibly have negative consequences for the oil industry? Think about it: Skis are made from oil based raw material. Fewer skis are purchased, because not as many people can afford their winter vacation. Not only are those at the manufacturing plant affected, but so are, once again, the sales clerk in the sport article industry; and really anybody to do with winter sports: the hotel concierge, the snow plow driver, the laundry service providing clean linen for hotel guests. Fewer customers all around equate to reduced purchasing power all the way around, coupled with unemployment mixes into an almost disastrous cocktail to deepen the recession.

Petroleum products changed our society

Over the past one hundred and fifty years oil based products have become en-grained in every aspect of our society. It took time and tremendous advances in technology to get to that point, and it will take time and technology to make the paradigm shift. There are no quick fixes to reduce our dependence on oil. So in our call for change, we must look at all the other ways and products that will need to be changed as well. We have changed the way we purchase and the amount of products we purchase due to the recession, now we need to change the way we look at the oil industry in order to make it work. They are all intertwined!

Until that day, one company is striving to work within the oil industry and help keep costs of maintenance and repair down so that the cost of oil production will also remain lower - “Miller Oil Field Equipment, Supply & Repair”. Their 45,000 sq.ft warehouse and over 3000 products keep the oil drilling equipment running smoothly and efficiently, thus keeping costs to a minimum. And that is good news for all consumers.

Resources: If you would like to know more about the oil field industry, you can read more articles by Jaron Miller of Miller Oil Equipment & Repair. They have thousands of products available to service you.

Everybody wants to take the lead - whether it’s a small organisation or a small member of staff! Most people seem to have the perception that “Bigger is Better”, but recently this perception has changed, and the revolutionary concept of “Small is Big” has arrived on the scene.

As any business coaching expert will tell you, the bigger you become the more profit you’ll earn through a higher overall sales threshold, and the more efficient you get in your operations, the greater status you will eventually achieve. Unfortunately, there’s a flip side to this general rule, which is that as a business becomes bigger, the level of risk is increased proportionally, along with increasingly rigid and difficult to manage individual client relationships.

Small firms are far more attentive to their approach because there’s a much greater likelihood of innovation and experimentation in their local operations. These small firms might not be able to utilise the benefits of “global economics”, but they are definitely open to “local economics”. In the current example, small businesses are generally more profitable and growth oriented, as they’ve an amazing potential to realise significant levels of profit and expansion - at astounding levels, which percentage wise, big businesses just can’t achieve.

Small businesses are far more flexible than big businesses, and they can easily adapt to almost any changes if the need arises, as they are able to rapidly implement informed decisions in a short span of time. Small businesses are successful because they know what they are good at - and they do it, effectively and efficiently. They can serve the needs of their customers in an ideal fashion - regularly sharing personal interaction, with the usual result of a growing number of long term relationships. In most instances, small businesses maintain actual direct contact with their staff and individual stakeholders, thereby giving them far more influence over their day-to-day operations, which makes them more able to integrate and coordinate all kinds of planed actions.

Also, with respect to the stock market - when involved with management training, we can clearly see there are numerous occasions where we find that stocks of small companies consistently outperform the stocks of their big business counterparts. Their stocks can often earn high returns for their shareholders and occasionally may even be less risk-prone. During really adverse conditions of the market, there is also far less impact on their share prices compared with the stocks of large corporations. So what do you think, what matters most - thinking big or becoming big?

Alan Gillies is the Managing Director of the L2L Group. He specialises in delivering Executive Coaching, Training and Consultancy Services to International Businesses across the World. Want to discover more about these insightful business building success strategies? Get Alan’s essential FREE Business Pack today!