When a company is at a loss, it will have two halves -- one avoidable loss, another unavoidable loss. Avoidable loss must be avoided. By doing that, the company will NOT be a losing concern anymore. Coming to the other, it is common knowledge that what is considered unavoidable in one company is not so in several other successful companies in the same town. Unorganised people will be known as clumsy by others. To them, what they do not want to do is described as unavoidable.
No company need lose money in the market climate of India since 1990. Recently a big setback is there, but to those who are ORGANISED in their work, the Indian market does not offer a loss even today. There are those who neglect the business, others who simply trust the manager who is dishonest, whose purchases are not in relation to their stocks, who never collect their arrears, who borrow indiscriminately and spend it on non-business items and several others who unintentionally destroy their business. I am NOT talking about these people.
There are others who are devoted to their work, who have earned the title of experts in the work, who have initiated many others into the same business, who do not squander cash, and who are right by many standards but exclaim, "I wonder why I lose at the end of the year. What has gone wrong? Where?" There are people who think they are efficient and that thought is the source of their inefficiency.
They will carefully do a work SLOWLY and all work will be done so. Time wasted is money wasted. In a section where three persons are working, they will take a 4th person for an emergency work and he will stay after that work is done. That pattern would have spread all over the company in a few years, which means there will be 25 % more employees than necessary. At least there are 20 or 25 ways which a trim work will not admit. In any good company, a few such methods would have crept in. Trim ALL of them. Profits will double or even treble.