As profit margins continue to shrink, can foreign trade companies still grow by adding more staff?
In the past, the most direct way for foreign trade companies to expand their performance was often to hire more salespeople, expand their teams, and invest more in platforms and advertising budgets.
But today, market competition is becoming increasingly fierce, products are highly homogeneous, prices are becoming more transparent, and order profits are under constant pressure.
At the same time, office rent, labor costs, annual platform fees, advertising and promotion expenses, and trade show costs are difficult to reduce in tandem.
Companies are investing more and more, yet profits do not necessarily grow accordingly.
In this environment, companies do not necessarily need to become bigger; instead, they should learn to reduce fixed costs and accumulate assets that can generate long-term value.
This is the "Squirrel Rule."：Squirrels store pinecones when there is an abundance of food, preparing for the uncertainties of the future. In the business world, the principle is quite simple: reduce the fixed costs required for maintaining operations and invest the limited resources in assets that can accumulate value over the long term and generate value repeatedly.
For foreign trade enterprises, these "pinecones" can be customer databases, independent websites, industry content that consistently generates inquiries, or a set of AI lead generation and automated workflow processes that can be repeatedly run.
Over the years of doing foreign trade, I have come to realize that what foreign trade enterprises need to change in the future may not only be the methods of lead generation, but the entire business logic as well.
The future competition is not about who has more salespeople, but who can utilize technology to create higher customer value and per capita output at a lower operating cost.
What future foreign trade enterprises truly need may not be an increasingly large team, but rather an operating system that can continuously acquire customers, accumulate customer assets, and increase per capita output.
Technology will not replace all outstanding foreign trade professionals, but it will give those who know how to utilize technology and continuously accumulate professional skills more choices.
In the era of low profit margins, the enterprises that can survive longer and develop more steadily are not necessarily the largest ones.
Rather, they might be those that can control costs, maintain professional capabilities, and continuously accumulate long-term value.