Your business is doing well! Could it be more successful?
Every business, by definition, has an entirely individual definition of what success is. Profitability is usually one of the measures, but only one.
Is it time to increase your profits? To remove obstacles that prevent unlocked growth? To generate cash instead of raising more for operating? To make your production process more efficient? To truly excite your customers, and future customers? To avoid some of the struggle?
Try taking a step back to consider:
- Are you looking at or evaluating the right things, and frequently enough?
- Could you implement some strategic adjustments?
- What advantage have you got and what do you need?
Look at trends, clear sub-groups, the future. Regularly!
Implementing and using simple reports and forecasts is now easier than ever. Their value is in the ability to demonstrate how parts of the business impact each other, to understand what is occurring and likely, and to understand and steer the future.
- Components: Use reports that give a simple view of the different parts, functions or customer groups in your company. Do you know where profit is made, or where not? Where is the cash bottleneck?
- Trends: Use graphs or charts to look at trends over weeks, months, or even years and know immediately if a change happens. No surprises! What period is meaningful in your business?
- Future: Do you look only at the past and manage the present? Start forecasting and continually rolling plans forward into the future. Include cash forecasts with good runway. What different scenarios or variable circumstances should you be testing?
- Regularity: Are your reports regular and timely? Do you know the current health of the company, or is your report old news when you receive it? How often do you use your reports and how current should they be for your specific business? Do you need the sales pipeline, the production, the profits from yesterday, last week, or two months ago?
Change – react when there is room for improvement or an opportunity to seize
To achieve improvement it is necessary to continually change and refine. Even if improvements appear to be subtle. Companies that steer their success or react expediently when circumstances demand, thrive.
- Pivot: When a change makes sense take action. Do you wait and debate too long, until it is too late perhaps?
- Plan goals and strategy that stretch: Set achievable but visionary (or stretch), strategies and goals. The higher you plan the greater the likelihood they are achieved, or at least very close. Do you plan greater success, or fail to plan and hence plan to fail?
- Stakeholders lead: Consistently create value for all stakeholders. Increase profit, achieve social goals, refine corporate culture, reward and thrill customers and suppliers, contribute to the community, and more. Does your success lie in transforming what can be better, and keeping everyone supporting the drive for awesome?
Harness and Systemize Success – enhance your unique brand of magnificent
Build on success you see, the wins you plan, the gains everyone needs. Ensure the right infrastructure is in place to grow it all. Use the people and tools that ensure tomorrow’s version of “doing well” is more than the one from yesterday.
- Cash and funding: Get Cash and finance available at exactly the right time to grow, transform, or support the strategy, changes and results. Does your team allow lack of cash to stop progress, distract activity, and destroy morale?
- Heads-up: Avoid only focusing on “fires of the day”. Think, plan and forecast ahead. Engage in periodic open, honest and impartial conversations and evaluations around “what are we doing? What could we be doing? What should we do?”
- Skills mean power: Get the right people in the right places; always. Do you empower the best experienced and most appropriate people for every job, even on a part-time basis?
- Wise tools: Invest carefully in systems and processes that enhance productivity and manageability. Are you doing what you have always done, or found new ways to do more with less?
Take action today
What were your thoughts above? Where do you need to take action to be more successful, to create profit, to ignite growth, to make it easier?
Improvements may be sudden, subtle or accumulate. Stick with the changes and allow them to deliver; keep enhancing. Enjoy your control and knowledge of performance.
If you are thinking “I cannot do all this, it is way too difficult and time-consuming; it is expensive”. Take heart! Perhaps your reporting tools or structure need an update. For probably less cost and effort than you currently spend new simple tools can be employed to assist. Ask your financial management to partner with your executive, demonstrate alternatives, and together deliver the success you dream of.
If you want to discuss further here are four ways we can help:
- Subscribe to the Unlocking Business Growth podcast to learn ways other people do it.
- Get your free copy of my latest book The 5 F Strategy – Bottom Line Growth in Any Economy without Additional Sales and Marketing.
- Download a copy of the Financial Growth Scorecard to assess your current status and what to work on next.
- Work with me to achieve the growth and success your company is truly capable of. To find out if we’re a fit go to contact.
