
8
Improvement potential
How could your business performance be improved?
Most businesses always have room for improvement and it can be dangerous for a business owner to sit back and assume that everything is going really well and will continue to do so.
It is therefore a good idea to estimate your improvement potential and to use “sensitivity analysis” to see how sensitive your results are to changes in the key factors driving your profitability.
As a result of that you will know what is at stake e.g.
- How much do you stand to gain if you take action to achieve your potential
- How much will you miss out on if you don’t take action
You can then use those insights into what is at stake to decide how much effort and energy to put into improving your performance.
One of the most common reasons for business under-performance is managers who say “That’s just the way it is in our industry”.
If, instead of pre-judging in this way you look at ways to make improvements, along the lines perhaps of what your competitors are doing (See Benchmark your competitors) or through analysis of your performance (See Measure your performance) you can potentially change the results of your business for the better.
Alternatively we can produce a simple one page Profit Review to give you an indication of what might be possible in your business.
If you would like to have a chat about this, give us a call
How Beyond the Numbers will help you…
We believe that you should want more from your accountant and we are happy to help you with our 9 step plan towards performance measurement and improvement.
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The Numbers
We believe that you should want more from your accountant and we are happy to help you with our 9 step plan towards performance measurement and improvement....
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1. Set your goals
We believe that you have to look at both your business and your personal life if you are going to set goals for the business as the two are intrinsically linked – through you!...
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2. Develop your plan
Having identified your goals you need to convert these into a business plan so that you know what your business needs to do to help you achieve these goals....
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3. Measure your performance
Once you have created your forecasts and budgets (see Develop your plan) you need to systematically measure your actual performance and compare it to your targets....
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4. Your annual accounts
Every business is required by law to produce annual accounts and of course those annual accounts must comply with all the relevant rules and regulations....
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5. Understand your business trends
It is almost impossible to evaluate how well you are doing in business by looking at one set of figures from one financial year. Performance is always relative....
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6. Benchmark your competitions
Benchmarking is one of the most commonly used management tools in the world and it’s not hard to see why....
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7. Value your business
Is one of the reasons you own a business to create value for yourself? In other words, do you want to build a business that is actually worth something when you want to sell it or ...
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8. Improvement potential
Most businesses always have room for improvement and it can be dangerous for a business owner to sit back and assume that everything is going really well and will continue to do so...
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9. Improvement action plan
Nothing changes until something changes so you need to develop and implement an action plan....
Get in touch today
Book an appointment and we’d be delighted to tell you more
about our experience helping other clients in your sector.
We’d love to help you, too.