By
Frankie
Eyton-Jones
Are you using your own strengths?
When we talk about business growth we often focus on generating more leads, increasing prices or cutting costs.
Efficiencies are essential to growing a sustainable business.
When starting our owners and staff often take on roles outside of their skillset to minimise fixed costs. This often results in business owners, or key staff, undertaking multiples of the following roles:
What you may be struggling with..
It’s tricky to find the time to sit down and find an hour a week to focus on your business, rather than working in it.
- Do you have enough time to sit down and plan for growth?
- Do you feel you can make decisions knowing the financial impact?
- Are you able to respond to all leads and assess whether they are timewasters?
- Do you feel confident that you are efficiently completing all of tasks that you are responsible for?
Often the answer to this is no because business owners are spending too much time on operations and minimal time on strategic tasks.
So that’s the problem, but what solutions are there?
- Explore software to automate processes and document them so anyone can pick up the task
- Build a business plan with 90 day, yearly and 5 year SMART goals
- Hold yourself accountable for your goals by setting achievable tactics with actions and check in against them
- Consider outsourcing tasks e.g. marketing, sales, human resources, IT and admin or finance
- Consider hiring a staff member with the relevant skillset and delegate tasks
- Audit your role and throw out anything that is unnecessary
How JP Blackmoor can help
There are numerous ways we can help, the first being to diagnose the problem.
Then it’s a case of taking that diagnostic and setting goals. Consider an annual business plan with SMART goals. It’s often a good idea to pair this with an annual forecast so you can go into the year armed with the knowledge of what you are looking to achieve and can benchmark performance.
Now let’s start to achieve these goals. Consider coaching with accountability with/without management accounts. We can be that third party to help you keep focused on your goals, be a sounding board for ideas and also help you see the financial impact of your decisions (with or without non-financial KPIs e.g. lead conversion, staff happiness etc.)
Finally, ensure that you think about your exit strategy. Consider a meeting to discuss succession planning. It’s essential to think about this years in advance so that you can put yourself in the best position to eventually exit.
Beyond these strategic solutions we also offer day to day finance outsourcing including:
- Bookkeeping
- Internal finance department: payment services and credit control
- VAT
- Payroll
- Management accounts
- Targeted cashflow or profit improvement meetings
If you would our help to review your organisation and help you to optimise your team, you can contact us by clicking below.